In 1932 a quartet of Bronx gangsters set out to murder a friend of theirs in order to collect his life insurance. But Michael Malloy proved to be almost comically difficult to kill. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review what one observer called “the most clumsily executed insurance scam in New York City history.”
We’ll also burrow into hoarding and puzzle over the value of silence.
On Sept. 21, 1849, naturalist and explorer Philip Henry Gosse wrote in his diary:
E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica.
The son grew up to be poet, author, and critic Edmund Gosse, who wrote:
“This entry has caused amusement, as showing that he was as much interested in the bird as in the boy. But this does not follow; what the wording exemplifies is my Father’s extreme punctilio.
“The green swallow arrived later in the day than the son, and the earlier visitor was therefore recorded first; my Father was scrupulous in every species of arrangement.”
The esoteric programming language DOGO “heralds a new era of computer-literate pets.” Commands include:
SIT — If the value of the current memory cell is 0, jump to STAY.
STAY — If the value of the current memory cell is not 0, jump to SIT.
ROLL-OVER — Select the next operation in the operation list.
HEEL — Execute the currently selected operation.
This program prints the words HELLO WORLD:
roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel sit roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over stay roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel sit roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over stay roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel roll-over heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel sit roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over stay roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel sit roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over stay roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over heel roll-over heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over heel heel heel heel heel heel heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over heel heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over roll-over heel
Here’s a similar program in Blub, which is designed to be readable by fish:
blub. blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub! blub? blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub? blub! blub! blub? blub! blub? blub. blub! blub. blub. blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub! blub? blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub? blub! blub! blub? blub! blub? blub. blub. blub. blub! blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub! blub. blub! blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub! blub. blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub! blub? blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub? blub! blub! blub? blub! blub? blub. blub! blub. blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub! blub? blub? blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub? blub! blub! blub? blub! blub? blub. blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub! blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub. blub! blub. blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub. blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub! blub. blub. blub? blub. blub? blub. blub. blub! blub.
See User Friendly.
Then God said, Let there be light! And the light came. And God saw the light, and it pleased him, and he gave it the name of Day. And when the day was gone, and the dark came back to stay for a while, he gave the dark spell the name of Night. And God did these things on the first day.
— Josephine Pollard, History of the Old Testament in Words of One Syllable, 1888
04/20/2018 UPDATE: Much later, in 1994, MIT logician George Boolos summarized Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem in words of one syllable. (Thanks, Ethan.)
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the crew of an American seaplane were caught off guard near New Zealand. Unable to return across the Pacific, they were forced to fly home “the long way” — all the way around the world. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the adventures of the Pacific Clipper on its 30,000-mile journey through a world engulfed in war.
We’ll also delve into the drug industry and puzzle over a curious case of skin lesions.
Victorian and Edwardian boys could send confidential questions to the Boy’s Own Paper and look for responses in the “Answers to Correspondents” column:
One of the editors, Scottish physician Gordon Stables, seemed to have a particular favorite remedy for health questions:
When one boy said he longed for a fine pair of whiskers, he was told that “a really cold tub” was his only hope. A New Zealand reader who asked for something to help his nerves was advised to “take plenty of exercise in the open air and a cold tub every morning before breakfast.”
What if there was no tub in the house? “Douche yourself regularly 365 days a year in the mornings on rising, and 366 in any Leap Year, with 30 sponge loads of the coldest water obtainable. We presume there is somewhere around where you can do this with discretion.” (Footnote: “The water must be really cold.”)
To a boy in Northern Ontario: “On no account should you ever cut a circular hole in the winter ice to get a cold tub. You would certainly freeze to death very quickly but it is also probable you might well provide a tasty meal for some hungry seal lurking below. In your case, wait for the spring thaws.”
Stables didn’t mince words. In 1905 he wrote, “The children of the wealthy and well-to-do in cities are apt to be spoiled by pampering and coddling and over-feeding. Cargoes of such little fat boys would sell well in some parts of new Guinea, but in this country they do not assist in the very least to keep the crown on the King’s head.” To a boy inquiring about “bad habits” in 1902, he wrote, “Coffins are cheap and boys like you are not of much use in the world. We do not answer by post.” Admonished for this, he published a modified reply in the Boy’s Own Annual for that year: “If you go on as you are, there is nothing before you but an early and dishonoured grave. Pray God to forgive and help you to resist temptation.”
(Jack Cox, Take a Cold Tub, Sir!, 1982.)
In 2015 Keele University historian Paul Booth found evidence of a man named “Roger Fuckbythenavele” in the Chester county court plea rolls of 1310:
County Court of Chester, held on Tuesday after the feast of St Nicholas, 4 Edw. II, before Payn Tibotot, justiciar of Chester (8th December 1310)
A man called ‘Roger Fuckbythenavele’ was exacted for the first time [the process preliminary to outlawry].
TNA CHES 29/23 m 10d
Booth believes that’s the earliest known reference to fuck as a swear word. “This surname is presumably a nickname. I suggest it could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit’ i.e. a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it.”
Humiliatingly, Roger is mentioned seven times by that name in the rolls in 1310 and 1311. The “serjeants of the peace” had been ordered to bring him before the court, but they’d failed to find him, and consequently he was outlawed. Apparently a court clerk gave him the nickname.
(Paul Booth, “An Early Fourteenth-Century Use of the F-word in Cheshire, 1310–11,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 164 [2015], 99–102.)
In 1989 Poul Anderson wrote a short text using only words of Germanic origin, to show what English might look like if it expressed new concepts using German-style compounds rather than borrowing from other languages. The piece described atomic theory, or “uncleftish beholding”:
The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.
The full text is here. Douglas Hofstadter called this style “Ander-Saxon.”
UPDATE: Apparently there’s a whole wiki for “Anglish,” including recastings of famous texts:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this greatland, a new folkship, dreamt in freedom, and sworn to the forthput that all men are made evenworthy. Now we are betrothed in a great folk-war, testing whether that folkship, or any folkship so born and so sworn, can long withstand. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.
(Thanks, Dave.)
Salman Rushdie suggested that if Robert Ludlum had written Hamlet it would be called The Elsinore Vacillation.
Larry Rosenbaum observed that a gigolo is a million million billion piccolos.
The Greek god of theatrical criticism was named Pan.
Most pygmy hippos in American zoos are descended from William Johnson Hippopotamus, a pet given to Calvin Coolidge.
BISOPROLOL FUMARATE is an anagram of SUPER MARIO FOOTBALL.
Illinois considers Pluto a planet.
“It is as if children know instinctively that anything wholly solemn, without a smile behind it, is only half alive.” — Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, 1959
In 2004 Stanford physicist R.B. Laughlin wrote a 12-page poem critiquing of the theory of resonating valence bonds. He set it in trochaic tetrameter, after Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha:
What ensued was simply awesome,
Destined to go down in legend.
They proposed a cuprate theory
So magnificent in concept,
So much bolder than the others
That it blasted them to pieces
Like some big atomic warhead,
So outshined them in its glory
Like a nova in the heavens
That it blinded any person
Who would dare to gaze upon it.
Cuprates did these things, it stated,
Just because a quirk of nature
Made them like the Hubbard model,
Which, as had been long established,
Did some things quite fundamental,
Not yet known to modern science,
Which explained the crazy data,
So to understand the cuprates
One would have to solve this model.
How colossal! How stupendous!
It was absolutely foolproof!
No one could disprove this theory
With existing mathematics
Or experimental data
For exactly the same reasons
Nor could they admit they couldn’t,
So they’d spend their whole lives trying,
Blame themselves for being so stupid,
And pay homage in each paper
With the requisite citation!
The whole thing is here. (Thanks, Daniele.)
Related: Mark Twain’s father, a justice of the peace, once told his son that there was more poetry in a warranty deed than in Longfellow’s verse. So Twain “took the stupid warranty deed itself and chopped it up into Hiawathian blank verse, without altering or leaving out three words, and without transposing six”:
THE STORY OF A GALLANT DEED.
THIS INDENTURE, made the tenth
Day of November, in the year
Of our Lord one thousand eight
Hundred six-and-fifty,
Between JOANNA S.E. GRAY
And PHILIP GRAY, her husband,
Of Salem City in the State
Of Texas, of the first part,
And O.B. Johnson, of the town
Of Austin, ditto, WITNESSETH:
That said party of first part,
For and in consideration
Of the sum of Twenty Thousand
Dollars, lawful money of
The U.S. of Americay,
To them in hand now paid by said
Party of the second part,
The due receipt whereof is here
By confessed and acknowledg-ed,
Have Granted, Bargained, Sold, Remised,
Released and Aliened and Conveyed,
Confirmed, and by these presents do
Grant and Bargain, Sell, Remise,
Alien, Release, Convey, and Con-
Firm unto the said aforesaid
Party of the second part,
And to his heirs and assigns
Forever and ever, ALL
That certain piece or parcel of
LAND situate in city of
Dunkirk, county of Chautauqua,
And likewise furthermore in York State,
Bounded and described, to-wit,
As follows, herein, namely:
BEGINNING at the distance of
A hundred two-and-forty feet,
North-half-east, north-east-by-north,
East-north-east and northerly
Of the northerly line of Mulligan street,
On the westerly line of Brannigan street,
And running thence due northerly
On Brannigan street 200 feet,
Thence at right angles westerly,
North-west-by-west-and-west-half-west,
West-and-by-north, north-west-by-west,
About —
That’s as far as he got in reciting it to his father. “I kind of dodged, and the boot-jack broke the looking glass. I could have waited to see what became of the other missiles if I had wanted to, but I took no interest in such things.”