In 1896, Adolf Beck found himself caught up in a senseless legal nightmare: Twelve women from around London insisted that he’d deceived them and stolen their cash and jewelry. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Beck’s incredible ordeal, which ignited a scandal and inspired historic reforms in the English justice system.
We’ll also covet some noble socks and puzzle over a numerical sacking.
In 1930, British explorer Augustine Courtauld volunteered to spend the winter alone on the Greenland ice cap, manning a remote weather station. As the snow gradually buried his hut and his supplies steadily dwindled, his relief party failed to arrive. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Courtauld’s increasingly desperate vigil on the ice.
We’ll also retreat toward George III and puzzle over some unexpected evidence.
In Under the Mask, his 1972 anthology about prejudice in America, Karel Weiss records a scene aboard the slave ship Young Hero in 1788, recounted by ship’s surgeon Ecroide Claxton before the House of Commons:
Some of the slaves on board the same ship, says Mr. Claxton, had such an aversion to leaving their native places, that they threw themselves overboard, with an idea that they should get back to their own country. The captain, in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient, viz. to cut off the heads of those who died, intimating to them, that if determined to go, they must return without their heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness the operation. One of them seeing, when on deck, the carpenter standing with his hatchet up ready to strike off the head of a dead slave, with a violent exertion got loose, and flying to the place where the nettings had been unloosed, in order to empty the tubs, he darted overboard. The ship brought to, and a man was placed in the main chains to catch him, which he perceiving, dived under water, and rising again at a distance from the ship, made signs, which words cannot describe, expressive of his happiness in escaping. He then went down, and was seen no more.
Weiss says the idea of escaping into death was particularly prevalent among the Ibo of eastern Nigeria. Related:
In the West Indies, according to the Spanish historian Girolamo Benzoni, four thousand men and countless women and children died by jumping from cliffs or by killing each other. He adds that, out of the two million original inhabitants of Haiti, fewer than 150 survived as a result of the suicides and slaughter. In the end the Spaniards, faced with an embarrassing labor shortage, put a stop to the epidemic of suicides by persuading the Indians that they, too, would kill themselves in order to pursue them in the next world with even harsher cruelties.
— Alfred Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, 1971
In 2015, University of East London psychologist Tim Lomas encountered the Finnish word sisu, which means something like extraordinary determination in the face of adversity. The word has no direct analog in English, but it describes a universal human trait — an English speaker who learns it can more easily recognize and appreciate sisu in herself and others, which enriches her life.
Lomas began collecting similarly specific words that describe positive feelings:
Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says that learning to make fine distinctions in identifying one’s feelings increases “emotion granularity,” which has real benefits — people with a rich emotional vocabulary recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol. Yale psychologist Marc Brackett, who has seen similar benefits among children, agrees that Lomas’ word list could help people to identify and appreciate their positive feelings. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives.”
Lomas’ list now numbers more than 400 words — you can browse them here.
(Thanks, Greg.)
Since 1897 wordplay enthusiasts have been seeking an order-10 word square — a 10 × 10 array of letters whose rows and columns, read in order, produce the same set of 10 words. In English this is so difficult that it’s been called the Holy Grail of logology, but the task gets dramatically easier when we increase the vocabulary, and one way to do this is to admit words from multiple languages:
A A N G E H A R D E Dutch A P E R N A S E I S Spanish N E C E L I S T V I Czech G R E N A D E R E N Norwegian E N L A G U N A R E Spanish H A I D U C E S T E Romanian A S S E N E R A I S French R E T R A S A R S E Spanish D I V E R T I S S E French E S I N E E S E E N Finnish
Graham Toal produced this example, as well as 775 others, in 2004, to prove the concept; Word Ways editor A. Ross Eckler estimated that Toal’s program might produce 135,000 such squares. In 2004 Toal told Eckler that some further efforts were being contemplated using distributed computing, but I haven’t seen anything since then.
(A. Ross Eckler, “The Polyglot Ten-Square,” Word Ways 37:3 [August 2004], 207-208.)
From the Daily Telegraph‘s obituary of Charles Dodgson, Jan. 15, 1898:
The sayings attributed to him at Oxford would fill an entertaining volume of Carrolliana. Among other things, his ‘etymology of the bell’ is still quoted with relish by scholars. There was a provisional belfry at Christ Church College, which was familiarly known to Oxonians of the time as ‘the meat safe.’ Mr. Dodgson, undertaking to explain this epithet etymologically, split up the word belfry into two parts — the French word belle and the German word frei (free). Then he went to work as follows:
Belle = beautiful = comely = meet (meat);
Frei = free = secure = safe
Result: ‘Meat-safe.’
His nephew, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, wrote, “No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two ‘Alice’ books.”
In 1972 biologists Colin Tayler and Graham Saayman were observing a group of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in a South African aquarium. One of them, a 6-month-old calf named Dolly, began to seek their attention by pressing feathers, stones, seaweed, and fish skins against the glass of the viewing chamber. If they ignored her she swam off and returned with a different object.
At the end of one observation session, one of the investigators blew a cloud of cigarette smoke against the glass as Dolly was looking in. “The observer was astonished when the animal immediately swam off to its mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk which engulfed her head, giving much the same effect as had the cigarette smoke,” the biologists reported. “Dolly subsequently used this behaviour as a regular device to attract attention.”
“Dolly didn’t ‘copy’ (she wasn’t really smoking) or imitate with intent to achieve the same purpose,” argues ecologist Carl Safina in Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. “Somehow Dolly came up with the idea of using milk to represent smoke. Using one thing to represent something else isn’t just mimicking. It is art.”
(C.K. Tayler and G.S. Saayman, “Imitative Behaviour by Indian Ocean Bottlenose Dolphins [Tursiops aduncus] in Captivity,” Behaviour 44:3 [1973], 286-298.)
In 1884 Robert Louis Stevenson began to give writing lessons to his 26-year-old neighbor Adelaide Boodle. One of his first assignments was to describe a place. When he read her attempt, he said, “Oh, but this work is disgracefully bad! It could hardly be worse. What induced you to bring me stuff like this?” When she asked him what was wrong with it, he said:
‘As a first step in the right direction we will do a sum together. Count the adjectives in that exercise.’
I did so.
‘Now then, see how many times that will go into the number of words allowed for the whole description.’
The result proved that my modest percentage of adjectives was 17 1/2.
‘And mostly weak ones at that!’ remarked the Master with a queer little grimace at the culprit.
‘But how ought it to have been done?’
The voice that made this appeal for light and leading was no longer in the least lachrymose: it was now, I flattered myself, that of a vigorous and determined student.
‘You should have used fewer adjectives and many more descriptive verbs,’ came the swift reply. ‘If you want me to see your garden, don’t, for pity’s sake, talk about “climbing roses” or “green, mossy lawns”. Tell me, if you like, that roses twined themselves round the apple trees and fell in showers from the branches. Never dare to tell me again anything about “green grass”. Tell me how the lawn was flecked with shadows. I know perfectly well that grass is green. So does everybody else in England. What you have to learn is something different from that. Make me see what it was that made your garden distinct from a thousand others. And, by the way, while we are about it, remember once for all that green is a word I flatly forbid you to utter in a description more than, perhaps, once in a lifetime.’
She judged that the lesson was “well worth suffering for,” and the two became good friends. “After all, R.L.S. ‘was going to teach me to write’. What on earth did anything else matter?”
(From Boodle’s R.L.S. and His Sine Qua Non, 1926.)
The signs in Melbourne’s Eureka Tower Carpark are not signs — the words are painted anamorphically on the floor and walls of the garage. Each direction becomes visible from the point where you’d naturally look for it.
Designer Axel Peemöller has a slideshow.
(Thanks, Rini.)
When Westinghouse buried a time capsule at the 1939 World’s Fair, the planners hoped that it wouldn’t be opened until 6939. That created a problem: How could they leave writings for a future civilization when language itself was sure to change immeasurably in the ensuing 5,000 years?
Westinghouse tried to solve the problem by enlisting Smithsonian ethnologist John P. Harrington, who wrote a “mouth map” (“Mauth Maep”) showing the pronunciation of “33 sounds of 1938 English” and a list of “the thousand words most essential to our daily speech and thought.” He also presented Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun” in “neo-phonetic spelling” and in 1938 English:
Dhj Northwind aend dhj Sjn wjr dispyucting whitsh woz dhj stronggjr, hwen j traevjljr kecm jlong raepd in j worm klock. Dhec jgricd dhaet dhj wjn huc fjrst mecd dhj traevjljr teck of hiz klock shud bic konsidjrd stronggjr dhaen dhj jdhjr. Dhen dhj Northwind bluc widh aol hiz mait, bjt dhj mocr hie bluc, dhj mocr klocsli did dhj traevjljr focld hiz klock jraund him, aend aet laest dhj Northwind gecv jp dhj jtempt. Dhen dhj Sjn shocn aut wormli, aend imicdijtli dhj traevjljr tuk of hiz klock; aend soc dhj Northwind woz jblaidzhd tj konfes dhaet dhj Sjn woz dhj stronggjr jv dhj tuc.
The Northwind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who first made the traveler take off his cloak should be considered stronger than the other. Then the North wind blew with all his might, but the more he blew, the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the Northwind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shone out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak; and so the Northwind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.
But even if the book manages to convey 20th-century vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation to future scholars, will the world that these describe be too remote for them to imagine? The Westinghouse authors begged intermediate librarians to retranslate the book continually to keep alive its meaning. Will that be enough? I guess they’ll find out.
