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Prince and Misprints

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Fuseli_rendering_of_Hamlet_and_his_father's_Ghost.JPG

In 1889 Fredericka Beardsley Gilchrist advanced a theory that the entire meaning of Hamlet has been confused because of a typographical error. In Act I, Scene V, the ghost reveals to Hamlet his mother’s adultery and his father’s murder. Hamlet responds:

O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
And shall I couple hell? O fie!

Gilchrist maintains that the second line should read:

And shall I couple? Hell! O fie!

In other words, “And after this shall I also marry? No!” He gives up his love for Ophelia, and the rest of the play is the story of “an unhappy lover.”

For Gilchrist this is “the one key that unlocks every difficulty in the play”: “For nearly three hundred years it has been possible to misunderstand, not special passages only, but the fundamental intention of the play; during that time no satisfactory explanation of all its obscurities has been advanced. I believe this theory explains them; and this belief, based on careful study and comparison, ought to excuse the seeming vanity and presumption of the preceding statement.”

Decide for yourself — her book is here.

| Literature

“Effen Uyt”

These Flemish Words are on a very antient funeral Monument of whitish Marble, on which are engraved a Pair of Slippers of a very singular kind. Effen Uyt means Exactly. The Story is, that a Man tolerably rich, and who dearly loved good Eating, took it into his Head that he was only to live a certain Number of Years, and no longer. In this Whimsey he counted that if he spent so much a Year, his Estate and his Life would expire together. It happened by chance that he was not deceived in either of these Computations. He died precisely at the Time he had prescribed to himself in his Imagination, and had then brought his Fortune to such a Pass, that, after paying his Debts, he had nothing left but a Pair of Slippers. His Relations buried him creditably, and would have the Slippers carved on his Tomb, with the abovementioned Laconic Device.

— John Hackett, Select and Remarkable Epitaphs on Illustrious and Other Persons, in Several Parts of Europe, 1757

| Death

Medical Brief

The story about Dr. Abernethy and his lady patient is a classic. He was a man of few words, and the lady knew it. Being shown into his private office, she bared her arm and said simply, ‘Burn.’

‘A poultice,’ said the doctor.

Next day she called again, showed her arm, and said, ‘Better.’

‘Continue the poultice.’

Some days elapsed before Abernethy saw her again. Then she said, ‘Well. Your fee?’

‘Nothing,’ said the doctor, bursting into unusual loquacity. ‘You are the most sensible woman I ever met in my life!’

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

| Humor · Society

Poetry Piecemeal

Lexicographer Wilfred Funk declared these the 10 most beautiful words in English:

  • chimes
  • dawn
  • golden
  • hush
  • lullaby
  • luminous
  • melody
  • mist
  • murmuring
  • tranquil

Playwright Edward Sheldon declared these the ugliest:

  • funeral parlor
  • galluses
  • housewife
  • intelligentsia

Charles V said, “We should speak Spanish with the gods, Italian with our lover, French with our friend, German with soldiers, English with geese, Hungarian with horses, and Bohemian with the devil.”

See Euphony.

| Language

Waste Paper

John Warburton (1682–1759) collected drama manuscripts during a fruitful period in English literature. Unfortunately, he’s remembered chiefly for his carelessness — he left a pile of 50 manuscripts in his kitchen and returned months later to find that his cook had destroyed nearly all of them in lighting fires and lining pie pans.

Among the losses were plays by Massinger, Ford, Dekker, Greene, Davenant, Tourneur, Rowley, Chapman, Glapthorne, and Middleton — and three by William Shakespeare.

See A Poor Review and A Loss for Words.

| Literature

Misc

  • As Britain prepared for World War I, officers were required to have their swords sharpened.
  • Wordsworth’s “The Rainbow” has an average word length of 3.08 letters.
  • sin 10° × sin 50° × sin 70° = 1/8
  • WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE = I SWEAR HE’S LIKE A LAMP
  • “I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.” — Benjamin Disraeli
| History · Language · Poems · Science & Math · Society

Terms Past

Disused words from Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language:

  • figure-flinger: a pretender to astrology and prediction
  • pissburnt: stained with urine
  • blinkard: one that has bad eyes
  • centuriator: a name given to historians, who distinguish times by centuries
  • longimanous: long-handed; having long hands
  • candlewaster: that which consumes candles; a spendthrift
  • carecrazed: broken with care and solicitude
  • overyeared: too old
  • scarefire: a fright by fire; a fire breaking out so as to raise terror
  • traveltainted: harrassed; fatigued with travel
  • vowfellow: one bound by the same vow

“Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition,” he had written in the preface. “[But] when we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years.”

| Language

Strange Bills

exhibition broadside - enormous head

Magician, actor, and author Ricky Jay collects the broadsides that publicized bygone exhibitions of conjuring, acrobatics, curiosities, and feats of strength. These are two of his favorites, featured in his 2005 collection Extraordinary Exhibitions. According to one account, the Frenchmen who exhibited the “enormous head” were “cautiously noncommittal” as to whether it had belonged to a gigantic bird, fish, or lizard. And the playbill below presents three words that Jay finds “endlessly appealing. I love the way they look on the page. I love the way they roll off the tongue. No matter how much one is mired in the complexities of life, no matter how seriously one is inclined to take oneself, no matter how depressing are the day’s events — these vicissitudes are all assuaged by the presence of ‘The Giant Hungarian Schoolboy.'”

exhibition broadside - hungarian schoolboy

| Entertainment

So It Goes

A whimsical traveler on one of the main trails in the State of Georgia painted, on a large rock, the words, ‘Turn Me Over.’ Other travelers heaved and struggled to turn the rock over. On the underside of it they found painted, ‘Now Turn Me Back That I May Fool Another.’

— H. Allen Smith, The Compleat Practical Joker, 1953

| Humor

Chasing Leo

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer_055.jpg

In 1938, the American Mathematical Monthly published an unlikely paper: “A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting.” In it, Ralph Boas and Frank Smithies presented 16 ways to catch a lion using techniques inspired by modern math and physics. Examples:

  • “The Method of Inversive Geometry. We place a spherical cage in the desert, enter it, and lock it. We perform an inversion with respect to the cage. The lion is then in the interior of the cage, and we are outside.”
  • “A Topological Method. We observe that a lion has at least the connectivity of the torus. We transport the desert into four-space. It is then possible to carry out such a deformation that the lion can be returned to three-space in a knotted condition. He is then helpless.”
  • “The Dirac Method. We observe that wild lions are, ipso facto, not observable in the Sahara Desert. Consequently, if there are any lions in the Sahara, they are tame. The capture of a tame lion may be left as an exercise for the reader.”
  • “A Relativistic Method. We distribute about the desert lion bait containing large portions of the Companion of Sirius. When enough bait has been taken, we project a beam of light across the desert. This will bend right round the lion, who will then become so dizzy that he can be approached with impunity.”

The article has inspired a tradition of updates by other mathematicians over the years:

  • “Let Q be the operator that encloses a word in quotation marks. Its square Q2 encloses a word in double quotes. The operator clearly satisfies the law of indices, QmQn = Qm + n. Write down the word ‘lion,’ without quotation marks. Apply to it the operator Q-1. Then a lion will appear on the page. It is advisable to enclose the page in a cage before applying the operator.” (I.J. Good, 1965)
  • “Game Theoretic Method. A lion is big game. Thus, a fortiori, he is a game. Therefore there exists an optimal strategy. Follow it.” (“Otto Morphy,” 1968)
  • “Method of Analytics Mechanics. Since the lion has nonzero mass it has moments of inertia. Grab it during one of them.” (Patricia Dudley et al., 1968)
  • “Method of Natural Functions. The lion, having spent his life under the Sahara sun, will surely have a tan. Induce him to lie on his back; he can then, by virtue of his reciprocal tan, be cot.” (Dudley)
  • “Nonstandard Analysis. In a nonstandard universe (namely, the land of Oz), lions are cowardly and may be caught easily. By the transfer principle, this likewise holds in our (standard) universe.” (Houston Euler, et al., 1985)

Dudley also suggested a “method of moral philosophy”: “Construct a corral in the Sahara and wait until autumn. At that time the corral will contain a large number of lions, for it is well known that a pride cometh before the fall.”

| Science & Math