Search Results for: in a word

Season’s Greetings

Comes Christmas merry? Hungry birds; no bright berries;
Rents high, not paid; long bills; empty barns, no peace and prosperity.

Read this backward and it becomes:

Prosperity and peace; no barns empty; bills long paid;
Not high rents; berries bright; no birds hungry; merry Christmas comes.

J.A. Lindon composed the following verse, in which the first line, the first word of each line, and the nth word of each nth line spell the same message:

A merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Merry, merry carols you’ll have sung us;
Christmas remains Christmas even when you are not here,
And though afar and lonely, you’re among us.
A bond is there, a bond at times near broken.
Happy be Christmas then, when happy, clear,
New heart-warm links are forged, new ties betoken
Year ripe with loving giving birth to year.

| Language

One Solution

Beset with writer’s block, Robert Benchley typed the word The, thinking it “as safe a start as any.”

Then he left for an hour with friends.

On returning to his room he regarded the solitary word, alone on its expanse of blank paper.

He typed hell with it and “went out happily for the evening.”

| Literature

“The Siege of Belgrade”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Nandorfehervar.jpg

An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery beseiged Belgrade;
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Dealing destruction’s devastating doom;
Every endeavour engineers essay
For fame, for fortune, forming furious fray;
Gaunt gunners grapple, giving gashes good;
Heaves high his head heroic hardihood;
Ibraham, Islam, Ismail, imps in ill,
Jostle John, Jarovlitz, Joe, Jack, Jill,
Kick kindling Kutosoff, kings’ kinsmen kill;
Labor low levels loftiest, longest lines;
Men marched ‘mid moles, ‘mid mounds, ‘mid murd’rous mines.
Now nightfall’s near, now needful nature nods,
Opposed, opposing, overcoming odds.
Poor peasants, partly purchased, partly pressed,
Quite quaking, Quarter! quarter! quickly quest.
Reason returns, recalls redundant rage,
Saves sinking soldiers, softens seigniors sage.
Truce, Turkey, truce! Truce, treach’rous Tartar train!
Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!
Vanish, vile vengeance! Vanish, victory vain!
Wisdom wails war — wails warring words. What were
Xerxes, Xantippe, Ximenes, Xavier?
Yet Yassey’s youth, ye yield your youthful yest,
Zealously, zanies, zealously, zeal’s zest.

— William T. Dobson, Literary Frivolities, Fancies, Follies and Frolics, 1880

| History · Language

Scale Degrees

Suppose that in one night all the dimensions of the universe became a thousand times larger. The world will remain similar to itself, if we give the word similitude the meaning it has in the third book of Euclid. Only, what was formerly a meter long will now measure a kilometer, and what was a millimeter long will become a meter. The bed in which I went to sleep and my body itself will have grown in the same proportion. When I wake in the morning what will be my feeling in face of such an astonishing transformation? Well, I shall not notice anything at all. The most exact measures will be incapable of revealing anything of this tremendous change, since the yard-measures I shall use will have varied in exactly the same proportions as the objects I shall attempt to measure.

— Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, 1908

| Science & Math

Asking Directions

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1084981

If we take a cube and label one side top, another bottom, a third front, and a fourth back, there remains no form of words by which we can describe to another person which of the remaining sides is right and which left. We can only point and say here is right and there is left, just as we should say this is red and that blue.

— William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

| Science & Math

The Problem of the Calissons

A calisson is a flat French candy traditionally manufactured in the shape of two equilateral triangles joined along an edge. Suppose a quantity of these are packed randomly into a hexagonal container:

problem of the calissons

Each candy must take one of three orientations: east-west, northeast-southwest, or northwest-southeast.

As it happens, no matter how the candies are packed into the hexagon, an equal number will take each of these three orientations.

In the May 1989 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly, Guy David and Carlos Tomei demonstrated this with a beautifully intuitive “proof without words.” What had they seen?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Painting the Lily

About 50 years after Shakespeare’s death, John Dryden’s brother-in-law James Howard rewrote Romeo and Juliet as a tragicomedy in which the lovers are happily married. His production was so unpopular that the play was performed as a tragedy on alternate evenings, but it was enough to inspire a series of dramatists to try their hands at revising the Bard.

British poet laureate William Davenant added dancing and singing to Macbeth, all reportedly “excellently performed, being in the nature of an opera.” In Irish poet Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision of King Lear, the fool is absent, the king survives, Cordelia marries Edgar, and the three sisters are reconciled. In the 1740s, David Garrick raised Juliet’s age to 18, dropped the bedroom scene, removed Rosaline, and added a brief reunion between the lovers in the tomb. (He considered these changes “few and trifling.”)

The one really interesting such idea lay with Lewis Carroll, who dreamed of “Bowldlerising Bowldler,” “i.e. of editing a Shakespeare which shall be absolutely fit for girls.” He planned to “erase ruthlessly every word in the play that is in any degree profane, or coarse, or in any sense unsuited for a girl of from 10 to 15; and then to make the best I can of what is left.” Alas, he never completed the project.

| Literature

In Memoriam

While Bret Harte was serving as proofreader for a provincial newspaper in Yreka, Calif., he was asked to consider a flowery obituary that contained the sentence “Even in Yreka her chastity was conspicuous.”

Harte realized with a smile that the writer had probably meant “charity,” so he underscored “chastity” and put a question mark in parentheses in the margin, to indicate that the word should be checked.

The following morning he picked up the paper and read: “Even in Yreka her chastity was conspicuous (?)”

| Literature

Quite Contrary

A contronym is a word with two contrary meanings, such as cleave or sanction (more here).

The word contronym itself has no double meaning. Is it a contronym?

“Not until I came along!” writes Charles Melton in Word Ways. “I declare that it is a contronym for the simple reason that it isn’t! It is both a self-opposite and not a self-opposite. QED.”

| Language · Science & Math

Lost and Found

In early April 1922, a little girl, Pauline Picard, disappeared from her parents’ farm in Brittany. Searches turned up no clues, and eventually it was thought that she had been carried off by gypsies.

Then word came from Cherbourg that a girl had been found who matched Pauline’s description. The parents hurried to claim her, but they found that the girl did not seem to know them, and she remained silent when addressed in Breton. They returned with her to their village, where the neighbors recognized her, and the attending policeman was satisfied she was Pauline Picard.

Then, in May, a farmer crossing a local field discovered the mutilated body of a young girl. She could not be identified, but her parents recognized Pauline’s clothes.

The New York Times reported: “Although it would seem almost incredible that the parents should make a mistake, the Picards are now uncertain whether the child they have been nursing for more than a month is really their own, and the police are faced by a three-fold task — to discover the murderer, identify the murdered child, and, if she is proved to be Pauline Picard, discover the identity of the little girl from Cherbourg.”

I can’t find any record that they succeeded.

| Crime · Oddities