Search Results for: in a word

One Gloomy Evening

A schoolmaster gave a Latin grammar to the 10-year-old Winston Churchill and directed him to learn a series of words.

Churchill found it an “absolute rigmarole” but memorized the list and reeled it off when asked.

‘But,’ I repeated, ‘what does it mean?’

‘Mensa means a table,’ he answered.

‘Then why does mensa also mean O table,’ I enquired, ‘and what does O table mean?’

‘Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,’ he replied.

‘But why O table?’ I persisted in genuine curiosity.

‘O table,–you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.’ And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, ‘You would use it in speaking to a table.’

‘But I never do!’ I blurted out in honest amazement.

“Such was my introduction,” he later wrote, “to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.”

| Society

What’s in a Name?

Founded by Daniel Dennett, the Philosophical Lexicon converts philosophers’ surnames into useful words (with often pointed definitions):

  • bergson, n. A mountain of sound, a “buzzing, blooming confusion.”
  • braithwaite, n. The interval of time between two books. “His second book followed his first after a long braithwaite.”
  • chomsky, adj. Said of a theory that draws extravagant metaphysical implications from scientifically established facts.
  • derrida, n. A sequence of signs that fails to signify anything beyond itself. From a old French nonsense refrain: “Hey nonny derrida, nonny nonny derrida falala.”
  • foucault, n. A howler, an insane mistake. “I’m afraid I’ve committed an egregious foucault.”
  • heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. “It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.”
  • hughmellorate, v. To humiliate at a seminar.
  • kripke, adj. Not understood, but considered brilliant. “I hate to admit it, but I found his remarks quite kripke.”
  • rand, n. An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption.
  • turing, v. To travel from one point to another in simple, discrete steps, without actually knowing where one is going, or why.
  • voltaire, n. A unit of enlightenment.

And, inevitably, dennett: “To while away the hours defining surnames.”

| Language

“The Poet’s Corner”

In November 2003, Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics challenged its readers to discover why Ed Wolpow had sent in the following poem:

ADIRONDACK SHINGLES

Among old and crafty mountain men,
Far gone in their heart-held dreaming,
Nearest neighbor one mile down a rock road,
Busy poking old and peeling car bonnets,
An owl hoots past a tin ear.
The sunny period in every week
Is time for one–one hoarse chuckle.
It’s not the place for foxy generals
Nor a spiffy consul, furtive, medalled.
No young and flaxen onlookers
With peach fuzz included.
Extant alumni of a meaner university
Plead for simple knots and bolts.
Home to fossil icons of steep hills,
And not fossil verses which gleam
With glib phrases that parse nicely,
A rogue element in every line.

The answer is that each line contains the name of an element.

| Language

“French for Americans”

Phrases most in demand by American visitors to Paris, compiled by Robert Benchley:

Pronunciation:

a = ong
e = ong
i = ong
o = ong
u = ong

Haven’t you got any griddle-cakes?
N’avez-vous pas des griddle-cakes?

What kind of a dump is this, anyhow?
Quelle espèce de dump is this, anyhow?

Do you call that coffee?
Appelez-vous cela coffee?

Where can I get a copy of the N.Y. Times?
Où est le N.Y. Times?

What’s the matter? Don’t you understand English?
What’s the matter? Don’t you understand English?

Of all the godam countries I ever saw.
De tous les pays godams que j’ai vu.

I haven’t seen a good-looking woman yet.
Je n’ai pas vu une belle femme jusqu’à présent.

Here is where we used to come when I was here during the War.
Ici est où nous used to come quand j’étais ici pendant la guerre.

Say, this is real beer all right!
Say, ceci est de la bière vrai!

Oh boy!
O boy!

Two weeks from tomorrow we sail for home.
Deux semaines from tomorrow nous sail for home.

Then when we land I’ll go straight to Childs and get a cup of coffee and a glass of ice-water.
Sogleich wir zu hause sind, geh ich zum Childs und eine tasse kaffee und ein glass eiswasser kaufen.

“Word you will have little use for”:

Vernisser — to varnish, glaze.
Nuque — nape (of the neck).
Egriser — to grind diamonds.
Dromer — to make one’s neck stiff from working at a sewing machine.
Rossignol — nightingale, picklock.
Ganache — lower jaw of a horse.
Serin — canary bird.
Pardon — I beg your pardon.

| Society

Riddle

What is shorter when it is longer and longer when it is shorter; also bigger when it is smaller and smaller when it is bigger?

A word. LONGER is shorter than SHORTER, and SMALLER is bigger than BIGGER.

Richard Lederer and Gary Hallock devised this puzzling sentence, which is best read aloud:

What is a four-letter word for a three-letter word which has five letters yet is still spelled with three letters, while it has only two and rarely has six and never is spelled with five?

It’s not a question, but a statement. Capitalize WHAT, FOR, WHICH, YET, IT, RARELY, and NEVER.

| Language

Offerings

At Frank Sinatra’s funeral, friends and family members were invited to place items of personal significance into his coffin. Reportedly these included:

  • several Tootsie Rolls
  • a pack of Black Jack chewing gum
  • a roll of wild cherry Life Savers
  • a ring engraved with the word Dream
  • a mini-bottle of Jack Daniel’s
  • a pack of Camel cigarettes and a Zippo lighter
  • 10 dimes

Why 10 dimes? “He never wanted to get caught not able to make a phone call,” his daughter Tina told Larry King.

| Death · Entertainment

The Infallible Seducer

Here’s a foolproof way to get anyone to sleep with you. Ask:

  1. Will you answer this question in the same way that you will answer the next?
  2. Will you sleep with me?

“If she keeps her word,” writes Richard Mark Sainsbury, “she must answer Yes to the second question, whatever she has answered to the first.”

| Science & Math

An Extraordinary Coincidence

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PSM_V05_D270_Thomas_Young.jpg

As Thomas Young was struggling to decipher the Rosetta Stone, a traveler gave him a parcel of Egyptian manuscripts. Among the baffling hieroglyphics he noted three names written in Greek: Apollonius, Antigonus, and Antimachus. As he was puzzling over the rest, a friend gave him some papyri he had purchased at Thebes in 1820. Two of these contained some Greek characters, and Young began to examine them impatiently.

He “could scarcely believe that I was awake, and in my sober senses” when he saw the words Antimachus Antigenis and, a few lines further back, Portis Apollonii. It was a Greek translation of the very Egyptian manuscript he had been wrestling with!

“I could not, therefore, but conclude, that a most extraordinary chance had brought into my possession a document which was not very likely, in the first place, ever to have existed, still less to have been preserved uninjured, for my information, through a period of near two thousand years: but that this very extraordinary translation should have been brought safely to Europe, to England, and to me, at the very moment when it was most of all desirable to me to possess it, as the illustration of an original which I was then studying, but without any other reasonable hope of being able fully to comprehend it.”

“This combination would, in other times, have been considered as affording ample evidence of my having become an Egyptian sorcerer.”

| History · Oddities

Relativity

zeno stadium paradox

Bertrand Russell explains Zeno’s paradox of the stadium:

Let us suppose three drill-sergeants, A, A′, and A′′, standing in a row, while the two files of soldiers march past them in opposite directions. At the first moment which we consider, the three men B, B′, B′′, in one row, and the three men C, C′, C′′ in the other row, are respectively opposite to A, A′, and A′′. At the very next moment, each row has moved on, and now B and C′′ are opposite A′. When, then, did B pass C′? It must have been somewhere between the two moments which we supposed consecutive. It follows that there must be other moments between any two given moments, and therefore that there must be an infinite number of moments in any given interval of time.

In other words, if time is a series of consecutive instants, and motion means passing through consecutive points, then the Bs are passing the As at the fastest possible speed — one point per instant. How then is it that the Bs are passing the Cs at twice this rate? It seems, Aristotle noted, that “half the time is equal to its double.”

| Science & Math

“An Untaught Highlander”

We don’t know much about Angus McDiarmid, except that he’s been called “the world’s worst author.” His 1815 book Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn is a bewildering mess of bad grammar and obscure language — apparently he composed it in his native Scottish Gaelic and then salted it with impressive words from an English dictionary, without much regard to their parts of speech:

The foresaid high Grampian mountains abounded with spasmodiac opening, or excavated parts, that if a loud cry made at accommodious distant, they would sounded the same in such miraculous manner, that one apt to conceive that each parts of those spasmodiac rocks imbibed the vociferation which is depressing gradually the sonorofic sound to the expiry thereof.

But the high point is the dedication, which William Shepard Walsh calls “as grovelling and abject as the worst example in the very worst periods of authorial servility”:

To the Right Honorable the Earl of Breadalbane. May it please your lordship, with overpowering sentiments of the most profound humility, I prostrate myself at your noble feet, while I offer, to your Lordship’s high consideration, those very feeble attempts to describe the indescribable and ineffable beauties of your Lordship’s delicious estate of Edinample. With tumid emotions of heart-distending pride, and with fervescent feelings of gratitude, I beg leave to acknowledge the honor I have to serve so noble a master, and the many advantages which I, in common with your Lordship’s other menials, enjoy from the exuberance of your princely liberality. That your Lordship may long shine with refulgent brilliancy in the exalted station to which Providence has raised you, and that your noble family, like a bright constellation, may diffuse a splendor and glory through the high sphere of their attraction, is the fervent prayer of your lordship’s most humble and most devoted servant, Angus McDiarmid.

The whole book is here.

| Literature