ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL is a word-level palindrome.
So is the witches’ chant FAIR IS FOUL, AND FOUL IS FAIR in Macbeth.
Search Results for: in a word
Partly Cloudy
But how are we to figure the change from ‘undecided’ to ‘true’? Is it sudden or gradual? At what moment does the statement ‘it will rain tomorrow’ begin to be true? When the first drop falls to the ground? And supposing that it will not rain, when will the statement begin to be false? Just at the end of the day, 12 p.m. sharp? … We wouldn’t know how to answer these questions; this is due not to any particular ignorance or stupidity on our part but to the fact that something has gone wrong with the way the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ are applied here.
— F. Waismann, “How I See Philosophy,” in H.D. Lewis, ed., Contemporary British Philosophy, 1956
Pinpointing
Writing in Psychological Review in 1917, Berkeley psychologist George Stratton reported the startling achievements of Jewish scholars known as Shass Pollaks, who would memorize the entire Babylonian Talmud — not just the text, but the position of every word on every page:
“A pin would be placed on a word, let us say, the fourth word in line eight; the memory sharp would then be asked what word is in the same spot on page thirty-eight or fifty or any other page; the pin would be pressed through the volume until it reached page thirty eight or page fifty or any other page designated; the memory sharp would then mention the word and it was found invariably correct. He had visualized in his brain the whole Talmud; in other words, the pages of the Talmud were photographed on his brain. It was one of the most stupendous feats of memory I have ever witnessed and there was no fake about it.”
Stratton also quotes Judge Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, who had seen a Shass Pollak put down a pencil at random in the Talmud and immediately name the word on which it had lighted.
These achievements, Stratton wrote, “should be stored among the data long and still richly gathering for the study of extraordinary feats of memory.”
Spoon Sweet
CHOCOLATE contains the words HOT COCOA, each in order.
Ready Order
In the word ARCHETYPICAL, five letters occupy the same positions as in the alphabet — A is first, C third, E fifth, I ninth, and L twelfth.
In the remarkable sentence A bad egg hit KLM wipers two ways, composed by Ross Eckler, fully 16 of 26 letters occupy their alphabetic positions.
Enjoy Your Flight
Items prohibited from carry-on baggage by the Transportation Security Administration, as of June 2010:
- Meat cleavers
- Spear guns
- Sabers
- Hatchets
- Cattle prods
- Swords
- Brass knuckles
- Nunchakus
- Throwing stars
- Blasting caps
- Dynamite
- Hand grenades
And “snow globes … even with documentation.”
“Singular Old Coin”
The editor of the Milford (Del.) Beacon, was shown, a few days go, a coin — a composition of copper and brass — found on the farm of Mr. Ira Hammond, about two miles from that place. It is over 600 years old, bearing, date 1178; on one side is a crown, and upon the other the words ‘Josephus, I D J-PO RT-ET-AL G-REX,’ very legible, and the work well executed. This coin is about two hundred years older than the discovery of America, and the question very naturally arises, where did it come from?
— Scientific American, 6:250, 1851
UPDATE: Another mystery solved: A reader points out this entry in the U.S.
Bureau of the Mint catalogue of coins and tokens:
Gold
16. Meia dobra, 1768. (R). 6*Jy.
JOSEPHUS.I.D.G. – PORT. ET.ALG.REX.
Laureated bust, draped, to right; below, R 1758. Rev. Garnished shield
of arms of
Portugal, crowned. Edge, wreath. 32 mm. ; 216 grs.
Probably Scientific American‘s correspondent discovered a Portuguese coin from the 18th century and misread the date. (Thanks, John.)
Time-Machine Journalism
Being the paper of record brings with it some odd responsibilities. On March 10, 1975, the New York Times inadvertently published the wrong dateline in its Late City editions, officially dating the day’s news “March 10, 1075.”
Modern readers would understand that this was a simple typo, of course, but the editors grew concerned that future historians might be confused to discover a Times issue from the Middle Ages. So the following day’s issue contained a historic correction:
In yesterday’s issue, The New York Times did not report on riots in Milan and the subsequent murder of the lay religious reformer Erlembald. These events took place in 1075, the year given in the dateline under the nameplate on Page 1. The Times regrets both incidents.
Dot Bomb
Hijinks is the only common English word with three dotted letters in a row. Among proper nouns, Beijing and Fiji are better known than Australia’s Lake Mijijie, but all three lose out to the Katujjijiit Development Corporation, a property development concern in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.
Can we beat this? A reader tells me that pääjääjiiri is Finnish for “main ice mitre,” and possessiveness contains 18 consecutive dots in Morse code.
But the all-time winner must remain H.L. Mencken, who in 1938 ridiculed the New Deal by filling six columns of the Baltimore Evening Sun with 1 million dots — to represent “the Federal Government’s immense corps of job-holders.”
An Invertible Autograph
Seeing the reversible word ‘chump’ among your ‘Curiosities,’ I am sending you a name, ‘W.H. Hill,’ which, when written in the style shown, reads the same when reversed. Surely this is the only name possessing so convenient a peculiarity.
— B.R. Bligh, in Strand, September 1908