Laid up in the hospital, James Thurber passed the time doing crossword puzzles.
One day he asked a nurse, “What seven-letter word has three u’s in it?”
She said, “I don’t know, but it must be unusual.”
Search Results for: in a word
Short Subjects
While adapting The Big Sleep for the screen, a confused Howard Hawks wired Raymond Chandler asking who was supposed to have killed General Sternwood’s chauffer in the novel. Chandler responded:
NO IDEA
When a Paris news editor asked Ernest Hemingway for an accounting of his expenses, he cabled:
SUGGEST YOU UPSTICK BOOKS ASSWARDS
A movie studio once approached Eugene O’Neill to write a screenplay for a Jean Harlow film. They asked him to reply in a collect telegram of no more than 20 words. He wrote:
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO O’NEILL
When Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize in in 1969, he received a telegram from a Parisian named Georges Godot … apologizing for keeping him waiting.
Overkill
Poet/farmer Thomas Tusser composed his Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573) for the most part in rhyming couplets. But in Chapter 49 he gets ambitious, casting his conclusion in 94 consecutive words that begin with the letter T:
The thrifty that teacheth the thriving to thrive,
Teach timely to traverse, the thing that thou ‘trive,
Transferring thy toiling, to timeliness taught,
This teacheth thee temp’rance to temper thy thought.
Take Trusty (to trust to) that thinkest to thee,
That trustily thriftiness trowleth to thee.
Then temper thy travell, to tarry the tide,
This teacheth thee thriftiness, twenty times try’d.
Take thankfull thy talent, thank thankfully those,
That thriftily teacheth thy time to transpose.
Troth twice to be teached, teach twenty times ten,
This trade thou that takest, take thrift to thee then.
“Perhaps this was the most difficult chapter, according to its length, that our author had to compose,” writes editor William Mavor, “yet he has strained alliteration to the most extravagant pitch; for when he writes trive for contrive, and for the sake of the rhyme uses thee for thrive, we cannot help pitying the miserable expedients to which he was reduced, in order to accomplish his design.”
“In other respects the advice is good.”
“Literary Ingenuity”
ODO TENET MULUM, MADIDAM MAPPAM TENET ANNA
[Odo, holding Master Doctor’s mule, and Anne with her tablecloth]
The above line is said, in an old book, to have ‘cost the inventor much foolish labor, for it is perfect verse, and every word is the very same both backward and forward.’
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
Unimpressed
This is the only confirmed photo of Abe Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken about three hours before he gave his address. Not everyone loved the speech:
- Chicago Times: “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”
- Harrisburg Patriot and Union: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”
- London Times: “Anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.”
Lincoln delivered the 10-sentence, 3-minute speech only after a 2-hour, 13,607-word oration by former secretary of state Edward Everett. When Everett sent Lincoln his compliments the next day, the president replied, “I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”
Find the Theme, Part 2
What do these words have in common?
- ALMOND
- INCOME
- CANDID
- MEMORIAL
- CONCORDE
- GANYMEDE
- MANDARIN
- MAINLAND
“The Boy Jones”
Curious doings at Buckingham Palace, 1838-1841:
- In December 1838, a porter discovered 15-year-old Edward Jones in the marble hall. He had stolen linen and a regimental sword, but a jury acquitted him.
- In November 1840, the same boy scaled the wall and entered the palace again, this time leaving undetected.
- The following day a nurse found him under a sofa in the queen’s dressing room. “He said that he had sat upon the throne, that he saw the queen, and heard the princess royal cry.”
- After three months in prison he returned immediately — in March 1841 he was found eating in one of the royal apartments.
This last earned him three more months’ correction, this time with hard labor, and this apparently cured him. But others would follow: In July 1982 Elizabeth II awoke to find 32-year-old Michael Fagan in her bedchamber. “He thinks so much of the Queen,” Fagan’s mother explained. “I can imagine him just wanting to simply talk and say hello and discuss his problems.”
“Prevalent Poetry”
A wandering tribe, called the Siouxs,
Wear moccasins, having no shiouxs.
They are made of buckskin,
With the fleshy side in,
Embroidered with beads of bright hyiouxs.
When out on the war-path, the Siouxs
March single file–never by tiouxs–
And by “blazing” the trees
Can return at their ease,
And their way through the forests ne’er liouxs.
All new-fashioned boats he eschiouxs,
And uses the birch-bark caniouxs;
These are handy and light,
And, inverted at night,
Give shelter from storms and from dyiouxs.
The principal food of the Siouxs
Is Indian maize, which they briouxs,
And hominy make,
Or mix in a cake,
And eat it with pork, as they chiouxs.
Now, doesn’t this spelling look cyiouxrious?
‘Tis enough to make any one fyiouxrious!
So a word to the wise!
Pray our language revise
With orthography not so injiouxrious.
— Charles Follen Adams
Reporting In
Army slang collected in Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words:
- snafu: situation normal, all fucked up
- janfu: joint army and navy fuckup
- susfu: situation unchanged: still fucked up
- fumtu: fucked up more than usual
- tarfu: things are really fucked up
- fubb: fucked up beyond belief
- fubar: fucked up beyond all recognition
- sapfu: surpassing all previous fuckups
George Washington said, “An army of asses led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by an ass.”
Thinking Back
Can you move an object using only your mind? Of course not. But can you move one in the past?
Since January 1997, the Retropsychokinesis Project at the University of Kent has invited Web visitors to try to influence the replay of a prerecorded bitstream. In other words, they must try to influence an event that has already happened.
The experimenters claim to be agnostic as to whether retroactive causality exists, but “the best existing database suggests that the odds are in the order of 1 in 630 thousand million that the experimental evidence is the result of chance.”
Try it for yourself here — but remember, if you have some skepticism about this, it may only be because someone in the future is influencing you.