Although the altitudes are three,
Remarks my daughter Rachel,
One point’ll lie on all of them:
The orthocenter H’ll.
By mathematician Dwight Paine of Messiah College, 1983.
(Further recalcitrant rhymes: month, orange. W.S. Gilbert weighs in.)
Search Results for: in a word
Sotto Voce
‘Wordsworth,’ said Charles Lamb, ‘one day told me that he considered Shakespeare greatly overrated. “There is an immensity of trick in all Shakespeare wrote,” he said, “and people are taken in by it. Now if I had a mind I could write exactly like Shakespeare.” So you see,’ proceeded Charles Lamb quietly, ‘it was only the mind that was wanting.’
— Frank Leslie’s Ten Cent Monthly, December 1863
To Do
While editing The Sun Also Rises, Maxwell Perkins had to decide how to handle the many obscenities in Hemingway’s text. He planned a lunch with the author and kept a list of words to discuss with him.
While Perkins was at lunch, Charles Scribner came looking for him and, finding his office empty, consulted his calendar. It read “shit piss fuck bitch.”
When Perkins returned, Scribner said, “You must be exhausted.”
Nearer My God
Buzz Aldrin celebrated communion on the moon. From his 2009 book Magnificent Desolation:
So, during those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.’ I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon. My comments to the world were inclusive: ‘I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.’ I silently read the Bible passage as I partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.
“Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion,” he wrote. “Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind — be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience that by giving thanks to God.”
Mailbag
To the Editor of the Herald:
I am anxious to find out the way to figure the temperature from centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice versa. In other words, I want to know, whenever I see the temperature designated on the centigrade thermometer, how to find out what it would be on Fahrenheit’s thermometer.
Old Philadelphia Lady
Paris, December 24, 1899
That’s reasonable enough, right? It ran in the Paris Herald on Dec. 27, 1899.
The curious thing is that it also ran on Dec. 28, and Dec. 29 … and every day thereafter for 18 years, a total of 6,718 times.
Publisher James Gordon Bennett never gave a reason — he only told colleague James B. Townsend that “just so long as there was an average income of jocose but more often indignant and abusive letters about this letter at the Paris Herald office he would continue to publish it.”
“The Story of Esaw Wood”
Esaw Wood sawed wood.
Esaw Wood would saw wood!
All the wood Esaw Wood saw Esaw Wood would saw. In other words, all the wood Esaw saw to saw Esaw sought to saw.
Oh, the wood Wood would saw! And oh, the wood-saw with which Wood would saw wood.
But one day Wood’s wood-saw would saw no wood, and thus the wood Wood sawed was not the wood Wood would saw if Wood’s wood-saw would saw wood.
Now, Wood would saw wood with a wood-saw that would saw wood, so Esaw sought a saw that would saw wood.
One day Esaw saw a saw saw wood as no other wood-saw Wood saw would saw wood.
In fact, of all the wood-saws Wood ever saw saw wood Wood never saw a wood-saw that would saw wood as the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood would saw wood, and I never saw a wood-saw that would saw as the wood-saw Wood saw would saw until I saw Esaw Wood saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood.
Now Wood saws wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood.
Oh, the wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw!
Oh, the wood Wood’s woodshed would shed when Wood would saw wood with the wood-saw Wood saw saw wood!
Finally, no man may ever know how much wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw, if the wood-saw Wood saw would saw all the wood the wood-saw Wood saw would saw.
— W.E. Southwick
Anthologist Carolyn Wells writes, “Well, you don’t have to read it.”
No, No, No
The New York Times ran a bewildering headline on May 6, 1965:
“Albany Kills Bill to Repeal Law Against Birth Control”
… a triple (quadruple?) negative.
“As you leave the town of Franklin, Pennsylvania, you encounter a sign: END BRAKE RETARDER PROHIBITION,” notes Edward Wolpow in the May 2011 issue of Word Ways. “For those for whom this is relevant, they are, presumably, able to follow the instructions quite quickly, since it is, after all, a road sign. But I still can’t figure it.”
In a 1975 interview with Business Week, Henry Kissinger said, “I am not saying that there’s no circumstances where we would not use force” against Saudi Arabia. Is this what he meant to say?
At a New York conference of linguistic philosophers in the 1950s, Oxford professor J.L. Austin noted that while a double negative often expresses a positive — as in “not unattractive” — there is no example in English of a double positive expressing a negative.
Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, who was in the audience, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, yeah …”
Mathematicians’ Graves
Archimedes wanted no other epitaph than a sphere inscribed within a cylinder — he had determined the sphere’s relative volume and considered this his greatest achievement.
Henry Perigal’s tomb in Essex displays his graphic proof of the Pythagorean theorem (left).
Gauss wanted to be buried under a heptadecagon, which he’d shown can be constructed with compass and straightedge. (The stonemason demurred, fearing he’d produce only a circle.)
And Jakob Bernoulli opted for a logarithmic spiral and the words Eadem mutata resurgo—the motto means “I shall arise the same though changed.”
Managing the Managers
Sostratos, architect of the famous light-house on the Island of Pharos, Alexandria, once numbered among the seven wonders of the world, engraved deeply on one of the stones the words, ‘Sostratos of Gnidos, son of Dexiphanos, to the Gods protecting those on the sea.’ Knowing very well that Ptolemy, his employer, would not be satisfied with this inscription, he covered it with a thin coating of plaster on which he inscribed the name of Ptolemy. In time the plaster disappeared, and with it the name of the king, so that in the end the architect had all the credit for the work.
— The Illustrated American, June 18, 1892
Imagine!
Imagine the theatre of the future. … [T]he masses will no doubt go to the theatre much as they do now. Only instead of seeing a company of actors and actresses, more or less mediocre, engaged in the degrading task of repeating time after time the same words, the same gestures, the same actions, they will see the performance of a complete ‘star’ company, as once enacted at its very best, reproduced as often as it may be wanted, the perfected kinetoscope exhibiting the spectacle of the stage, the talking machine and the phonograph (doubtless differentiated) rendering perfectly the voices of the actors and the music of the orchestra. There will be no need for the employment of inferior actors in the small parts. As the production of any play will only demand that it be worked up to the point of perfection and then performed once, there will be no difficulty in securing the most perfect rendering that it is capable of.
— T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906