The longest English word in which no letter is repeated is uncopyrightable.
Do you see why that’s true?
Search Results for: in a word
Look Here
The ‘Four-eyed Man of Cricklade’ was a celebrated English monstrosity of whom little reliable information is obtainable. He was visited by W. Drury, who is accredited with reporting the following–
‘So wondrous a thing, such a lusus naturae, such a scorn and spite of nature I have never seen. It was a dreadful and shocking sight.’ This unfortunate had four eyes placed in pairs, ‘one eye above the other and all four of a dull brown, encircled with red, the pupils enormously large.’ The vision in each organ appeared to be perfect. ‘He could shut any particular eye, the other three remaining open, or, indeed, as many as he chose, each several eye seeming to be controlled by his will and acting independently of the remainder. He could also revolve each eye separately in its orbit, looking backward with one and forward with another, upward with one and downward with another simultaneously.’ He was of a savage, malignant disposition, delighting in ugly tricks, teasing children, torturing helpless animals, uttering profane and blasphemous words, and acting altogether like the monster, mental and physical, that he was. ‘He could play the fiddle, though in a silly sort, having his notes on the left side, while closing the right pair of eyes. He also sang, but in a rough, screeching voice not to be listened to without disgust.’
— George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, 1896
Do Animals Have Emotions?
In 1984, a pet kitten was given to Koko, the Stanford University gorilla who communicates through sign language.
She cared for it as a baby gorilla until December of that year, when the cat escaped from her cage and was run down by a car.
When her trainers told Koko what had happened, she gave the signs for two words.
They were “cry” and “sad.”
Homework
It’s been known since 1876 that 267-1 isn’t prime, but for decades no one knew what the factors were.
Then, at a meeting in 1903, mathematician Frank Nelson Cole gave an hourlong “lecture” in which he didn’t say a word. On one chalkboard he expanded the value of 267-1:
147,573,952,589,676,412,927
On another he wrote:
193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287
Then he multiplied those values by hand. The two boards matched. He had found the factors. Cole returned to his seat amid a standing ovation.
He later admitted that finding the factors had taken “three years of Sundays.”
Easy as Pi
Isaac Asimov proposed this mnemonic for a famous constant:
How I want a drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
Count the letters in each word and you’ll get 3.14159265358979.
Best Served Cold
Excerpt from the will of Joseph Dalby, London, 1784:
I give to my daughter Ann Spencer, a guinea for a ring, or any other bauble she may like better: — I give to the lout, her husband, one penny, to buy him a lark-whistle; I also give to her said husband, of redoubtable memory, my fart-hole, for a covering for his lark-whistle, to prevent the abrasion of his lips; and this legacy I give him as a mark of my approbation of his prowess and nice honour, in drawing his sword on me, (at my own table), naked and unarmed as I was, and he well fortified with custard.
Euphony
James Joyce thought cuspidor the most beautiful word in the English language. Arnold Bennett chose pavement. J.R.R. Tolkien felt the phrase cellar door had an especially beautiful sound.
These may seem odd choices, because it’s hard to separate sound from sense. “The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word,” wrote Max Beerbohm, “is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.”
Beerbohm once pressed this point with his friend Robert Hichens (related in David Cecil’s 1964 biography Max):
One day [Beerbohm] said to Hichens, ‘Do you think, Crotchet, that a word can be beautiful, just one word?’
‘Yes,’ Hichens said, ‘I can think of several words that seem to me beautiful.’
‘Ah?’
A pause.
‘Then tell me, do you think the word ermine is a beautiful word?’
‘Yes,’ Hichens said, ‘I like the sound of it very much.’
‘Ah?’
Another pause.
‘And do you think vermin is a beautiful word?’
Moonstruck
On June 18, 1178, five monks at Canterbury reported witnessing a catastrophe in the sky:
There was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance.
Stony Brook earth scientist Jack Hartung speculates that this may have been an impact event that created the 20-kilometer crater Giordano Bruno.
Unquiet Slumbers
Pity Lal Bihari: In 1976 the Indian farmer applied for a bank loan and learned he was dead. His uncle had arranged it in order to get control of his land.
This is fairly common in the crowded northern state of Uttar Pradesh, and it creates an odd predicament: If you complain too much about being dead, your enemies might kill you for real.
The struggle led Bihari to make some strangely existential demonstrations. He added the word “dead” to his name, signed his letters as the “late” Lal Bihari, organized his own funeral, and demanded a widow’s compensation for his wife.
Finally he was recalled to life in 1994, after 18 years in the grave. But the “association of the dead” that he founded has now grown to 20,000 members.
The Somerton Man
On Dec. 1, 1948, a bather discovered a body on the beach near Adelaide, Australia. The man appeared to be European, about 45 years old, well dressed, and in excellent physical condition. Indeed, the coroner could not determine a cause of death. Still more strangely, it seemed the man had carried no money, and all identifying marks had been removed from his clothes. Apparently he had left a suitcase at the Adelaide railway station, but it contained no useful clues. Photos and fingerprints were circulated throughout the English-speaking world, but no one identified him.
And the body bore one last strange clue: In a trouser fob pocket, one of the investigators found a tiny piece of paper bearing the words “Taman Shud.” Those are the final words in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; they mean “The End.” A local doctor came forward with a copy of that book, from which the words had been clipped. He had found it tossed on the front seat of his car the day before the body was found.
But even that clue went nowhere. To this day, no one knows who the man was or how he died. He’s known only as the Somerton man.