hadeharia
n. constant use of the word “hell”
Search Results for: in a word
In a Word
wittol
n. a man who knows of and tolerates his wife’s infidelity
In Other Words
Raymond Queneau’s 1947 book Exercises in Style tells the same story in 99 different ways, from telegram to ode:
Narrative:
“One day at about midday in the Parc Monceau district, on the back platform of a more or less full S bus (now No. 84), I observed a person with a very long neck who was wearing a felt hat which had a plaited cord round it instead of a ribbon. …”
Apostrophe:
“O platinum-nibbed stylograph, let thy smooth and rapid course trace on this single-side calendared paper those alphabetic glyphs which shall transmit to men of sparkling spectacles the narcissistic tale of a double encounter of omnibusilistic cause. …”
Sonnet:
“Glabrous was his dial and plaited was his bonnet,
And he, a puny colt — (how sad the neck he bore,
And long) — was now intent on his quotidian chore —
The bus arriving full, of somehow getting on it. …”
In response, Colin Crumplin’s 1977 book Hommage à Queneau features 100 different drawings of a cup, and Philip Ording’s 99 Variations on a Proof proves the same mathematical result in 99 different ways.
In Other Words
Writing in the New Beacon in 1938, blind poet W.H. Mansmore describes a process he calls “mental alchemy,” “a transmutation of sensations from one order to another.” He takes up this visual description from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in which the nymph Asia watches dawn break over the mountains:
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains; through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it; now it wanes; it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel in pale air;
‘T is lost! and through yon peaks of cloudlike snow
The roseate sunlight quivers; …
“I give below an attempt to render the same passage in terms of touch:”
One cold metallic grain is quivering still
Deep in the flood of warm ethereal fluid
Beyond the velvet mountains: through a chasm
In banks of fleece the heavier lake is splashed
With fairy foam: it wanes: it grows again
As the waves thicken, and as the burning threads
Of woven wool unravel in the tepid air:
‘Tis lost! and through the unsubstantial snow
Of yonder peaks quivers the living form
And vigour of the Sun …
“Or it may be put into sound, thus:”
One star pierces with thin intensity
The large crescendo consonance of morn
Beyond the drumming mountains: on the lake
Through stolid silence ghostly-faint is thrown
An echo: now it wanes: it grows again
Its echo fades, and splits into a swarm
Of singing notes that scatter in the faint air:
Then through a sound of breathing winds afar
Begins the throbbing anthem of the Sun.
He adds, “I owe Shelley an apology for publishing the above travesties of his work, but with all their inadequacy they may serve to make clear our method of realising the unreal world of light in the real world of sound and touch.”
Words and Pictures
This just caught my eye: In his manuscripts and notebooks, Alexander Pushkin often sketched the characters he was describing, as well as friends, family, romantic partners, and other literary figures. One biographer calls the drawings Pushkin’s graphic diary. This page is from his 1822 poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus.
A Story Without Words
Subtitled “A Novel in Woodcuts,” Lynd Ward’s 1929 parable Gods’ Man unfolds in images, making it an important forebear of the modern graphic novel. A young artist makes his way to the big city, where a masked stranger gives him a magic paintbrush. The adventures that follow remark on the roles of love and commerce in an artist’s life; in the end the stranger returns to claim a reward.
Despite its unusual format, Ward’s book sold more than 20,000 copies during the Depression, and he followed it up with five more wordless novels. When he died in 1985, he was at work on an ambitious seventh, which Rutgers published in 2001.
Squaring Words
In his 1864 autobiography Passages From the Life of a Philosopher, Charles Babbage describes an “amusing puzzle.” The task is to write a given word in the first rank and file of a square and then fill the remaining blanks with letters so that the same four words appear in order both horizontally and vertically. He gives this example with the word DEAN:
D E A N E A S E A S K S N E S T
“The various ranks of the church are easily squared,” he writes, “but it is stated, I know not on what authority, that no one has yet succeeded in squaring the word bishop.”
By an unlikely coincidence I’ve just found that Eureka put this problem to its readers in 1961, and they found three solutions:
B I S H O P B I S H O P B I S H O P I L L U M E I N H E R E I M P A L E S L I D E S S H A R P S S P I N E T H U D D L E H E R M I T H A N G A R O M E L E T O R P I N E O L E A T E P E S E T A P E S T E R P E T R E L
The first was found by A.L. Cooil and J.M. Dagnese; the second by A.R.B. Thomas; and the third by R.W. Payne, J.D.E. Konhauser, and M. Rumney.
12/10/2023 UPDATE: Reader Giorgos Kalogeropoulos has enlisted a database of 235,000 words to produce more than 100 bishop squares (click to enlarge):
This is pleasing, because it’s a road that Babbage himself was trying to follow in the 19th century, laboriously cataloging the contents of physical dictionaries after an algorithm of his own devising — see page 238 in the book linked above. (Thanks, Giorgos.)
Dressing Old Words New
Trained on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French, and Latin, MonadGPT is a chatbot with the language and style (and limited knowledge) of the 17th century:
User: What are the planets of the solar system?
Monad-GPT: The six Planets are, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Sun. The Moon is also a Planet; which being of so great Influence upon Earth, makes it to be most admired of all others by Astronomers.
User: Why has the Moon such an influence upon Earth?
Monad-GPT: But the Moon is so neer to us, as almost to be part of Earth; and therefore it much influences our Atmosphere. This Influence makes all that are in any way affected by Air, to be more under her influence than any other Planet. For if there were a little more or less Matter in the Air, than there is now, we should never have such Plants and Creatures as there are upon Earth: for every Plant and Creature hath its proper Temperature necessary for its Existence. If the Sun did not make up this shortage by his warmth from without, we should be destroyed.
User: Can you write a poem about the Moon?
Monad-GPT: O fairest Moon, that from the Heav’n dost shine, / In her own Lustre all the World does find: / As in thine Orb, where all is bright and clear, / The Sun himself is not more pure than thee.
User: How could we travel to the Moon? With a big canon?
Monad-GPT: But how to travel from Earth to the Moon, with our present Engines? A very hard Question: for we are like those that would go to Heaven in a Basket: We have no Wings, and God hath not given us any Angels to bear us up. Therefore I will leave this Enquiry to others; and end my Discourse of the Moon.
Via MetaFilter.
A Self-Descriptive Crossword Puzzle
From Lee Sallows:
Can you complete the ‘self-descriptive crossword puzzle’ at left below? As in the solution to a similar puzzle seen at right, each of its 13 entries, 6 horizontal, 7 vertical, consists of an English number name folowed by a space followed by a distinct letter. The number preceding each letter describes the total number of occurrences of the letter in the completed puzzle. Hence, in the example, E occurs thirteen times, G only once, and so on, as readers can check. Note that the self-description is complete; every distinct letter is counted.
Though far from easy, the self-descriptive property of the crossword enables its solution to be inferred from its empty grid using reasoning based on orthography only.
Words and Numbers
Strategies to memorize π sometimes rely on devising a sentence with words of representative lengths. Isaac Asimov offered this one:
How I want a drink, alcoholic, of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
Count the letters in each word and you get 3.14159265358979. That’s not the best strategy, though: What shall we do about zero? And it’s hard to reel off the digits impressively for friends when you have to stop and count the letters in each word.
Arthur Benjamin, a mathematician at Harvey Mudd College, suggests using a phonetic code instead:
1 = t or th or d
2 = n
3 = m
4 = r
5 = l
6 = sh, ch, or j
7 = k or hard g
8 = f or v
9 = p or b
0 = s or z
Once we’ve memorized this list, we can turn a whole string of digits into a single word simply by inserting vowels between the consonants. So, for example, 314 could be represented by meter, motor, meteor, matter, mother, etc. The consonants h, w, and y, which don’t appear in the list, can be used like additional vowels.
Using this method, it takes only three sentences to encode the first 60 digits of π:
3. 1415 926 5 3 58 97 9 3 2 384 6264
My turtle Pancho will, my love, pick up my new mover Ginger.
3 38 327 950 2 8841 971
My movie monkey plays in a favorite bucket.
69 3 99 375 1 05820 97494
Ship my puppy Michael to Sullivan’s backrubber!
Now we just need a way to remember the sentences …
(Arthur T. Benjamin, “A Better Way to Memorize Pi: The Phonetic Code,” Math Horizons 7:3 [February 2000], 17.)