Search Results for: in a word

Footloose

A visitor’s description of William Kingston, a Somerset farmer born without arms, recounted in John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876:

He highly entertained us at breakfast, by putting his half-naked feet upon the table as he sat, and carrying his tea and toast between his great and second toe to his mouth, with as much facility as if his foot had been a hand, and his toes fingers. … He then shewed me how he shaves himself with the razor in his toes; and he can comb his own hair. He can dress and undress himself, except buttoning his clothes. He feeds himself, and can bring both his meat or his broth to his mouth, by holding the fork or spoon in his toes. He cleans his own shoes, lights the fire, and does almost any domestic business as well as any other man. … He can milk his cows with his toes, and cuts his own hay, binds it up in bundles, and carries it about the field for his cattle. Last winter he had eight heifers constantly to fodder. The last summer he made all his hay-ricks. He can do all the business of the hay-field (except mowing) as fast and as well with his feet as others can with rakes and forks. … In a word, he can nearly do as much without as others can with their arms.

| Oddities

The Engine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Engine_(Gulliver).png

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:

He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me ‘to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.’ The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

As it permutes sets of words, it’s arguably a forerunner of the modern computer.

| Literature · Technology

Fundamentals

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:

A Poet’s Advice to Students

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)

| Literature · Society

“Good and Clever”

If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.

But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!

So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.

— Elizabeth Wordsworth

| Poems

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Johnson_EMWEA.jpg

  • Dante’s 1305 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.”
  • Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father.
  • 2746 = 2 + \sqrt{7\sqrt{4}}^{6} (Colin Rose)
  • RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES.
  • “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial

Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the charm that comes from an unexpected combination of qualities. In general, odd people are not sensible and sensible people are not odd. Johnson was both and often both at the same time.”

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

“A ‘Religious’ Fish”

https://books.google.com/books?id=P_6Z7ooR98IC&pg=PA1124

Describing this fish (Holocanthus Alternaus), which was caught off Zanzibar, a correspondent of the ‘Times of India’ wrote: ‘… On the one side of the tail are the words, La-ilaha-illa Allah’ — ‘There is no God but God.’ On the other side, ‘Shan Allah’ — ‘God’s Work,’ or ‘An Act of God.’ … Many of our readers who know Arabic will be able to see for themselves from this untouched photograph that the fish is a devout Moslem.’ We have shown the photographs to an expert in this country, who informs us that the letters are certainly intended to represent Arabic characters, but that there is nothing sufficiently distinguishable to enable it to be said that they mean what they are alleged to mean. A further opinion is expressed that the ‘inscriptions’ may not be genuine.

— Illustrated London News, Dec. 28, 1929

| Oddities

Prospect

In Eric Cross’ 1942 book The Tailor and Ansty, Irish tailor and storyteller Timothy Buckley recounts the wisdom held by the old Irish, before “the people got too bloodyful smart and educated, and let the government or anyone else do their thinking for them.” They had a way of reckoning time that advances from the lifespan of a rail, a type of small bird, to the age of the world:

A hound outlives three rails.
A horse outlives three hounds.
A jock outlives three horses.
A deer outlives three jocks.
An eagle outlives three deer.
A yew-tree outlives three eagles.
An old ridge in the ground outlives three yew-trees.
Three times the time that the sign of a ridge will be seen in the ground will be as long as from the beginning to the end of the world.

“The tailor is wildly off,” notes philosopher Robert P. Crease, “in his estimate of the age of the universe, which is unlikely to be (lifetime of the rail) × 38. Still, his point is well made that the old Irish unit system may possess certain superiorities to ours in that it was ‘reckoned on the things a man could see about him, so that, wherever he was, he had an almanac.'”

01/31/2025 UPDATE: Reader Edward White writes:

There is actually a similar calculation found in the Cosmati Pavement, in Westminster Abbey: The inscription reads

If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile; a hedge (lives for) three years, add dogs and horses and men, stags and ravens, eagles, enormous whales, the world: each one following triples the years of the one before.

In other words the calculation is:

A hedge lives 3 years
A dog lives for 3 hedges (i.e. 9 years)
A man lives for 3 dogs (i.e. 27 years)
A stag lives for 3 men (i.e. 81 years)
A raven lives for 3 stags (i.e. 243 years)
An eagle lives 3 ravens (i.e. 729 years)
A whale lives 3 eagles (i.e. 2187 years)
And the world lives 3 whales (6561 years)

This is the same as the Irish peasant’s calculation, in that it involves 8 rounds of tripling, but it has different terms. Schott’s Quintessential Miscellany (Bloomsbury, 2011) has a similar list of calculations on page 104. They are quoted below in full:

Flemish folklore gave this estimate of animal life-spans, premised upon the belief that a town (or enclosure) lasted just three years:

A TOWN lives three YEARS,
A DOG lives three TOWNS,
A HORSE lives three DOGS
A MAN lives three HORSES,
An ASS lives three MEN,
A WILD GOOSE lives three ASSES,
A CROW lives three WILD GEESE,
A STAG lives three CROWS
A RAVEN lives three STAGS
& the PHOENIX lives three RAVENS

A German equivalent has it:

A FENCE lasts three YEARS;
A DOG lasts three FENCES;
A HORSE lasts three DOGS;
And a MAN three HORSES.

Hesiod (fl.c 8th BC) wrote:

The NOISY CROW lives nine generations of MEN who die in the bloom of years; the STAG attains the age of four CROWS; the RAVEN, in its turn, equals three STAGS in length of days; while the PHOENIX lives nine RAVENS. We nymphs, fair-of-tresses, daughters of Jove the aegis-bearer, attain to the age of ten PHOENIXES.

And, Italian folklore maintained:

A DOG lasts 9 years;
A HORSE lasts 3 DOGS: 27 years;
A MAN lasts 3 HORSES: 81 years;
A CROW lasts 3 MEN: 243 years;
A DEER lasts 3 CROWS: 729 years;
An OAK lasts 3 DEER: 2,187 years.

The principle was evidently very widespread across Europe.

[Here’s another translation of the Hesiod, this from Plutarch:

A screaming crow lives for nine generations
of men who have reached puberty; a deer is four crows;
the raven grows old at three deer; then the phoenix at nine ravens; and we at ten phoenixes,
we beautiful-haired nymphs, daughters of aegis-holding Zeus.]

(Thanks, Edward.)

| Literature · Science & Math

“Prepopr Splelnig”

In 1999, a letter in New Scientist noted that randomizing letters in the middle of words has little or no effect on readers’ ability to understand text. Noam D. Plum responded with a poem:

The suggetsoin taht chrilden slhuod laern how to sepll
Is a tmie-watse we ohgut to rjeect.
Sicne a jlumbe of leertts raeds pertlecfy wlel
If the frist and the lsat are crrocet.

Wehn an edtoir grembuls, “Yuor seplinlg is ntus!”
Wtih cntoempt he can braley cocneal,
Trehe is no cuase to flcnih; mkae no ifs adns or btus;
Say, “I’ts radnom, sir. Wa’hts the big dael?”

In tihs fsat-minvog wrold, waht we raed dseon’t sictk.
Olny vrey few deliats get strsseed.
If i’ts frsit or it’s lsat we may glncae at it qucik.
Woh’s got tmie to be raenidg the rset?

(Noam D. Plum, “Prepopr Splelnig,” Verbatim 32:1 [Spring 2008], 15. See Half Measures.)

| Language · Poems

Field Notes

Two perceptive entries from the journals of English naturalist Gilbert White:

“December 4, 1770 – Most owls seem to hoot exactly in B flat according to several pitch-pipes used in tuning of harpsichords, & sold as strictly at concert pitch.”

“February 8, 1782 – Venus shadows very strongly, showing the bars of the windows on the floors & walls.”

Between these he makes what may be the earliest written use of the word golly, in 1775.

| Language · Science & Math