Search Results for: in a word

Catastrophe

In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson describes a particularly inscrutable English newspaper headline:

ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER

Bomb and plot, you notice, can be either nouns or verbs, and would take kindly to being adjectives, not that they are anything so definite here. One thinks at first that there are two words or sentences, and a semicolon has been left out as in telegrams: ‘I will tell you for your penny about the Italian Assassin and the well-known Bomb Plot Disaster’; but the assassin, as far as I remember, was actually not an Italian; Italian refers to the whole aggregate, and its noun, if any, is disaster. Perhaps, by being so far separated from its noun, it gives the impression that the other words, too, are somehow connected with Italy; that bombs, plots, and disasters belong both to government and rebel in those parts; perhaps Italian Assassin is not wholly separate in one’s mind from the injured Mussolini.

In fact it’s not clear what the intended meaning had been. Empson says that the main rhythm conveys the sense “This is a particularly exciting sort of disaster, the assassin-bomb-plot type they have in Italy.” In The Wordsworth Book of Usage & Abusage (1995), Eric Partridge suggests that the writer may have meant ITALIAN DISASTER ASSASSIN’S BOMB-PLOT, “There has been in Italy a disaster caused by a bomb in an assassin’s plot.” But he agrees that “even after an exasperating amount of cogitation by the reader,” the meaning is unclear.

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To the Point

In What a Word!, his 1936 examination of English usage, A.P. Herbert takes up a letter written in “officese”:

Madam,
We are in receipt of your favour of the 9th inst. with regard to the estimate required for the removal of your furniture and effects from the above address to Burbleton, and will arrange for a Representative to call to make an inspection on Tuesday next, the 14th inst., before 12 noon, which we trust will be convenient, after which our quotation will at once issue.

He reduces this to:

Madam,
We have your letter of May 9th requesting an estimate for the removal of your furniture and effects to Burbleton, and a man will call to see them next Tuesday forenoon if convenient, after which we will send the estimate without delay.

This shortens the letter from 66 words to 42. Then he cuts it again, to 35 words, or 157 letters against the original 294, a savings of nearly 50 percent:

Madam,
Thank you for your letter of May 9th. A man will call next Tuesday, forenoon, to see your furniture and effects, after which, without delay, we will send our estimate for their removal to Burbleton.

In a large firm, he estimates, cutting “verbose and indolent, obscure, inelegant, and time-devouring monkey-talk” could save a week’s work for two typists.

Elsewhere he considers a memo that reads “Hot-Water Bottles: With reference to the above matter I should like an opportunity of discussing same with you.” The improvement he suggests is “Could we, please, have a talk about Hot-Water Bottles?”

| Language

Cube Route

A centered hexagonal number is a number that can be represented by a hexagonal lattice with a dot in the center, like so:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hex_number_37.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Starting at the center, successive hexagons contain 1, 7, 19, and 37 dots. The sequence goes on forever.

The sum of the first n centered hexagonal numbers is n3, and there’s a pretty “proof without words” to show that this is so:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visual_proof_centered_hexagonal_numbers_sum.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Instead of regarding each figure as a hexagon, think of it as a perspective view of a cube, looking down along a space diagonal. The first cube here contains a single dot. How many dots must we add to produce the next larger cube? Seven, and from our bird’s-eye perspective this pattern of 7 added dots matches the 7-dot hexagon shown above. The same thing happens when we advance to a 3×3×3 cube: This requires surrounding the 2×2×2 cube with 19 additional dots, and from our imagined vantage point these again take the form of a hexagonal lattice. In the last image our 33 cube must accrete another 37 dots to become a 43 cube … and the pattern continues.

| Science & Math

Reflections

Epigrams of poet Ralph Hodgson:

  • Oaths in anguish rank with prayers.
  • The wink was not our best invention.
  • When crises pall, humdrum is sensational.
  • But Woman — in whose image made?
  • A sparrow in a snowstorm with a feather in his bill: that is Faith.
  • Forget the slush, but keep the snow / Of Christmasses of long ago.
  • Anniversary: Familiarity breeds content.
  • Some things have to be believed to be seen.
  • Who shall paraphrase a tear!
  • There’s one thing to be said for sin — it does give conscience exercise.
  • Why not Foremothers?
  • The Golden Rule was called new-fangled, once upon a time.
  • Blessed are the children of a nobody.
  • The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery.

And “The ‘last word’ is only the latest.”

| Quotations

Misc

  • Vatican City has 2.27 popes per square kilometer.
  • Skylab was fined for littering.
  • Five-syllable rhyming words in English: vocabulary, constabulary
  • 8767122 + 3287682 = 876712328768
  • “We die only once, and for such a long time!” — Molière

Above is the only known film footage of Mark Twain, shot at Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. The women are thought to be his daughters Clara and Jean.

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Term Limits

Little-used words:

anopisthograph
adj. having writing on one side only

antapology
n. a reply to an apology

antephialtic
n. something that prevents nightmares

centesimate
v. to select one person in every hundred for a punishment

citramontane
adj. relating to this side of the mountains

demonachize
v. to remove monks from

frounce
n. a canker in the mouth of a hawk

hendecad
n. a period of eleven years

laquearian
adj. armed with a noose

pastinaceous
adj. of the nature of a parsnip

philosophunculist
n. an insignificant philosopher

spartostatics
n. the study of the strength of ropes

swinehood
n. pigs collectively

togated
adj. clad in a toga

trouserdom
n. the domain of those who wear trousers

yealing
n. a person of one’s own age

See Specialists.

| Language

Expedient

Captured by the North Vietnamese in 1965, Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton was forced to participate in a propaganda interview to be broadcast in the United States. Pretending to be oppressed by the television lights, he blinked the word “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code — alerting U.S. Naval Intelligence for the first time that American prisoners were being tortured.

In his Investigator’s Guide to Steganography (2003), Gregory Kipper notes that captured soldiers would sometimes use hand signals to transmit messages during photo ops; “often, these gestures were airbrushed out by the media.”

| Language

Cryptarithm

A pleasing puzzle by Eric LeVasseur:

PI × R2 = AREA

If each letter in this expression (but not the exponent 2) is replaced with a corresponding digit, the resulting equation will be valid. What are the digits?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:R%C3%BCstung_-_Bestandteile_-_Vorder-_und_R%C3%BCckseite.jpg

  • It’s illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament wearing a suit of armor, according to a 1313 statute.
  • “All things in moderation” is an immoderate policy.
  • If a prime number is made up entirely of 1s (e.g., 11), then the number of its digits is prime.
  • The word CARBON is itself made up of element symbols (Ca, Rb, O, N). (Dmitri Borgmann)
  • Interior decorator Nicholas Haslam: “All it comes down to is making a setting in which people look prettier.”

07/17/2024 UPDATE: Several readers point out, correctly, that carbon is hardly the only elemental “chemical word” — indeed, some elements can be spelled in multiple ways. I’ve assembled this list from multiple contributions:

ArSeNiC ArSeNIC
AsTaTiNe
BiSmUTh BISmUTh
CArBON CaRbON
CoPPEr COPPEr
IrON
KrYPtON
NeON
OGaNeSSON OGaNEsSON
PHoSPHoRuS PHOSPHoRuS PHOsPHoRuS PHoSPHORus PHOSPHORuS PHOsPHORuS
SiLiCoN SiLiCON SILiCON SILiCoN
SiLvEr SILvEr
TeNNeSSINe TeNNEsSiNe TeNNEsSINe
TiN
XeNON XeNoN

TiN is even a valid compound, titanium nitride.

Of these Borgmann had found arsenic, carbon, iron, neon, phosphorus, silicon, and xenon when he wrote in 1974, “surely the most unusual is CARBON which can be factored into elements not including itself.” But that property wasn’t unique even within his limited list, as can be seen above.

Many thanks to readers Gareth McCaughan, Catalin Voinescu, and Eric Harshbarger for writing in about this.

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