Search Results for: in a word

“Hence These Rimes”

Tho’ my verse is exact,
Tho’ it flawlessly flows,
As a matter of fact
I would rather write prose.

While my harp is in tune,
And I sing like the birds,
I would really as soon
Write in straightaway words.

Tho’ my songs are as sweet
As Apollo e’er piped,
And my lines are as neat
As have ever been typed,

I would rather write prose —
I prefer it to rime;
It’s less hard to compose,
And it takes me less time.

“Well, if that be the case,”
You are moved to inquire,
“Why appropriate space
For extolling your lyre?”

I can only reply
That this form I elect
‘Cause it pleases the eye,
And I like the effect.

— Bert Leston Taylor

| Poems

Hypertension

New English verb tenses, offered by David Morice in a November 1986 Word Ways article:

Future past perfect: I will have had walked
Progressive conditional: I would have should have been walking
Future present past: He will does walked
Double future: He will will walk
Unconditional present: He could can walk
Obsessive progressive: He is being doing walking
Refractive future perfect: He did will was have walked
Superjunctive: He might be having been about to be walking

The Tortoise stepped ever so carefully across the finish line, just a moment before the Hare would have been about to be going to hop across it himself. ‘I won!’ she said. The Hare paused a moment, then replied, ‘Yes, Ms. Tortoise, in the next decade you will have been about to be going to be used to be having been doing being the winner of this race, but tomorrow we’ll have to do it again, for it’s two out of three, ma’am.’

| Language

The Perfect Infinitive

“Let us take a typical case. A gentleman and his wife, calling on friends, find them not at home. The gentleman decides to leave a note of regret couched in a few well-chosen words, and the first thing he knows he is involved in this:

We would have liked to have found you in.

“Reading it over, the gentleman is assailed by the suspicion that he has too many ‘haves,’ and that the whole business has somehow been put too far into the past. … He takes an envelope out of his pocket and grimly makes a list of all the possible combinations, thus getting:”

  • We would have liked to have found
  • We would have liked to find
  • We would like to have found
  • We would like to find
  • We had hoped to have been able to have found

“If he has married the right kind of woman, she will hastily scratch a brief word on a calling card, shove it under the door, and drag her husband away.”

— James Thurber, “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to Modern English Usage,” 1931

| Language

Piecework

In his Canterbury Puzzles of 1907, Henry Dudeney posed a now-famous challenge: How can you cut an equilateral triangle into four pieces that can be reassembled to form a perfect square?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Triangledissection.svg

Dudeney’s beautiful solution was accompanied by a rather involved geometric derivation. It seems unlikely that he worked this out laboriously in approaching an answer to the problem, but how then did he reach it?

Here’s one possibility: If a strip of squares is draped adroitly over a strip of triangles, their intersection forms a wordless proof of the task’s feasibility:

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

Whether that was Dudeney’s path to the solution is not known, but it appears at least plausible.

| Puzzles · Science & Math

Elevated Thoughts

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montaigne_1576_R.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The joists in the tower in which Montaigne wrote his Essays are inscribed with his favorite quotations from Greek and Latin authors, many of which appear in his writings: “It is not so much things that torment man, as the opinions he has of things.” “Every reasoning has its contrary.” “Wind swells bladders, opinion swells men.”

He wrote, “The room pleases me because it is somewhat difficult of access, and retired, as much on account of the utility of the exercise, as because I there avoid the crowd. Here is my seat, my place, my rest. I try to make it purely my own, and to free this single corner from conjugal, filial, and civil community.”

The numbers in the diagram below correspond to this table in the German Wikipedia. English translations are here.

In large Latin letters on the central rafter are the words “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. I PAUSE. I EXAMINE.”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Montaigne_-_tower_-_sketch_of_2nd_floor_with_library.svg
Image: © Roman Eisele / CC BY-SA 4.0
| Literature · Quotations

Unquote

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

“The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.” — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

| Quotations

Tricolor

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tricol.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Make an inverted triangle of hexagonal cells with side length 3n + 1, and color the cells in the top row randomly in three colors. Now color the cells in the second row according to these rules:

  1. If the neighboring cells immediately above are of the same color, assign that color.
  2. If they’re of different colors, assign the third color.

When you’ve finished the second row, continue through the succeeding ones, applying the same rules. Pleasingly, no matter how large the triangle, the color of the last cell can be predicted at the start: Just apply our two guiding rules to the endmost cells in the top row. If those two cells are both red, the last cell will be red. If one is red and one is yellow (as in the figure above), the bottom cell will be blue.

The principle was discovered by Newcastle University mathematician Steve Humble in 2012. Gary Antonick gives more background here, and see the paper below for a mathematical discussion by Humble and Ehrhard Behrends.

(Ehrhard Behrends and Steve Humble, “Triangle Mysteries,” Mathematical Intelligencer 35:2 [June 2013], 10-15.)

| Science & Math

First Things First

George Orwell’s six rules of writing, from “Politics and the English Language,” 1946:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

But “one could keep all of them and still write bad English.”

| Language · Literature