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Efficiency

Just a bit of trivia: In the New South Wales railway system, the telegraph code RYZY meant:

Vehicle No ….. may be worked forward to ….. behind the brakevan of a suitable goods train during daylight provided locomotive branch certifies fit to travel. If the damaged vehicle is fitted with automatic coupling it must only be worked forward behind a brakevan also fitted with automatic coupling by connecting the automatic couplers on each vehicle but, if fitted with ordinary drawgear, it must be screw coupled. Westinghouse brake to be in use throughout train and on damaged vehicle. Guard to be given written instructions to carefully watch vehicle en route.

This reduced a 90-word message to four letters.

| Language · Technology

“WIPEOUT!”

Cynthia Knight composed this in 1983 — a poem typed entirely on the upper row of a typewriter:

O WOE
(we quote you, poor poet)
We tiptoe up, quiet. You peer out. You opt to write
quite proper poetry
to pour out your pretty repertoire.
We try to woo you to write. You pop out; retire to pout.
Torpor? Terror? Ire? Or worry? We pity you, poor poet.
Put out, you rip your poetry up. Too trite?
We try to pique you.
Were your pep to tire, or your power to rot
We prop you up to retype it.
Or were our top priority to trip you
or were etiquette, piety, or propriety to require you to wire up your typewriter to rewrite it …
O! You write witty quip, pert retort. You titter. You write pure, utter tripe too, I purr.
You err
retype your error
weep
wipe your wet typewriter (your property)
We TOWER o’er you, wee tot — were you TWO?
YOU WORE YOUR TOY TYPEWRITER OUT!
We quit.

(“The Poet’s Corner,” Word Ways 16:2 [May 1983], 87-88.)

| Language

Mixed Doubles

In a letter to Maud Standen dated Dec. 18, 1877, Lewis Carroll included a puzzle:

[M]y ‘Anagrammatic Sonnet’ will be new to you. Each line has 4 feet, and each foot is an anagram, i. e., the letters of it can be re-arranged so as to make one word. Thus there are 24 anagrams, which will occupy your leisure moments for some time, I hope. Remember, I don’t limit myself to substantives, as some do. I should consider ‘we dishwished’ a fair anagram.

As to the war, try elm. I tried.
The wig cast in, I went to ride.
‘Ring? Yes.’ We rang. ‘Let’s rap.’ We don’t.
‘O shew her wit!’ As yet she won’t.
Saw eel in Rome. Dry one: he’s wet.
I am dry. O forge! Th’rogue! Why a net?

For example, the first foot in the first line, “As to,” can be rearranged to spell OATS. Carroll left no solution, but he did add a parting riddle to which we have the answer:

“To these you may add ‘abcdefgi,’ which makes a compound word — as good a word as ‘summer-house.'” What is it?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Round and Round

https://archive.org/details/MathematicsCanBeFun-Eng-YakovPerelman/page/n11/mode/2up

‘I had quite a bit of fun playing hide-and-seek with a squirrel,’ he said. ‘You know that little round glade with a lone birch in the centre? It was on this tree that a squirrel was hiding from me. As I emerged from a thicket, I saw its snout and two bright little eyes peeping from behind the trunk. I wanted to see the little animal, so I started circling round along the edge of the glade, mindful of keeping the distance in order not to scare it. I did four rounds, but the little cheat kept backing away from me, eyeing me suspiciously from behind the tree. Try as I did, I just could not see its back.’

‘But you have just said yourself that you circled round the tree four times,’ one of the listeners interjected.

‘Round the tree, yes, but not round the squirrel.’

‘But the squirrel was on the tree, wasn’t it?’

‘So it was.’

‘Well, that means you circled round the squirrel too.’

‘Call that circling round the squirrel when I didn’t see its back?’

‘What has its back to do with the whole thing? The squirrel was on the tree in the centre of the glade and you circled round the tree. In other words, you circled round the squirrel.’

‘Oh no, I didn’t. Let us assume that I’m circling round you and you keep turning, showing me just your face. Call that circling round you?’

‘Of course, what else can you call it?’

‘You mean I’m circling round you though I’m never behind you and never see your back?’

‘Forget the back! You’re circling round me and that’s what counts. What has the back to do with it?’

— Yakov Perelman, Mathematics Can Be Fun, 1927

| Oddities

Homage à Fromage

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DoubleGlou.png

For his 1992 palindrome dictionary From A to ZOtamorf, Stephen J. Chism set out to gather all the reversible expressions in English that had been published up to that point. He divides them sensibly into single words; phrases and sentences; poems; and personal and place names — but the last chapter is titled FOR SOME REASON CHEESE:

A duo Gouda
Ate Feta?
Cheese not dairy. Myriad tone? See H.C.
Cheese? See H.C. …
Disk Colby block, Sid.
Edam Hannah made
He ate feta, eh?
He made lives evil. Edam, eh?
Lay block Colby, Al.
No Brie, Irbon?
No Romano on a moron …
Not Lit, Stilton?
Note Swiss: “I.W. Seton”
Why block Colby, H.W.?

“I don’t propose to explain it,” he writes. “Cheese is as unlikely as it is likely; a seemingly ordinary food product. Why, then, do we find it treated more thoroughly in palindromes than any other substance?”

| Language

Plunges in Dumbness

In his adopted home of Majorca, Robert Graves once encountered a memorable tourist leaflet:

They are hollowed out in the see coast at the municipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called ‘The Spider’ There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their eulogy about, included Nort-American geoglogues

He commemorated it with a poem:

Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops
While all admit their impotence (though autors most formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature’s underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the strength of water drops

The whole thing is here.

| Language · Poems

Ah

A reader nicknamed MANX submitted this poser to The Enigma, the magazine of the National Puzzlers’ League, in September 1985.

The letters in BENEATH CHOPIN can be rearranged into a fitting three-word phrase of 3, 5, and 5 letters. What is it?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Cut Spelling

Devised by English orthographer Christopher Upward, Cut Spelling seeks to reform English by eliminating and substituting letters to better match the spoken word:

Wen readrs first se Cut Spelng, as in this sentnce, they ofn hesitate slytly, but then quikly becom acustmd to th shortnd words and soon find text in Cut Spelng as esy to read as traditional orthografy, but it is th riter ho realy apreciates th advantajs of Cut Spelng, as many of th most trublsm uncertntis hav been elimnated.

Words in this scheme are 8 to 15 percent shorter than their standard spellings, and the rules are more systematic, arguably making them easier to learn for both newcomers and established readers. The plan was promoted for a time by the Simplified Spelling Society but, like so many other reform proposals, never achieved wide acceptance.

| Language