Search Results for: in a word

Decalogue

Jonathan Franzen’s “10 rules for novelists”:

  1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
  2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
  3. Never use the word then as a conjunction — we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
  4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
  5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
  6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
  7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
  8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
  9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
  10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

(From The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, 2018.)

| Literature

Succinct

Travelling to England with his wife and daughter in the Norwegian freighter Halibut, which ran into rough seas, [Sir Robert Menzies] sent this cable to relatives:

At sea off Perth: Exodus X, 23.

In the Bible they found these words:

They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days.

— Ray Robinson, ed., The Wit of Sir Robert Menzies, 1966

| Humor · Religion

Viewpoints

https://archive.org/details/b28738196/page/n3/mode/2up

Jeremy Bentham made a table of the springs of action, where every human desire was named in three parallel columns, according as men wish to praise it, to blame it, or to treat it neutrally. Thus we find in one column ‘gluttony,’ and opposite it, in the next column, ‘love of the pleasures of the social board.’ And again, we find in the column giving eulogistic names to impulses, ‘public spirit,’ and opposite to it, in the next column, we find ‘spite.’ I recommend anybody who wishes to think clearly on any ethical topic to imitate Bentham in this particular, and after accustoming himself to the fact that almost every word conveying blame has a synonym conveying praise, to acquire a habit of using words that convey neither praise nor blame.

— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, 1929

Bentham had published the table in 1817. “By habit,” he wrote, “wherever a man sees a name, he is led to figure to himself a corresponding object, of the reality of which the name is accepted by him, as it were of course, in the character of a certificate. From this delusion, endless is the confusion, the error, the dissension, the hostility, that has been derived.”

| Society

Hot Woe!

A conversation in Spoonerian, a language conducted entirely in spoonerisms, proposed by J.A. Lindon:

A: Hot woe, Barley Chinks!
B: Hot woe, Chilly Base!
A: Blocking showy, Miss Thorning.
B: Glowing a bale.
A: It slacked one of my crates.
B: I’ve a late slacking. The drain rips in.
A: Porter on the willows? Tut-tut!
B: Mad for the bite. Cuddles on the pot.
A: A very washy splinter.
B: All blood and mowing.
A: Here’s to spray in the Ming!
B: Sadsome glummer! ‘Ware fell!
A: Low song!

| Language

A Late Edit

The screenplay for the 1962 war film The Longest Day was composed by an international team of writers to reflect the various nationalities that appear in the film. James Jones, who handled the Americans, had finished his work and was vacationing in Yugoslavia when producer Darryl Zanuck sent an urgent wire asking him to correct a small piece of late dialogue. “How much for it?” Jones asked. Zanuck answered “Fifteen thousand dollars.” Jones wrote, “Okay, shoot.”

The line, which had been written by an Englishman, was “I can’t eat that bloody old box of tunny fish.”

Jones changed this to “I can’t stand this damned old tuna fish.”

In The Literary Life and Other Curiosities, Robert Hendrickson calls this the highest word rate ever paid to a professional author. “The chore of deleting two words and changing four words came to $2,500 a word.”

| Entertainment · Language

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