Howard W. Bergerson devised these:
As in a word square, the “columns” in each sum are identical with the “rows.”
12/07/2021 UPDATE: Reader James Foster finds that 20 such squares are possible. (Thanks, James.)
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.
Frugal
In 1884, zoologist William Hay Caldwell sent a historic cable from Australia to his colleagues at the British Association for the Advancement of Science:
MONOTREMES OVIPAROUS, OVUM MEROBLASTIC
In four words this manages to proclaim that the platypus lays eggs and that the early stages of its embryo formation resemble those seen in birds and reptiles rather than mammals.
His and Hers
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print — I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.
… A tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female — tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it — for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
— Mark Twain (from A Tramp Abroad)
Miniature
If there were only two men in the world, how would they get on? They would help one another, harm one another, flatter one another, slander one another, fight one another, make it up; they could neither live together nor do without one another. They would act just as all men do today. They possess the gift of reason — yes — but they also possess the gift of instinct; and they will feel, and reason, and act always as nature has destined them to do.
— Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764
Kakuro
This logic puzzle is the numerical equivalent of a crossword. Each white cell in the diagram is to be filled with a digit from the range 1-9. The sum of each string of digits must match the “clue” given in the diagram. For example, the clue 29 above means that the four digits to its right must sum to that total. No digit may be duplicated within any entry. Can you complete the diagram?
Still Life
The programming language efghij is literally object-oriented — its logic is expressed by arranging ordinary items in meaningful tableaus:
In this example, the tray and the cutting board constitute code blocks. The oblong plate, however, has a clothes peg on it, which expresses a for loop. The fork is a local variable. The fork variable is initialized to 1 within the for loop’s initial-value expression. The sauce with the rubber band indicates that the number of iterations is equal to the function’s argument. The stuff on the cutting board is the loop body. Using a stapler, the fork is multiplied by the sauce and the result assigned to the fork using a drinking glass. A hammer decrements the sauce, which demonstrates that the function’s parameter can be used as a local variable too. Finally, the toilet roll indicates that the return value is the final value of the fork.
That produces a factorial. The program below outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” — it’s just a pillow bearing a piece of paper on which those words are written.
A Bouquet
A surprising number of flowers are named for people:
- begonia: after Michel Bégon, a former governor of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)
- camellia: after Jesuit botanist Georg Joseph Kamel
- dahlia: after Anders Dahl, a student of Carl Linnaeus
- forsythia: after Scottish botanist William Forsyth
- fuchsia: after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs
- gardenia: after Scottish naturalist Alexander Garden
- magnolia: after French botanist Pierre Magnol
- poinsettia: after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, who is credited with bringing the flower to the United States
- wisteria: after American physician Caspar Wistar
- zinnia: after German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn
The ackee fruit of Jamaica is named Blighia sapida after William Bligh, who discovered it in his travels after the mutiny on HMS Bounty.
(Via Maxwell W. Nurnberg, Wonders in Words, 1968.)
Impostors
“Plaindromes” are ordinary sentences that sound as if they ought to be palindromes:
Money-man I, an Adam, not even a doom.
Stella, Otis deified Satan and Edna.
An item? No, revolt took Natasha.
Eggbert, a wry dross needs seating, tea-grams.
Droop: an old fan? Needles fone a poor ode.
“Ungrams” are invalid anagrams:
Richard M. Nixon / Noxious charmer
Brooklyn Bridge / Good ride by lake
Both were invented by Jef Raskin of Cupertino, California (from the August 2010 issue of Word Ways).
Bad Stanzas
From William Wordsworth, “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”:
Of waistcoats Harry has no lack,
Good duffle grey, and flannel fine;
He has a blanket on his back,
And coats enough to smother nine.
From Charles Wesley, “On the Sight of a Corpse”:
Ah lovely appearance of Death!
What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare.
From Richard Le Gallienne, “Beauty Accurst”:
The sleepy kine move round me in desire
And press their oozy lips upon my hair,
Toads kiss my feet and creatures of the mire,
The snails will leave their shells to watch me there.
From John Scott of Amwell, “To a Friend, Apprehensive of Declining Friendship”:
Too much in man’s imperfect state
Mistake produces useless pain.–
Methinks, of friendship’s frequent fate
I hear my Frogley’s voice complain.
From Isaac Watts, “On the Sudden Death of Mrs. Mary Peacock”:
Hark! she bids all her friends adieu;
Some angel calls her to the spheres;
Our eyes the radiant saint pursue
Through liquid telescopes of tears.
In The Stuffed Owl, D. B. Wyndham Lewis quotes this anonymous verse:
I always knew what sort of weather
We were going to have,
For Cynthia never wore her feather
When the weather would be bad.
But when the days were warm and bright
Cynthia wore a feather,
Sometimes black and sometimes white,
The colour doesn’t count whatever.