Bookmarks (195)

You see, when you learn to read you will be born again into another world and it is a pity to be born again so young. I should put off reading, if I were you. As soon as you learn to read you will not see anything again quite as it is. It will all the time be altered by what you have read...

In his Table Talk, W.H. Auden says that La Rochefoucauld “simply says what one has always known.” Robert Craft added, “Yes, but without him some of us would not have known that we knew.”

“Conjugated nouns,” offered by Ohio State University linguist Arnold M. Zwicky in Verbatim in 1975: I steal the keel. I stole the coal. I have stolen the colon. They choose the hues. They chose the hose. They have chosen the hosen. They mow the banks of the row. They mowed the banks of the road. They have mown the banks of the Rhone. I...

Dedication of P.G. Wodehouse’s 1926 book The Heart of a Goof: To My Daughter Leonora Without Whose Never-Failing Sympathy and Encouragement This Book Would Have Been Finished in Half the Time

Oh Lord, Thou knowest that I have lately purchased an estate in fee simple in Essex. I beseech Thee to preserve the two counties of Middlesex and Essex from fire and earthquakes; and as I have also a mortgage at Hertfordshire, I beg of Thee also to have an eye of compassion on that county, and for the rest of the counties, Thou may...

“Ingliz menuyu” presented to writer William Dalrymple at a family restaurant in Turkey in 1986: SOAP Ayas soap Turkish tripte soap Sheeps foot Macaront Water pies EATS FROM MEAT Deuner kepab with pi Kebap with green pe Kebap in paper Meat pide Kebap with mas patato Samall bits of meat grilled Almb chops VEGETABLES Meat in earthenware stev pot Stfue goreen pepper Stuffed squash...

Wikimedia user Tarquin points out that the natural rhythm of spoken language can be used to teach polyrhythms. Above: The phrase “cold cup of tea,” spoken naturally, approximates a rhythm of 2 against 3. Below: The phrase “what atrocious weather” approximates 4 against 3.

A gentleman walked up to another gentleman, who was standing before the fire in a Coffee Room, and immediately said, ‘I beg your pardon, Sir, but may I ask your name?’ ‘I am not in the habit, Sir,’ said the other man, ‘of giving my name to strangers, but, as you are so pertinacious, Sir, my name is Thompson, Sir.’ ‘Then, Mr. Thompson, Sir,’...

Remarkable names of real people, collected in the 1980s by John Train: Mac Aroni Cigar Stubbs Legitimate Jones Halibut Justa Fish Daphne Reader’s Digest Taione Halloween Buggage Eucalyptus Yoho Solomon Gemorah Asa Miner Carlos Restrepo Restrepo Restrepo de Restrepo Cranberry Turkey Breckenridge Jr. Demetrius Plick F.G. Vereneseneckockkrockoff Rev. Fountain Wetmore Rainwater Grecian T. Snooze July August September Lobelia Rugtwit Hildebiddle Tarantula Turner Theanderblast Mischgedeigle...

When James Cameron was serving as second unit director on Galaxy of Terror (1981), he was asked to film an insert of a severed arm that’s being eaten by maggots. The team made a fake arm, covered it with mealworms, lit the shot, and rolled the camera, but the mealworms didn’t move. “They looked completely inert,” Cameron said. “So I thought, well, what would...

If your nose is close to the grindstone And you hold it there long enough In time you’ll say there’s no such thing As brooks that babble and birds that sing These three will all your world compose Just you, the stone and your poor old nose. — “From a two hundred-year-old stone in a country cemetery,” quoted in Christina Foyle, So Much Wisdom,...

Two rhapsodies on the name of French philosopher Michel Onfray, by Basile Morin. In the chain ambigram above, the first name is transfigured (at some point) into the last. In the tessellation ambigram below, the two names appear simultaneously as figure and ground.

From Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, November 1950: (1/2)3 < (1/2)2. Taking the logarithm to the base 1/2 of each member of the above inequality, we write 3 log1/2(1/2) < 2 log1/2(1/2). But logbb = 1. Therefore 3 < 2.

Back in 2017 I wrote about the Feynman ciphers, three coded messages that had been presented as challenges to Richard Feynman in the 1950s. Feynman couldn’t crack them, and even at the time of my post only the first of the three had been decoded — it turned out to be a transposition of the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English. But...

Smith College mathematician Jim Henle published this retrograde analysis puzzle in the Mathematical Intelligencer in 2018 as part of an appreciation of Raymond Smullyan. “After many moves, the chessboard appears as above. What were the last two moves?”

Several claimants have been put forth as the originators of the modern tropical cyclone ‘naming’ system. Australian weather meteorologist, Clement L. Wragge, is one of the best-established holders of the title. … Most ingeniously, he gained a measure of personal revenge by christening some of the nastiest storms with politicians’ names such as Drake, Barton, and Deakin. Modern hurricane researcher Chris Landsea noted that,...

In 1900, Louis Philip Perew of Tonawanda, New York, built a “gigantic man” of wood, rubber, and metal that “walks, talks, runs, jumps, [and] rolls its eyes.” Standing 7 foot 5 in size 13 1/2 shoes and clothed in white duck, the nameless man “walked smoothly, and almost noiselessly” at an exhibition for the Strand, circling the hall twice without stopping. Perew was cagey...

In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles. The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.) Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading...

A Polish problem longlisted for the 19th International Mathematical Olympiad in Yugoslavia, July 1977: A room contains nine men. Among every three of them there are two who are mutually acquainted. Prove that four of them are mutually acquainted.

We have a strong intuition that it’s wrong to punish someone for a crime he hasn’t committed, but is this always the case? Algy, an Alaskan motorist, and Ben, a traffic policeman, both know reliably that Algy intends to speed on a remote, unpatrolled, but radar-surveyed highway at 10:31 tomorrow morning. They also know that, if this happens, police won’t be able to reach...

No, no; for my virginity, When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die: Behind the elms last night, cried Dick, Rose, were you not extremely sick? — Matthew Prior Time magazine called this perhaps the only naughty verse that can’t be bowdlerized. (While we’re at it: In 1680 John Wilmot published a poem about premature ejaculation.)

This 1904 comic by Gustave Verbeek (click to enlarge) is a sort of visual palindrome — the first six panels are presented conventionally, and then they’re displayed again in reverse order and upside down to compose the story’s second half. Even the written messages change their meaning: why big buns am mad u! becomes in pew we sung big hym, and so on. Only...

Two leaps the water from its race Made to the brook below, The first leap it was curving glass, The second bounding snow. — William Allingham

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain...

A problem by British puzzlist Hubert Phillips: In writing home about an examination, five schoolgirls each made one true statement and one untrue one. The relevant passages: Betty: Kitty was second in the examination. I was only third. Ethel: You’ll be glad to hear that I was top. Joan was second. Joan: I was third, and poor old Ethel was bottom. Kitty: I came...

It’s illegal to mispronounce Joliet. G.K. Chesterton left an unfinished poem titled Plakkopytrixphylisperadaulantiobatrix. Alms has no singular. The Spanish village Trasmoz has been cursed and excommunicated by the Catholic Church. “The wink was not our best invention.” — Ralph Hodgson An Irish riddle: Yonder he is through the stream, a man without a coat, a man without a belt, a man of hard slender...

vatic adj. relating to a prophet futurition n. future existence natalitial adj. of or relating to a person’s birth aporetic adj. inclined to raise objections In 2000, three sisters from Inverness bought a £1 million insurance policy to cover the cost of bringing up the infant Jesus Christ if one of them had a virgin birth. Simon Burgess, managing director of britishinsurance.com, told the...

Thou shalt have one God only; who Would be at the expense of two? No graven images may be Worshipped, except the currency; Swear not at all; for, for thy curse Thine enemy is none the worse: At church on Sunday to attend Will serve to keep the world thy friend: Honour thy parents; that is, all From whom advancement may befall; Thou shalt...

A puzzle from the November-December 1994 issue of Quantum: “If the brainteaser you solved before you solved this one was harder than the brainteaser you solved after you solved the brainteaser that you solved before you solved this one, was the brainteaser you solved before you solved this one harder than this one?”

In his 1985 commonplace book Michelangelo’s Snowman, George Herrick gives a notable mnemonic for the bones of the wrist: Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle (scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate) Two more, from the r/Anatomy subreddit:

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state? — Lord Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, July 5, 1821

In 1782, during a tour of Hampton Court, Hannah More encountered landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who compared his art to literary composition: ‘Now there‘ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a...

According to Frank M. Chapman’s Color Key to North American Birds (1912), the hooded warbler sings You must come to the woods, or you won’t see me.

Between 1741 and 1760, when a baby was left at London’s Foundling Hospital, the staff encouraged the mother to provide some token that could be used as an identifying record — a note, a letter, or some other small object. Usually a piece of fabric was provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing, and these were attached to registration forms and...

A maze by Eric Fisk. Following the arrows, find a path that leads away from the star and back to it.

Ohm’s law states that V = IR, where V is the voltage measured across a conductor, I is the current through the conductor, and R is the conductor’s resistance. In the image mnemonic at left (easily remembered by the word “viral”), covering any of the unknowns gives the formula in terms of the remaining parameters: V = IR, I = V/R, R = V/I....

In Venice, on a small peninsula formed by the meeting of two canals, stands the church of Santa Maria della Salute, bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Further out stand statues of Atlas and Fortune. And on the very tip of the point there used to stand a solitary cast-iron lamppost, on whose base was inscribed the legend FONDERIA DI FERRO IN VENEZIA...

“A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.” — Walter Bagehot

Proverbs from around the world: “Opportunities come but do not linger.” — Nepalese “If you buy what you don’t need, you steal from yourself.” — Swedish “Happy nations have no history.” — Belgian “An old error has more friends than a new truth.” — Danish “Nothing is difficult if you’re used to it.” — Indonesian “The one being carried does not realize how far...

The Chief Defect of Henry King Was chewing little bits of String. At last he swallowed some which tied Itself in ugly Knots inside. Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, “There is no Cure for this Disease. “Henry will very soon be dead.” His Parents stood about his Bed Lamenting...

Writing in the Wall Street Journal about long sentences in literature, Laurie Winer offered her thoughts in a single sentence of 854 words: In order to credit William Faulkner — as the Guinness Book of World Records does — with the longest sentence in literature, one must include, when counting the words in Faulkner’s erratically punctuated, loosely defined ‘sentences,’ lengthy italicized passages that echo...

On hearing that Watership Down was a novel about rabbits written by a civil servant, Craig Brown wrote, “I would rather read a novel about civil servants written by a rabbit.”

I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept, Till I came to the cage where the Monster was kept. There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon, Rigid and smiling, lay … Mrs. RAVOON! I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun And ’twas midday at least ere my journey was done; But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,...

“Lady Dillon told Sir F. Chantrey that English women were more buxom than Italian women. The delicate way she put it was, ‘you will find that Italian women can sit much closer to a wall than English.'” — George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002

A surprising detail from Duke Ellington’s childhood, from his 1973 autobiography Music Is My Mistress: There were many open lots around Washington then, and we used to play baseball at an old tennis court on Sixteenth Street. President Roosevelt would come by on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play. When he got ready to go, he would wave and we would...

An illusion by University of Texas engineer David Novick: All the spheres have the same light-brown base color (RGB 255,188,144). The intervening foreground stripes seem to impart different hues. See this Twitter thread for the same image with the foreground stripes removed.

Have the love and fear of God ever before thine eyes; God confirm your faith in Christ and that you may live accordingly, Je vous recommende a Dieu. If you meet with any pretty insects of any kind keep them in a box. — Sir Thomas Browne, letter to his son, 1661

“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” — Voltaire “It has been said that this Minister [the Lord Privy Seal] is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal.” — Sydney D. Bailey “Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” — Ernie Kovacs