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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