Greg Ross's Blog, page 3

Lament

Letter to the Times, March 10, 1995:

Sir,

There doesn’t seem very much left for us agnostics not to believe in.

Yours faithfully,

Richard Crawford

(But Graham Chapman said, “There’s really nothing an agnostic can’t do if he really doesn’t know whether he believes in anything or not.”)

Two Solutions

[O]ur self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus,

Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.

— William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

Constitution

A sobering problem from Gerald Lynton Kaufman’s Book of Modern Puzzles, 1954:

If a GLEEPER is as long as two PLONTHS and a half-GLEEPER, and a BLAHMIE is as long as two GLEEPERS and a half-BLAHMIE, and a POOSTER is as long as two BLAHMIES and a half-POOSTER, then how many PLONTHS long is a half-POOSTER?

“It may help you to make a sketch.”

Four PLONTHS make a GLEEPER, four GLEEPERS make a BLAHMIE, and four BLAHMIES make a POOSTER. So half a POOSTER is 32 PLONTHS.

Suggestion

As to your method of work, I have a single bit of advice, which I give with the earnest conviction of its paramount influence in any success which may have attended my efforts in life — Take no thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition. That was a singular but very wise answer which Cromwell gave to Bellevire — ‘No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going,’ and there is much truth in it. The student who is worrying about his future, anxious over the examinations, doubting his fitness for the profession, is certain not to do so well as the man who cares for nothing but the matter in hand, and who knows not whither he is going!

— William Osler, advice to students, McGill College, 1899

Overspecialized Words

Some words become famous for their implausibly specific definitions:

ucalegon: a neighbor whose house is on fire
nosarian: one who argues that there is no limit to the possible largeness of a nose
undoctor: to make unlike a doctor

Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words, by Josefa Heifetz Byrne, collects examples ranging from atpatruus (“a great-grandfather’s grandfather’s brother”) to zumbooruk (“a small cannon fired from the back of a camel”). My own favorite is groak, “to watch people silently while they’re eating, hoping they will ask you to join them.”

Alas, most of these don’t appear in the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary. Accordingly, in 1981 Jeff Grant burrowed his way into the OED in a deliberate search for obscure words. When he reached the end of A he sent his 10 favorite finds to the British magazine Logophile:

acersecomic: one whose hair was never cut
acroteriasm: the act of cutting off the extreme parts of the body, when putrefied, with a saw
alerion: an eagle without beak or feet
all-flower-water: cow’s urine, as a remedy
ambilevous: left-handed on both sides
amphisbaenous: walking equally in opposite directions
andabatarian: struggling while blindfolded
anemocracy: government by wind
artolatry: the worship of bread
autocoprophagous: eating one’s own dung

“I have been working slowly through ‘B’ and so far my favourite is definitely ‘bangstry’, defined as ‘masterful violence’, an obsolete term that is surely overdue for a comeback.”

(From Word Ways, November 1981.)

Notice

First Impressions

In 1668, Charles II’s court was dominated by five high councillors rather than a single favorite, raising concerns of a threat to the throne’s authority.

It didn’t help that their names literally spelled CABAL: (left to right) the Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, the Earl of Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, the Lord Ashley, and the Duke of Lauderdale.

In fact the five were fractious and mistrustful, and the group broke up within a few years. But Lord Macaulay called them “the first germ of the present system of government by a Cabinet.”

In a Word

Image: Diego Delso

manducate
v. chew

congustable
adj. having a similar flavor

deturpation
n. a making foul

gazingstock
n. a thing gazed at with wonder

Beneath Seattle’s Pike Place Market is a 50-foot brick wall covered with used chewing gum. Begun in the 1990s, the wall now bears an estimated 180 pieces of gum per brick. In 2009 it was ranked second only to the Blarney Stone as the world’s germiest tourist attraction.

Washington state governor Jay Inslee called the “gum wall” his “favorite thing about Seattle you can’t find anywhere else,” but in fact Bubblegum Alley, in San Luis Obispo, Calif., is even bigger, at 70 feet long (below). Opponents call it offensive, but the Chamber of Commerce lists it as a “special attraction.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons

“Jealousy Is as Blind as Love”

Aphorisms from Austin O’Malley’s Keystones of Thought, 1914:

Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you.Education is only a ladder to gather fruit from the tree of knowledge, not the fruit itself.Humility is the sister of humor.Think what you have to say, and then don’t say it.Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage-stamp.A fallen lighthouse is more dangerous than a reef.The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.Comedy smiles from a neutral intellect; humor laughs from a favoring intellect.An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.The picturesque is the romantic seen.The worst miser is the learned man that will not write.To laugh at yourself is real life, never acting.Put your purse in your head and you will not be robbed.A critic at best is only a football coach.A gentleman seldom meets rude persons.It is yesterday that makes to-morrow so sad.

“A little learning striving to explain a great subject is like an attempt to light up a cathedral with a single taper, which does no more than to show for an instant one foolish face.”

“A Happy Retort”

I am told that a certain friend of mine, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, was of an extreme nimbleness, an agility which he could not well control. One day that grave and reverend personage, the Master of his college, happening to meet him, remonstrated with him thus: ‘Mr. Dash, I am sorry to say I never look out of my window but I see you jumping over those railings.’ Mr. Dash was equal to the emergency, for he respectfully replied, ‘And it is a curious fact, sir, that I never leap over those railings without seeing you looking out of that window.’

— Frederick Locker-Lampson, Patchwork, 1879