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Letters in the Sky In 1933, a German ship cruising in the Baltic sea projected letters onto the clouds in the night sky using a giant searchlight. Here is a dramatic photo. The same year, airplanes in the USA were equipped with "player piano" rolls which controlled lights to form huge letters across the wings. Speaking of letters in the sky, I love this quotation from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read, by the way): The only live, bright things were the stars. Their constellations looked to Drawlight like gigantic, glittering letters—letters in an unknown alphabet. For all he knew the magician had formed the stars into these letters and used them to write a spell against him.
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Give an Inch, Take a MileAt Inch Beach (on the Dingle peninsula), the water recedes a mile at low tide. "In what way are an inch and a mile alike?" is a question in a neuropsychological test (from this compendium). In poetry, an inch of verse can traverse miles. Praising T.S. Eliot, Robert Francis wrote: He moved from the Mississippi to the Thames
and we moved with him a few miles or inches.
Speaking of the Thames, the scale of this map of London from 1786 is one inch to a mile. It has been said that at "Mile Zero" of the Oregon Coast, nearly every inch is scenic ( Portland Hikes by Art Bernstein and Andrew Jackman). "Victory is not won in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later win a little more." —Louis L'Amour Similarly, "Battle is a matter of inches, not miles. The inches that separate a man from his enemy." —Bernard Cornwell, Excalibur: A Novel of ArthurThe immortal inchworm vs. the infinitely stretchy rubber band: An inchworm is at one end of an infinitely stretchy mile-long rubber band. He walks an inch. The rubber band is then stretched to two miles. It stretches evenly along its entire length, so the inchworm has gotten a one-inch free ride, and is now two inches from the end. He walks another inch, and is now three inches from the end. The rubber band stretches another mile, to three miles long. He gets a 1 1/2 inch free ride out of this stretch. The pattern of walking an inch and stretching a mile repeats itself indefinitely. (a) Will the inchworm ever reach the other end? Prove your answer. Hint: Use the asymptotic bounds on harmonic series. (b) Will the inchworm ever reach the other end if, instead of increasing by a mile, the rubber band doubles in length at each step? Prove your answer. —via this test (.pdf) from an Analysis of Algorithms class. However, " a mile wide and an inch deep" involves a different sort of math. Ultimately, "The very idea that space is separated by inches, miles, light-years,
and parsecs is but an illusion, as ephemeral as ephemeral as the
shadows in Plato's cave." —Win Wenger, The Einstein Factor
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Ann Althouse says: "I'm fascinated by the almost legible. Have you ever imagined there were words somewhere that you could almost read?" She offers this intriguing illustration. This sign has more distinct letters but is equally illegible. "A sky full of stars arranged itself in an unreadable tombstone motto." —Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever. Speaking of epitaphs in the sky, the Orion Correlation Theory proposes a relationship between the Egyptian pyramids of Giza and the alignment of stars in the Orion constellation. Here's a big graphic depicting the correlation.
More mundane but equally mysterious, here's an unreadable funeral marker inside a rock-lined grave in Texas. "In places the ink was faded, the script unreadable. It appeared to be a poem." —Kelly Jones, The Seventh UnicornHere's an unreadable 18-line poem, scrawled by Mark W. "He was writing tiny, illegible doodles on big sheets of paper years before anyone else." —Edmund White, My LivesHere's an unreadable page of doodles, with text from an off-world language. "Concrete poems are often close to graphic art and may be unreadable in a conventional way." —Stephen Matterson and Darryl Jones, Studying PoetryHere's unreadable text art, by a program that encodes text as binary and represents the resulting code visually.
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"I knew that the network had determined that my program was going over the heads of Middle America, and, as I waited alone in the Vice President's office, I pondered my inevitable cancellation. Finally, I heard the door creak open with an ominous 'peorrrrrrrria.'"
—Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.
(Literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt's plays, stories, essays, letters, parodies, wordplay, witticisms and miscellaneous tomfoolery can be found at Monkeys 1, Typewriters 0. Here you'll encounter frivolous, urbane writings about symbolic yams, pigs in bikinis, donut costumes, vacationing pikas, nonexistent movies, cross-continental peppermills, and other compelling subjects.)
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Wilfred Funk once collected a list of "the most beautiful words in
English." The list includes such words as dawn, tranquil, hush, golden,
halcyon, camellia, myrrh, jonquil, lullaby, and melody. Pictured below
are four more words from Funk's list. Can you guess them?
The answer: Top left: TENDRIL. Top right: ANEMONE. Bottom left: FAWN. Bottom right: CHALICE. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
There are lots more lists of beautiful (and not so beautiful) English words at A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia.
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While referencing my computer's built in dictionary, I encountered a bit of editorializing that I enjoyed:
The spelling baited breath instead of bated breath is a common mistake that, in addition to perpetuating a
cliché, evokes a distasteful image.
A distasteful image was indeed evoked, and it inspired what I believe is my first-ever limerick (unless I wrote any as a child).
The fisherman's breath was bated;
On thin ice had he skated.
The cause of concern:
a perm (not a worm).
His wife said she'd have his ass crated.
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Spammers from Oz
Ken Clinger
shared the following text about magic spectacles that reveal a person's
character by illuminating letters of the alphabet on the
forehead. Ken found this text in a spam message:
Will you please wear these spectacles
for a few moments? The king at once put them on. They are called
Character Markers, continued the boy, because the lenses catch and
concentrate the character vibrations radiating from every human
individual and reflect the true character of the person upon his
forehead. If a letter 'G' appears, you may be sure his
disposition is good; if his forehead is marked with an 'E' his
character is evil, and you must beware of treachery.
The passage is actually from something entitled:
The Master Key
An Electrical Fairy Tale
Founded Upon The Mysteries Of Electricity
And The Optimism Of Its Devotees. It Was
Written For Boys, But Others May Read It
by [noneother than] L. Frank Baum
The story is available for online reading here. |
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Forgot the alphabet, — my language's Greek to me!
— Vladimir Vysotsky, "About a Mental Clinic" (translated by Andrey Kneller) |
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Jonathan Caws-Elwitt Begs the Question:
If bandages are sterile, where do those little Band-Aids come from?
Do Australian clocks go 'tock tick'?
When the bus doesn't stop at the bus stop, is it still a bus stop?
If the name "Mannering" is really spelled "Mainwaring", then what about the auxiliary waring?
Literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt's plays, stories, essays,
letters, parodies, wordplay, witticisms and miscellaneous tomfoolery
can be found at Monkeys 1, Typewriters 0.
Here you'll encounter frivolous, urbane writings about symbolic yams,
pigs in bikinis, donut costumes, vacationing pikas, nonexistent movies,
cross-continental peppermills, and other compelling subjects.
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"All the thoughts are swirling about in a bowl of Cheerios,
spelling millions of one letter words with no punctuation to speak of ..."
—Max, from his MySpace blog. |
Page 71 of 73
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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