"Language only works when two or more people agree that it does."
—Geof Huth

"It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government!'  The word, I expect, frightens people.  It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Here's a guessing game. How many pages did a reader make it through Metaphysics of the Supernatural as Illustrated by Decartes before scrawling an expletive in the margin? There are 65 pages, so your guess should be from 1 to 65.

To reveal the bad word in question as well as the correct page number, click the image below.

Is our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary a sham?  Australian secondhand book dealers Huc & Gabet discovered our tome amid Latin and Yiddish dictionaries (we approve), then asked a bookseller and a scientist (who had never seen our book) if such a dictionary must be a sham.  Here's the full report.

We sure do hope their puzzling definition of "dictionary" doesn't reach the ears of Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, since he read the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover, for enjoyment!  (Who'd've thunk it?)

But seriously, we're glad all the recent natural disasters in Australia haven't distracted from the really important issues.

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Mike responds:


June writes:

Allan elucidates:

June adds:

Jeff writes:

Here's a charming reference to a one-letter word in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight:

Poet Bob Grumman [in a suddenly missing blog post] uses the subject of one-letter words as an example of a "knowleplex," defined as a "reasonably coherent unified knowledge, practice, use and understanding of some subject."  There are five kinds of knowleplexes; which would you guess describes our own dictionary of one-letter words?

1. Academically-Approved Knowleplexes (by 90% of academics)

2. Academically-Tolerated Knowleplexes (insufficient data to approve or disapprove)

3. Academically-Unexamined Knowleplexes (too trivial)

4. Academically-Disapproved Knowleplexes (by 90% of academics)

5. Academically-Denounced Knowleplexes (considered a significant danger to right thinking)

From our Magic Words outpost:

Our intriguing magician friend Chris Philpott posed an interesting question about the preponderance of the two most popular magic words:


Chris, there are actually two very different answers to your question about abracadabra's surge in the 1920s.

Here's our first answer:  What we see when presented with a chart comparing word density over time from the Google Books scanspace is both something and nothing at all.  It's certainly something because we can perceive it, i.e. the charts dazzle us with their jagged edges and numerous nodes, suggesting the compilation of many data.  However, the trends that they argue are circular, based as they are only upon the tiny subset of books which Google has scanned from the periods under consideration.  If we had it on reliable word that Google had scanned, say, 95% of all extant publications, we should still consider word density measurements statistically insignificant considering that the missing 5% might contain 95% of the contemporary appearances of "abracadabra" in print.  Moreover, Google cannot estimate the readership of its catalog, which would be necessary to make any evaluative claims about the familiarity of a word or phrase in common culture or parlance, which is really what the word density charts are attempting to demonstrate.  Words used by authors in printed publications which survived until 2010 are not, by themselves, particularly significant.  The field of statistics is famous for its bold sleights of hand.  Most any contention can be illustrated by a sufficiently culled data set and evaluative methodology.  Google's scanned word data are of course too fun not to keep playing with, but we must always bear in mind their inherent balderdash.

Here's our second answer:  The rise of "abracadabra" in 1920s is the exhalation of a meme's biorhythm.  Decades later, the "wizard" meme began its exhalation, and J.K. Rowling rode the wave.  We can't even say that Rowling buoyed the wave -- she is merely part and parcel of a grand expansion cycle.

Chris responds:


Indeed, Chris, one definition of "meme" is an expression that can be copycatted.  (The Greek root is mimema:  that which can be mimicked or imitated).  Without discounting Rowling's achievements, let's remember that she didn't coin the word "wizard"; it was already a charming Briticism for "excellent."  Just as the common cold spreads one handshake at a time (Richard Dawkins has unsavorily called memes "viruses of the mind"), human culture spawns.  Rowling, bless her heart, is simply one node of the complex informational network that enables the "wizard" meme to spread and thrive.

From our Magic Words outpost:

We're honored to have our insights into "hocus pocus" referenced in Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller.  The chapter in question is Marco Deseriis' "Text Virus."

When in Greeceⁱ

by Jeff Hawkins

Among the more provocative questions debated aboveⁱⁱ the water cooler this week, "self-reincarnationⁱⁱⁱ, huh^iv?" generated more than its fair share of interest by adherents and passersby alike. While the answer to the question may seem, at first, to require an ex parte^v knowledge of the botanical sciences^vi, a more direct solution can be obtained by first asking how many lives^vii might be crammed into the average cat^viii, then dividing the result by a half dozen^ix of the udder^x. This gives mu, which we immediately recognize as the plaintive^xi feline utterance used to summon the butler, Yeats^xii, so that he might refill the vacant cream dishes left on the floor by the careless hand.

Even if those dishes had been blue^xiii, the very idea of replicating lives on the fly^xiv begs yet another question^xv, then one more: Why cats? Why cats?^xvi While the rest of us muddle along, dodging sparks^xvii thrown from the axle of the cosmic wheel as it spins, half greased^xviii, toward the window where billions are served^xix, the cat has only to wish itself a new itinerary, and providence^xx responds.

Mere^xxi coincidence? Perhaps. I do not claim to understand Greek^xxii.

 

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ⁱ Initially a play on "When in Rome," the "Greece" in question will play on fast-food "grease" by the end of the piece.

ⁱⁱ The water in the cooler has evaporated into a "word cloud."

ⁱⁱⁱ This is a play on "self-recursion," a form of infinite nesting (not to be confused with "infinite empty nesting," referring to revitalized marriages when the kids leave home).

^iv It's no coincidence that "huh" is a palindrome; palindromes are common in peptide sequences, meaning that human lives loop in the very strands of the DNA.

^v i.e., judicious partying.

^vi This is the "pot" calling the Grecian Urn black.

^vii The rhetorical answer is, of course, nine.

^viii The average cat crams 56 prey animals into its mouth each year (24 rodents, 15 birds, and 17 lizards).

^ix Why divide nine lives by six? Mathematically speaking, six is nine upside down.

^x Hawkins will milk some rich wit with this "udder." The bovine allusion will yield "mu," the famous Zen answer to whether or not a dog has Buddha-nature, even as it echoes "the cat's meow" (synonymous to "the cat's pajamas"). "Udder" also sets up a pig-Latin conjugation: udder/utterance/butler.

^xi "Plaintive" echoes the mournful "plaintiff" alluded to the judge's ex parte order.

^xii It's little known that William Butler, Yeats earned the comma before his surname while sailing to Byzantium.

^xiii "No substitutions" is the common policy on a "blue-plate special."

^xiv This is the fly attracted to the leftovers on the blue plate.

^xv "Begging the question" is a form of circular reasoning, though don't say that within hearing distance of Aristotle's premises.

^xvi Indeed, the word "caterwaul" is of imitative origin.

^xvii "Dodging sparks" is an echo of "dogs in parks," chasing their tails in pursuit of Buddha-nature.

^xviii The original aphorism was: "The squeaky cosmic wheel gets the oil."

^xix This seeming reference to a McDonald's drive-thru is actually an ancient metaphor for the vaginal canal. However, any allusion to sexual lubrication is product of the reader's corrupted mind.

^xx Providence, as in Providence, Rhode Island, a clever allusion to the Greek island of Rhodes.

^xxi This echo of the cat's meow is nearly the omega word.

^xxii The joke, of course, is that "coincidence" is of medieval Latin origin, not Greek.

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From our Magic Words outpost:

We're delighted to be twice-referenced in Varla Ventura's Beyond Bizarre, an entertaining collection of stranger-than-fiction stories and trivia.  In the chapter on famous magicians, hoaxes, and feats of human endurance, see our explanation of why "open sesame" is the most straightforward magical key.

"A creed is an ossified metaphor." —The Philistine, Dec. 1904

"How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!" (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory, revised edition, 1967, p. 13).

"Not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.  In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me.  It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors." —Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"Remove yourself from the word. Depend on the letter, depend on the phoneme. It is the particles that matter. Particulate." —Geof Huth

Do blurbs sell books?  With a blurb like this one, how could Prof. Oddfellow refuse?


(That's Prof. Oddfellow's catnip mouse enjoying the Swiss cheese on the dust jacket.  Thanks in a roundabout way to Hilary's mom for the tip!)

William Keckler quips:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Types of Keyboards

by William Keckler

You have to start with the keyboard with individual letters.  Then you graduate to the keyboard with concepts.  Later, they give you this horrifying keyboard with the concepts grouped into ethical, jurisprudential, scientific and historic categories.  You are horrified to find—to give just one example—"mass murder" and "the common good" sharing a single key.  "Progress" and "calculated limited extinctions" are also key-mates.

And they tell you that's not even your final keyboard.

Graduation still looms.  All the elders are getting excited for you.

The most horrible betrayal arrives, disguised as a graduation present.