The Right Word

The Voynich Manuscript is "a mysterious illustrated book with incomprehensible contents.  It is thought to have been written between approximately 1450 and 1520 by an unknown author in an unidentified script and unintelligible language" (Wikipedia).  Every few years, another scientist holds a press conference to declare the book a "hoax."

The book (see high-resolution scans on flickr) is undoubtably an historical document, an artwork, and an insight into psychology (as the creator's brainstorm).  To call it a "hoax" seems so dismissive.  Indeed, it's like missing the forest for the trees.  Whether or not the document encodes specific meaning, it exists and has significance.  One is reminded of ancient petroglyphs, which could be a form of writing, or merely whimsical doodles/graffiti, but certainly "meaningful" and worthy of study (or at least appreciation).  I'm all for computer scientists and cryptographers, but these so-called explanations of the Voynich Manuscript tell more about the tunnel vision of those fields than they do about the manuscript itself.  And I thought only statisticians still cited statistical probabilities with a straight face, everyone else in the world having realized that statistics are, unfortunately, as useless as tomorrow's weather forecast!

Here's an excerpt from an article about how "the last semicolon gets the last laugh":


—The Middleweight of Punctuation Politics

I came across a reference to the film "I Escaped from the Gestapo" (1943), but I somehow misread the last word as "Geppetto" and thought the film was about Pinocchio running away from home.

Barry Foy has created a pioneering culinary reference work consisting entirely
of lies.  He explains:


Here's an hilarious sample from Foy's book:

The nifty Farkleberries "Chicago Style Culture Warbloggery" site (with its marvelous Aztec Ouroboros logo) had this to say about my all-vowel and no-vowel dictionaries:

Last weekend I reorganized my bookcase according to spine color.  The colors move in a zig-zag pattern, from top left (brown) to top right (red), then right to left (red to orange and yellow), and so on.  My friend Ken cautioned me not to "judge a book by its color."

Literary Lettuce Leaves

I stumbled across someone described as "a literary lettuce-leaf."  It is a withering put down, presumably; a "literary artichoke" wouldn't sound so limp and would offer a more substantial heart within.  And yet, perhaps enchanted by the alliteration, I find myself intrigued by the idea of a literary lettuce leaf.

Here's a lovely Lebanese folk song concerning a lettuce leaf:


In a poem by Ricardo Sternberg, a lettuce leaf becomes the shroud of an expired mouse.

In Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito, mayonnaise cloaks a lettuce leaf like a magician's handkerchief, restoring the leaf's capacity to delight:


Fun fact: "In medieval belief, there were many ways a demon could enter the body, sometimes via so seemingly innocuous a vehicle as an unblessed lettuce leaf eaten by a careless nun." —Hilaire Kallendorf, Exorcism and Its Texts

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):

Give an Inch, Take a Mile

At 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:


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 Arthur

The immortal inchworm vs. the infinitely stretchy rubber band:


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

A councilman in New York City has asked for a "symbolic moratorium on the use of the n-word."  Columnist Charles Lee is skeptical of legislating language.  He says, "After the n-word, politicians could eradicate the infamous f-word and mark a plethora of other 'one-letter' words on their linguistic hit lists."  He concludes, "The n-word is not the only offensive word.  Perhaps we can attribute this to the fact that language is, to a certain extent, untamable.  Yet surely we can attribute it to the illimitable freedom of speech upon which this country was established."

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.



"A sky full of stars arranged itself in an unreadable tombstone motto."
—Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever. 


"In places the ink was faded, the script unreadable.  It appeared to be a poem."
—Kelly Jones, The Seventh Unicorn



"He was writing tiny, illegible doodles on big sheets of paper years before anyone else."
—Edmund White, My Lives



"Concrete poems are often close to graphic art and may be unreadable in a conventional way."
—Stephen Matterson and Darryl Jones, Studying Poetry

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

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.

While referencing my computer's built in dictionary, I encountered a bit of editorializing that I enjoyed:


A distasteful image was indeed evoked, and it inspired what I believe is my first-ever limerick (unless I wrote any as a child).

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:


The passage is actually from something entitled:


The story is available for online reading here.

Check out this funny bio:

Forgot the alphabet, — my language's Greek to me!
—Vladimir Vysotsky, "About a Mental Clinic" (translated by Andrey Kneller)

"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.

“Thousand-eyed, like snow or God — the hawk of airborne hordes advancing toward the perpetual countries of a single letter alphabet” —Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “Possible Indications,” translated by Genya Turovsky

“What other language has so many possibilities for one letter words?” —Ed vd Meulen, “American English 1”