Darren Rigby writes: "I found the anecdote in What Is The Name Of This Book?, and [Smullyan] seems to suggest that it predates him. He also tells the story about Norbert Wiener, not John von Neumann, so you're probably safe. (It's part 228 in that book, if you'd care to check.)" Thanks much for checking […]
Little-girl jokes form a small genre unto themselves. I've always heard these two told about little girls, for some reason, rather than little boys... A prisoner was released on parole after a twenty-year sentence. Elated, he ran down the street yelling, "I'm free! I'm free!" A little girl standing nearby replied, "That's nothing; I'm four." […]
I had already mentioned Roy G. Biv in another column. Oops. I ought to check the index before writing. Maybe I need a mnemonic for remembering what I've written about. Pierre Abbat mentions a recursive acronym he's seen on bumper stickers: "BASS, which stands for Bass Anglers Sportsman Society." Several people wrote in to fill […]
Recall from an earlier column that an initialism is an acronym if it forms a pronounceable word. It's not always obvious, though, what abbreviations are pronounceable. Take "IITYWYBAD?", for instance, a term displayed on a sign in a diner in The Grapes of Wrath. You certainly wouldn't want to have to say each letter, but […]
Elliott points out a linguistic error I made (where C stands for Consonant and V stands for Vowel): The katakana and hiragana aren't quite syllabaries. Each symbol stands not for a syllable, but for part of a syllable called a mora (Latin for "delay"). A mora is famously defined by James McCawley as "that which […]
Refrigerators. Refrigerators are cold. Refrigerators. —unknown In Japanese, two of the character sets are syllabaries, with a single symbol for each syllable found in the language. I always figured that had something to do with the origin of haiku, the unrhymed verse form consisting of three lines, with five syllables in the first and third […]
"...it is a bad method, to start from words to define things..." —Ferdinand de Saussure, as quoted by Ogden and Richards Penny: The gostak distims the doshes. Quentin: What's a gostak? Penny: That's what distims the doshes. Quentin: What's distimming? Penny: It's what the gostak does to the doshes. Quentin: Okay, but what are doshes? […]
(Unfortunately, this is another column best viewed in browsers that support tables. Apologies to lynx users.) The fugue, as a musical form, is looser than the canon; less canonical, one might say. The following piece is meant to be spoken aloud in parallel, in two voices; each line on the left is spoken in synch […]
(Note that the former GFP FAQ has moved to a new URL and has become the Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ, and John Chao is now named John Williams.) My idea of including reader-comments pages for my columns came originally from Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, collecting his columns from Scientific American, in which he includes a "Post […]
There are too many schools of thought on the matter to list (he said, beginning in media res), but here are some of the most common: Those who believe that "he" remains a gender-neutral pronoun and should be used in all cases where the subject's gender is not specifically known to be female. (With "one" […]