Dawkins, Richard. The ancestor's tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Theories of the origin of life need to account for both heredity and metabolism, but some writers have mistaken the priority. They have sought a theory of metabolism's spontaneous origin, and somehow hoped that heredity would follow, like other useful devices. But heredity, as we shall see, is not to be thought of as a useful device. Heredity has to be first on the scene because, before heredity, usefulness itself has no meaning. Without heredity, and hence natural selection, there would have been nothing to be useful for. The very idea of usefulness cannot begin until the natural selection of hereditary information does.
Booth, Wayne. Now don't try to reason with me. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
The worst thing that can happen to a man, Socrates says, is to become a misologist, a hater of the logos, a hater of the word of truth, a man who has lost his faith in human reason.
Dyson, Freeman. From Eros to Gaia. London: Penguin Books, 1993.
The generation that is now young has three good reasons for turning away from science. Science is presented to our young people as a rigid and authoritarian discipline, tied to mercenary and utilitarian ends, and tainted by its association with weapons of mass murder. These three reasons for hating science are real and serious. It is useless to pretend to our children that these three ugly faces of science do not exist. Children will not be fooled. If we try to fool them, they will turn away from science even more. Our task as educators is to show our children that science is a hexagonal mountain with six faces, with three beautiful faces in addition to the three ugly faces. The three beautiful faces of science are science as subversion of authority, science as an art form, and science as an international club. The way to attract young people into science is to show them all six faces and give them freedom to explore the beautiful and the ugly as they please.
Fussell, Paul. The Boy Scout Handbook and other observations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
The author reads the review, at first with disbelief, then, as he realizes others will read it too, with passion. Instead of sleeping on the matter a week or two, or better, simply getting on with his next book, he rushes to his typewriter and vents his sense of injured merit in five hundred or a thousand words. He is too impatient to revise, and he certainly feels no impulse to keep his peace nine years. Rage propels him out to the mailbox, and for the next few weeks rage causes him to tap his foot and with knitted brows to make sudden little sideways movements of his head, incomprehensible to his friends, few of whom have seen the review. ... Finally there arrives a copy of the offending periodical, and in it is the author's letter of complaint. Only now it doesn't look the way it looked in the author's typewriter. It's not been altered at all by the editor, or even shortened. But now it reads as if some puling adolescent, cut from the high-school basketball team, has published a letter about how good he really is, and written it not very well. All the author's sarcastic rebuttals now seem both too broad and too lame, inviting the reader to regard him as an even greater ass and loser than before.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Gebstadter, Egbert B. Copper, Silver, Gold: an Indestructible Metallic Alloy. Perth: Acidic Books, 1979. A formidable hodge-podge, turgid and confused -- yet remarkably similar to the present work. Professor Gebstadter's Shandean digressions include some excellent examples of indirect self-reference. Of particular interest is a reference in its well-annotated bibliography to an isomorphic, but imaginary, book.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973.
Mr. Wilson is horrified by my ``instinct to take digs at great reputations.'' Well, it cannot be helped; Mr. Wilson must accept my instinct, and wait for the next crash. I refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views and academic traditions, as he wants me to be. What right has he to prevent me from finding mediocre and over-rated people like Balzac, Dostoevski, Sainte-Beuve, or Stendhal, that pet of all those who like their French plain? How much has Mr. Wilson enjoyed Mme. de Staël's novels? Has he ever studied Balzac's absurdities and Stendhal's clichés? Has he examined the melodramatic muddle and phony mysticism of Dostoevski? Can he really venerate that arch-vulgarian Sainte-Beuve? And why should I be forbidden to consider that Chaykovski's hideous and insulting libretto is not saved by a music whose cloying banalities have pursued me ever since I was a curly-haired boy in a velvet box?
Quine, W. V. Quiddities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1987.
There is a melancholy fantasy, propounded a century and more ago by the psychologist Theodor Fechner and taken up by Kurt Lasswitz, Theodor Wolff, Jorge Luís Borges, George Gamow, and Willy Ley, of a complete library. The library is strictly complete, boasting as it does all possible books within certain reasonable limits. ... The principle of accession is simple, if uneconomical: every combinatorially possible sequence of letters, punctuation, and spaces, up to the prescribed book length, uniformly bound in half calf. ...
The entire and ultimate truth about everything is printed in full in that library, after all, insofar as it can be put in words at all. The limited size of each volume is no restriction, for there is always another volume that takes up the tale -- any tale, true or false -- where any other volume leaves off. In seeking the truth we have no way of knowing which volume to pick up nor which to follow it with, but it is all right there. ...
Instead of admitting 500,000 occurrences of characters to each volume, we might settle for say seventeen. We have no longer to do with volumes, but with two-inch strips of text, and no call for half-calf bindings. In our two-character code the number of strings is 2^17, or 131,072. Getting a substantial account of anything will require extensive concatenation of our two-inch strips, and a re-use of strings here and there. But we have everything to work with.
The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash.
Russell, Bertrand. Unpopular essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of whose who think themselves pious -- for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: ``Oh, but you forget the good God.'' Apparently they conceive of the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes. This view strikes me as curious.
Smullyan, Raymond. This book needs no title: a budget of living paradoxes. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980.
Would you like to know the real reason I hope there is an afterlife? ... So I can then triumphantly say to all my skeptical friends, ``I told you so!''
I think it would be still funnier ... if the skeptics were the only ones to survive. I can then imagine all the skeptics together saying: ``Poor Raymond! Too bad he is not with us, gloating and telling us, `I told you so.' He sure did tell us so! If he hadn't, he would be here with us now!''
Twain, Mark. The complete humorous sketches and tales of Mark Twain. Edited and with an introduction by Charles Neider. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961.
The celebrated Bonetus's ``Observation No. 1'' seems to be a sufficient sample, all by itself, of what people used to have to stand any time between the creation of the world and the birth of your father and mine when they had the disastrous luck to get a ``Head-ach'':
I, being call'd, order'd Venesection in the Arms, the Application of Leeches to the Vessels of his Nostrils, Forehead, and Temples, as also to those behind his Ears; I likewise prescrib'd the Application of Cupping-glasses, with Scarification, to his Back: But notwithstanding these Precautions, he dy'd. If any Surgeon, skill'd in Arteriotomy, had been present, I should have also order'd that Operation.
Here was a person who was being bled in the arms, forehead, nostrils, back, temples, and behind the ears, yet the celebrated Bonetus was not satisfied, but wanted to open an artery ``with a View'' to insert a pump, probably. ``Notwithstanding these Precautions'' -- he dy'd. No art of speech could more quaintly convey this butcher's innocent surprise ...
I have given one ``Observation'' -- a single Head-ach case; but the celebrated Bonetus follows it with eleven more. Without enlarging upon the matter, I merely note this coincidence -- they all ``dy'd.'' Not one of these people got well; yet this obtuse hyena sets down every little gory detail of the several assassinations as complacently as if he imagined he was doing a useful and meritorious work in perpetuating the methods of his crimes. ``Observations,'' indeed! They are confessions.
Stallman, Richard M. Free software, free society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press, 2002.
The term ``free software'' is sometimes misunderstood -- it has nothing to do with price. It is about freedom. Here, therefore, is the definition of free software: a program is free software, for you, if:
You have the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
You have the freedom to modify the program to suit your needs. (To make this freedom effective in practice, you must have access to the source code, since making changes in a program without having the source code is exceedingly difficult.)
You have the freedom to redistribute copies, either gratis or for a fee.
You have the freedom to distribute modified versions of the program, so that the community can benefit from your improvements.
Axelrod, Robert. The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Four simple suggestions for how to do well in a durable iterated Prisoner's Dilemma:
- Don't be envious.
- Don't be the first to defect.
- Reciprocate both cooperation and defection.
- Don't be too clever.
Frank, Thomas, and Weiland, Matt, editors. Commodify your dissent: salvos from The Baffler. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Yes, postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Frank, Thomas. One market under God. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
Plenty of average Americans, having considerable personal experience with the way the corporation worked, could easily have made their own contributions to the national conversation about the nature of the ``business revolution.'' They could have pointed out that the most noticeable change that swept through the workplace of the late eighties and nineties was the diverging fortunes of top management and everyone else; that the workplace was becoming ever more arbitrary; that they increasingly worked under an omnipresent threat of instant termination; that regardless of how they toiled they seemed always to be losing ground -- and that during the same period CEOs and top management had virtually transcended the realm of work altogether, had achieved a sort of superhuman state from which they made oracular pronouncements and collected rewards on a scale beyond imagining. ...
But one of the things that made the ``business revolution'' so revolutionary was that, even during the hyper-populist nineties, such doubts were only rarely heard in the national arena. Only business could afford to run commercials on prime time, and in the nineties business seemed increasingly determined to use that advantage to share its thoughts on the nature of enterprise, of office life, of hierarchy, of multiculturalism, of globalization, of ``change.''
Gould, Stephen Jay. The mismeasure of man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981.
Binet declined to define and speculate upon the meaning of the score he assigned to each child. Intelligence, Binet proclaimed, is too complex to capture with a single number. This number, later called IQ, is only a rough empirical guide constructed for a limited, practical purpose ... Binet was too good a theoretician to fall into the logical error that John Stuart Mill had identified -- ``to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own.''
Levine, Rick; Locke, Christopher; Searls, Doc; and Weinberger, David. The cluetrain manifesto: the end of business as usual. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 2000.
The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.
Litman, Jessica. Digital copyright. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2001.
Copyright owners have the exclusive right to authorize public performance of their works. Most small businesses playing recorded music and many businesses playing television or radio, therefore, needed to buy a performing license to do so. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC -- all music performing rights societies who represent composers -- were delighted to sell performance licenses to any establishment that wished to play music. Licenses were cheap, a matter of a few hundred dollars per year. Nonetheless, because proprietors of small businesses found the well-settled rules incredible, dozens of them went to court to protect their supposed right to play music -- every year -- at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, because they couldn't believe that these rules were really the rules. And they always lost. Even so, the next year there were another dozen small business owners who were determined to litigate, and they lost too. Members of the general public commonly find copyright rules implausible, and simply disbelieve them.
Manchester, William. The glory and the dream. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.
By 1932, a third of a million children were out of school because of lack of funds. ... Chicago's debts to its teachers were more than 20 million dollars.
The story of the Chicago schools was a great Depression epic. Rather than see 500,000 children remain on the streets, the teachers hitchhiked to work, endured ``payless paydays'' -- by 1932 they had received checks in only five of the last thirteen months -- and accepted city scrip to be redeemed after the Depression, even though Chicago bankers would not accept it. Somehow the city found money to invest in its forthcoming World's Fair of 1933, when Sally Rand would gross $6,000 a week, but it turned a deaf ear to the Board of Education. A thousand teachers were dismissed outright. Those who remained taught on at immense personal sacrifice. Collectively the 1,400 teachers lost 759 homes. They borrowed $1,128,000 on their insurance policies and another $232,000 from loan sharks at annual interest rates of 42 percent, and although hungry themselves, they fed 11,000 pupils out of their thin pocketbooks.
Mitchell, Richard. Less than words can say. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1979.
A fluent command of English cannot exist as an isolated skill, a clever stunt. A person who speaks and writes his native tongue clearly and precisely does so because of many other abilities, and those other abilities themselves grow stronger through the fluent manipulation of language. The simple matter of being logical is a function of language. A million high school graduates capable of fluent English would be a million Americans capable of logical thought. What would we do with them?
Owen, David. None of the above: behind the myth of scholastic aptitude. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985.
Every SAT contains six sections. One of these, the ``experimental'' section, doesn't count toward students' scores. It's used by ETS to pretest items for future SATs ... Because hard items are harder to write than easy items, the experimental section is usually quite a bit tougher than the other sections of the SAT. It's also more likely to contain miskeyed, flawed, badly written, and ambiguous items, because the pretest is the screen ETS uses to filter out defective questions (roughly 40 percent of the items in any pretest are eliminated). ... John Katzman has a simple solution to this problem. He teaches his students how to find the experimental section. When they find it, they fill it out at random, thereby saving thirty minutes of anxiety and frustration. They simply put their heads down on their desks and rest until it's time to start on the next section.
Rauch, Jonathan. Kindly inquisitors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
I contend that these peculiar rules are two of the most successful social conventions which the human species has ever evolved.
First, the skeptical rule. If people follow it then no idea, however wise and insightful its proponent, can ever have any claim to be exempt from criticism by anyone, no matter how stupid and grubby-minded the critic. The skeptical rule is, No one gets the final say: you may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.
Second, the empirical rule. If people follow it in deciding who is right and who is wrong, then no one gets special say simply on the basis of who he happens to be. The empirical rule is, No one has personal authority: you may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.
Sagan, Carl. The demon-haunted world. New York: Random House, 1995.
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
Sokal, Alan, and Bricmont, Jean. Fashionable nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science. New York: Picador USA, 1998 (first published, as Impostures intellectuelles, by Editions Odile Jacob, 1997).
The story of this book begins with a hoax. For some years, we have been surprised and distressed by the intellectual trends in certain precincts of American academia. Vast sectors of the humanities and the social sciences seem to have adopted a philosophy that we shall call, for want of a better term, ``postmodernism'': an intellectual current characterized by the more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a ``narration'', a ``myth'' or a social construction among any others.
To respond to this phenomenon, one of us (Sokal) decided ... to submit to a fashionable American cultural-studies journal, Social Text, a parody of the type of work that has proliferated in recent years, to see whether they would publish it. The article, entitled ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'', is chock-full of absurdities and blatant non-sequiturs. In addition, it asserts an extreme form of cognitive relativism: after mocking the old-fashioned ``dogma'' that ``there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole'', it proclaims categorically that ``physical `reality', no less than social `reality', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct''. By a series of stunning leaps of logic, it arrives at the conclusion that ``the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone''. The rest is in the same vein.
Thomas, Lewis. Late night thoughts on listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. New York: The Viking Press, 1983.
The man on television, Sunday midday, middle-aged and solid, nice-looking chap, all the facts at his fingertips, more dependable looking than most high-school principals, is talking about civilian defense, his responsibility in Washington. It can make an enormous difference, he is saying. Instead of the outright death of eighty million American citizens in twenty minutes, he says, we can, by careful planning and practice, get that number down to only forty million ... Of course, he adds, they have the capacity to kill all two hundred and twenty million of us if they were to try real hard, but they know we can do the same to them. If the figure is only forty million this will deter them, not worth the trouble, not worth the risk. Eighty million would be another matter, we should guard ourselves against losing that many all at once, he says.
If I were sixteen or seventeen years old and had to listen to that, or read things like that, I would want to give up listening and reading. I would begin thinking up new kinds of sounds, different from any music heard before, and I would be twisting and turning to rid myself of human language.
Zinn, Howard. The Zinn reader: writings on disobedience and democracy. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.
In the face of the manifest unpredictability of social phenomena, all of history's excuses of war and preparations for war -- self-defence, national security, freedom, justice, stopping aggression -- can no longer be accepted. ... Massive violence, whether in war or internal upheaval, cannot be justified by any end, however noble, because no outcome is sure. Indeed, the most certain characteristic of any upheaval, like war or revolution, is its uncertainty. Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends, however desirable, are uncertain, and the means are horrible and certain, those means must not be employed.
Flew, Antony. God: a critical enquiry. London: Hutchinson & Company, 1966.
Gardner, Martin. The flight of Peter Fromm. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1973.
It is hard to realize that these enigmas were once such violent storm centers of controversy. They seem so comic when repeated now. Where did Cain get his wife? Did the sons of God actually marry the daughters of men as Genesis 6:2 so unambiguously asserts? Did the God of Israel really command his people to enter villages, massacre entire populations, and keep the virgin girls as slaves? Did Lot's wife become a pillar of salt, did the Red Sea divide, did the sun and moon stand still?
Hume, David. Dialogues concerning natural religion. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1947 (first published, 1779).
Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
Kahane, Howard. Logic and contemporary rhetoric: the use of reason in everyday life. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company; sixth edition, 1992.
Paine, Thomas. The age of Reason: being an investigation of true and fabulous theology. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1984 (reprint of editions of 1794 and 1795).
Russell, Bertrand. Why I am not a Christian: and other essays on religion and related subjects. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957.
There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence.
Twain, Mark. Letters from the earth. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time.
White, Andrew Dickson. A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1978 (reprint of first edition [1896]).
More and more it became difficult ... to reconcile the dimensions of Noah's ark with the space required for preserving all of [the species of animals], and the food of all sorts necessary for the sustenance, whether they were admitted by twos, as stated in one scriptural account, or by sevens, as stated in the other.
The inadequate size of the ark gave especial trouble. Origen had dealt with it by suggesting that the cubit was six times greater than had been supposed. Bede explained Noah's ability to complete so large a vessel by supposing that he worked upon it during a hundred years; and, as to the provision of food taken into it, he declared that there was no need of a supply for more than one day, since God could throw the animals into a deep sleep or otherwise miraculously make one day's supply sufficient.
Knuth, D. E. Surreal numbers. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1974.
In the beginning, everything was void, and J. H. W. H. Conway began to create numbers. ... And the first number was created from the void left set and the void right set. Conway called this number ``zero,'' and said that it shall be a sign to separate positive numbers from negative numbers. Conway proved that zero was less than or equal to zero, and he saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the day of zero.
Zimmerman, Philip. The official PGP user's guide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995 (or follow this link).
Today, if the government wants to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, it has to expend a certain amount of expense and labor to intercept and steam open and read paper mail and listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversation. This kind of labor-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale. It is only done in important cases when it seems worthwhile.
More and more of our private communications are being routed through electronic channels. Electronic mail is gradually replacing conventional paper mail. Email messages are just too easy to intercept and scan for interesting keywords. This can be done easily, routinely, automatically, and undetectably on a grand scale. International cablegrams are already scanned this way on a large scale by the National Security Agency.
Collingwood, R. G. The principles of art. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.
Let all such artists as understand one another, therefore plagiarize each other's work like men. Let each borrow his friends' best ideas, and try to improve on them. If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting it in the pages of an essay; let him re-write B's poems and publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with Y's this year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing it; not a sketch in Punch, but a full sized picture for next year's Academy. ... Or if he cannot improve on his friends' ideas, at least let him borrow them; it will do him good to try fitting them into works of his own, and it will be an advertisement for the creditor. An absurd suggestion? Well, I am only proposing that modern artists should treat each other as Greek dramatists or Renaissance painters or Elizabethan poets did. If any one thinks that the law of copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times could produce, I will not try to convert him.
Descartes, René. Rules for the direction of the mind. In Philosophical works of Descartes, translated by E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
It is the way of writers, whenever they have allowed themselves rashly and credulously to take up a position in any controverted matter, to try with the subtlest of arguments to compel us to go along with them. But when, on the contrary, they have happily come upon something certain and evident, in displaying it they never fail to surround it with ambiguities, fearing, it would seem, lest the simplicity of their explanation should make us respect their discovery less.
Lao Tsu. Tao te ching. Translated, annotated, and with an afterword by Victor H. Mair. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
He who is skilled at traveling leaves neither tracks nor traces;
He who is skilled at speaking is flawless in his delivery;
He who is skilled in computation uses neither tallies nor counters;
He who is skilled at closing things tightly has neither lock nor key, but what he closes cannot be opened;
He who is good at binding has neither cord nor string, but what he binds cannot be untied.
Mill, John Stuart. On liberty. Internet Wiretap on-line edition, 1993 (first published, 1859).
That mankind are not infallible; that their truths, for the most part, are only half-truths; that unity of opinion, unless resulting from the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions, is not desirable, and diversity not an evil, but a good, until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognizing all sides of the truth, are principles applicable to men's modes of action, not less than to their opinions. As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. Set theory and its logic. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1969.
I have given much space to a logically trivial point of convention because in practice it is so vexatious. The trouble of thinking through proofs and theorems, considerable at best, is aggravated time and again by the need to think which way functions are to be taken and what then to make of `R''a' and `Q | R'. The mathematician who switched a seemingly minor point of usage out of willfulness or carelessness cannot have suspected what a burden he created.
Ziff, Paul. Semantic analysis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1960.
The difference between a logistic system and my language can be put thus: if in a logistic system I come across a contradiction, I cross out the system. But if in my language I find a contradiction, I cross out the contradiction.
Ayckbourn, Alan. The Norman conquests. London: Chatto and Windus, 1975.
TOM: Home-made. Mother made it last year. Just before she was ill. Annie and I bottled it. Tastes revolting but it's very potent.
REG: Carrot. Does it have to be carrot?
TOM: [opening the bottle] Well, there's also parsnip or dandelion but this seems to have a slightly better bouquet. The dandelion's all right but I lost the use of one side of my face for about an hour after I drank it.
Durang, Christopher. Christopher Durang explains it all for you: six plays by Christopher Durang. New York: Avon Books, 1983.
SISTER: [Reads] It used to be a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays, and now it isn't. Does that mean that people who ate meat on Fridays back when it was a sin are in hell? Or what? People who ate meat on Fridays back when it was a mortal sin are indeed in hell if they did not confess the sin before they died. If they confessed it, they are not in hell, unless they did not confess some other mortal sin they committed. People who would eat meat on Fridays back in the fifties tended to be the sort who would commit other mortal sins, so on a guess, I bet many of them are in hell for other sins, even if they did confess the eating of meat.
Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
THOMASINA: The Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?
SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.
Stoppard, Tom. Every good boy deserves favor and Professional foul. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1978.
ANDERSON: I propose in this paper to take up a problem which many have taken up before me, namely, the conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of the community. I will be making a distinction between rights and rules.
We note that the CHAIRMAN, listening politely and intently, is suddenly puzzled. He himself has some papers and from these he extracts one, which is in fact the official copy of ANDERSON's official paper. He starts looking at it. It doesn't take him long to satisfy himself that ANDERSON is giving a different paper.
Stoppard, Tom. Jumpers. New York: Grove Press, 1972.
DOTTY: The Church is going to be rationalized.
GEORGE: Rationalized? (Furiously.) You can't rationalize the Thirty-Nine Articles!
DOTTY: No, no ... not the faith, the fabric. You remember how they rationalized the railways? -- well, now they're going to rationalize the Church. (Pause.) There was an announcement on television.
GEORGE: Who by?
DOTTY: The Archbishop of Canterbury. Clegthorpe.
GEORGE: Clegthorpe? Sam Clegthorpe?
DOTTY: It's been made a political appointment, like judges.
GEORGE: Are you telling me that the Radical Liberal spokesman for Agriculture has been made the Archbishop of Canterbury?!!
DOTTY: Don't shout at me ... I suppose if you think of him as a sort of ... shepherd, ministering to his flock ...
GEORGE: But he's an agnostic.
DOTTY (capitulating): I absolutely agree with you -- nobody is going to have any confidence in him. It's like the Chairman of the Coal Board believing in oil.
GEORGE (shouts): No, it is not! (An exhausted pause.) You're making it up. You just like to get me going.
DOTTY: Do you find it incredible that a man with a scientific background should be Archbishop of Canterbury?
GEORGE: How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field. ... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight. `Archbishop Clegthorpe? Of course! The inevitable capstone to a career in veterinary medicine!'
Wagner, Jane. The search for signs of intelligent life in the universe. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
AGNUS: As I was leaving to come to the Un-Club tonight, my grandmother speck said, "As long as you're going out, take out the trash."
I look around the room. I see her seashell shadow box and her lima bean and split pea mosaic and decoupage hanging over granddaddy speck's Berkline recliner rocker, the kind they give away on game shows. I see her imitation Early American maple coffee table in the shape of a wagon wheel. I see her salt and pepper shaker collection on the simu-Early American knickknack shelf. I see this wrought-iron lamppost with the ceramic drunk leaning against it. I see it, but I don't believe it. Take out the trash? I wanted to say, ``I wouldn't know where to begin.''
Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1953.
He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
Amis, Kingsley. Girl, 20. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971.
The movement turned out to be the first movement of the First Symphony: a considerable mercy, seeing that it might so easily have been something broad, full, ample, spacious, massive, leisurely and going on for over half an hour from the Second or the Third. Thanks to some paroxysm of curtailment on the composer's part, I was in for little more than fifteen minutes' worth. ... At first against my will, I listened to Mahler's enormous talentlessness being rendered by Roy and the N.L.S.O. As they went on, flecks of seeming talent began to insinuate themselves. Factitious fuss turned itself into a sort of gaiety; doodles in the horns and woodwind were almost transformed into rustic charm; blaring and banging acquired a note of near-menace; even that terrible little cuckoo-motif reflected something more than the great man's decision to let the world know how jolly preoccupied he had been in those days with the interval of the perfect fourth.
Amis, Martin. Money. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984.
Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on form. Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting -- any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.
Andersen, Kurt. Turn of the century. New York: Random House, 1999.
Max is in the living room watching a forty-year-old episode of The Twilight Zone in which a pioneer travels eighty years forward through time in a Conestoga, to 1960, to get medicine for his sick child back in the nineteenth century. Louisa has refused to watch (``Mom! Grandma has only a white-and-black TV! The commercials are in white-and-black, too!'') even though Max explained to her that the show itself would be black-and-white on the TV at home, too. She finally got bored using Edith Hope's Clapper to turn lamps on and off, and couldn't understand the jokes in the old Reader's Digests, so she consented to go with Aunt Alice to play with the twins. Sarah, wearing a T-shirt Lizzie has never seen before (FORGET THE ALAMO. STOP THE WAR.), is in the kitchen eating prepeeled baby carrots out of the bag, dipping them into a jar of Cheez Whiz the size of a beach bucket.
Barth, John. The sot-weed factor. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1960.
For robbery Ebenezer cared little, his valet having picked him clean already; it was the prospect of being impressed that terrified him, since he and Bertrand had been captured in the fo'c'sle and neither was wearing the clothes of a gentleman. His fears redoubled when their captors led them toward the foremast.
``Nay, prithee, hear me!'' he cried. ``I am no seaman at all! My name is Ebenezer Cooke, of Cooke's Point in Maryland! I'm the Laureate Poet!''
The Poseidon's crew, despite the seriousness of their position, grinned and elbowed one another at his approach.
``Thou'rt a laureate liar, Jack,'' growled one.
Brunner, John. The sheep look up. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972.
They completed the autopsy on Dr. Stanway, conducted at his own morgue: verdict, the extremely common one of degenerative nephritis. He was, admittedly, only thirty-one. But he had after all spent his whole life in Los Angeles and Orange County. Not surprising.
Butler, Samuel. The way of all flesh. New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1950 (originally published in 1903).
Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason. We can conceive of St. Paul or even our Lord Himself as drinking a cup of tea, but we cannot imagine either of them as smoking a cigarette or a churchwarden. Ernest could not deny this, and admitted that Paul would almost certainly have condemned tobacco in good round terms if he had known of its existence. Was it not then taking rather a mean advantage of the Apostle to stand on his not having actually forbidden it? On the other hand, it was possible that God knew Paul would have forbidden smoking, and had purposely arranged the discovery of tobacco for a period at which Paul should be no longer living. This might seem rather hard on Paul, considering all he had done for Christianity, but it would be made up to him in other ways.
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. View of dawn in the tropics. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Berkeley, California: Creative Arts Book Company, 1981 (originally published in 1974).
The general asked what time it was and an aide-de-camp quickly ran to his side and mumbled: ``Any time you wish, Mr. President.''
Connell, Evan S. Mrs. Bridge. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1959.
Before leaving on the trip she had checked over the luggage in the attic and concluded that they did not have enough, so she had gone downtown and bought three elegant, darkly burnished leather suitcases. They were so beautiful that she was easily persuaded by the salesman to buy a set of canvas covers to protect the leather. These covers, to be sure, were ugly -- as coarse as Boy Scout pup tents -- but she bought them and had them fitted onto the suitcases. The covers remained on the suitcases while they were aboard ship, and as they had been in each city only a few days she had not bothered to remove them, but now she decided to see if the leather was being protected. She unfastened one of the canvas jackets, peeled it halfway off, and there -- as beautiful as though still on display -- the leather gleamed. Well pleased, she buttoned on the cover.
Dickinson, Peter. King and joker. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976.
``Really, this is too bad,'' said Father in a voice so curiously between laughter and anger that everybody looked round. He was standing back from the sideboard with the dishcover in one hand, like a distorted shield. On the dish where the ham should have been was what appeared to Louise to be a large cow-pat, palpitating with strange life.
``Hey! That's my toad!'' said Albert.
Nonny gave a small scream with a giggle threaded through it. Mother rang the bell for Pilfer. Father pulled the corner of his moustache and put the cover back on the toad.
``It's got to have air,'' said Albert.
``Quiet,'' said Father.
Pilfer slid into the room, bespectacled, stooping, all in black.
``Your Majesty rang?'' he said in his slightly nasal whine. He spoke to Mother because he knew that Father, if he'd wanted something, would have shouted and Nonny would have gone and asked.
``My ham is not what it should be, Pilfer,'' said Father.
Eco, Umberto. The name of the rose. Translated by Warren Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983 (originally published by Gruppo Editorial Fabbri-Bompiani, Sozogno, Etas S.p.A.).
``The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.''
Finney, Jack. Time and again. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
During several days Martin and I sat leafing through books whose pages had gone brown and whose covers were sometimes speckled with mildew. As you turned the pages, corners flaked off; only a ghost could ever have read these. Then, from a box, Martin brought out the same books, identical except that now their covers were bright new reds, blues, and greens, their titles fresh-stamped in shining gold leaf, their pages pure white, the fresh black print still smelling of ink. Obviously these had never been read -- not yet. And in my mind the eighties had begun to stir a little ...
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.
``Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action.''
Jackson, Shirley. Life among the savages. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953.
``Mrs. Skinner says,'' Jannie remarked as her father read the mimeographed notice for the third apoplectic time, ``that men who smoke are vulgar, especially cigars.''
It did not take us very long to find out that Mrs. Skinner thought that raised voices, dining in restaurants, and playing cards were all vulgar. Jannie took to keeping care of her own socks and she bathed every night, and once a week, while we were out carousing at our regular bridge game, she washed her hair inefficiently. ``A girl,'' she told me, ``who does not keep herself clean is unwomanly.''
``Talking about being clean is vulgar,'' I told her nastily.
``Clean talk,'' said Jannie, ``is womanly.''
``I beg your humble pardon,'' I said.
``Granted,'' said Jannie.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale fire. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962.
Line 962: Help me, Will. Pale Fire.
Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is ``pale fire.'' But in which of the Bard's works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens -- in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of ``pale fire'' (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).
Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995.
She wanted to know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael's real name. Who this ``Reader'' was, and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. What home would be without Plumtree's Potted Meats. How long it would take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be ``only a novel.'' What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be a mistake not to live all you can.
Powers, Richard. The gold bug variations. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991.
The veil between signal and noise never lifts as easily as it falls. Any teenager can take a car apart, but few would be thrilled with a complete parts inventory for their coming-of-age gift. If signal is rich and noise deafening, then the deforming garble is practically irreversible without the formula. ...
I may never come across the clause that revokes his exile. The journey back, however much it seems a birthright, a trip I ought to be able to do blind, remains as unlikely as my making it from alien Maple and Jefferson to unknown Walnut and Monroe with nothing but a world globe. Each cognate I stumble across gives a shock of recognition: here is the grammatical clue, something I can at last make out. The nearness is uncanny. The clues are all eall mast, al meist, allr mestr. But run through the decipherer, they remain all most. No ladders lead back up from where I've been lowered. I must lie down where all the ladders start.
Powers, Richard. Plowing the dark. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
She spun her body in the invented volume, the largo ballet of an astronaut repairing failed equipment far off in the infinite vacuum. She twisted and looked down into the breach below. The God's-eye view: in the simulation, but not of it. And deep beneath her, where there should have been stillness, something moved.
Rendell, Ruth. A judgement in stone. New York: Vintage Books, 2000 (originally published by Hutchinson, 1977).
``Norm and I always longed for kiddies,'' she was in the habit of saying, ``but they never came. The Lord knew best, no doubt, and it's not for us to question His ways.''
No doubt He did. One wonders what Joan Smith would have done with children if she had had them. Eaten them, perhaps.
Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon. New York: Avon Books, 1999.
``Do you have any questions?'' the Main Guy asks.
``Did Alan choose the number?''
``You mean Dr. Turing?''
``Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?''
This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended, as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.
``Possibly,'' says the Main Guy. ``Why do you ask?''
``Because,'' Waterhouse says, ``the number 2701 is the product of two primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation, are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other.''
All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. ``We'd best change that,'' he says, ``it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would notice.'' He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket, and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701. As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.
Sterne, Laurence. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman. New York: Modern Library, 1950 (originally published 1759-1767).
L--d! said my mother, what is all this story about? -- A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick -- And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. New York: Delacorte Press, 1985.
It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as brilliantly duplicitous as James Wait -- until I remind myself that just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighting about three kilograms! ... Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race? ... What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere?
My answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains.
Bierce, Ambrose. The collected writings of Ambrose Bierce. New York: Citadel Press, 1946.
Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Understanding, n. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse.
Ivins, Molly. Molly Ivins can't say that, can she? New York: Random House, 1991.
The Gibber's greatest moment this session came on Disability Day, which we have every year to honor the handicapped folks for their efforts to get better access to public buildings. We never give them any money for this, but we honor their efforts to get it. Anyway, the Guv issued a proclamation, both houses just resoluted up a storm, and Gib Lewis read all of it without making hardly any mistakes. We were so proud. Then he looked up at all the handicapped folks who had wedged their wheelchairs into the gallery and said, ``And now, will y'all stand and be recognized?''
Mencken, H. L. A Mencken chrestomathy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
O'Rourke, P. J. Holidays in hell. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
It's important to have your facts straight before you begin piloting a car around an underdeveloped country. For instance, which side of the road do they drive on? This is easy. They drive on your side.
Perelman, S. J. The most of S. J. Perelman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
As for consulting a dentist regularly, my punctuality practically amounted to a fetish. Every twelve years I would drop whatever I was doing and allow wild Caucasian ponies to drag me to a reputable orthodontist. I guess you might say I was hipped on the subject of dental care.
Trillin, Calvin. If you can't say something nice. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987.
I had no legal standing for making a citizen's arrest of someone for performing mime in public.
Borges, Jorge Luís. Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.
The Library contains all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters dhcmrlchtdj which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of those languages, the powerful name of a god.
Collier, John. Fancies and goodnights. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1951.
``Yes,'' said Reid, his face livid and his eyes blazing like live coals. ``And that is hogwash. The man who calls that a Georgia flip is not fit to mix bootblacking. It hasn't the nutmeg. The touch of nutmeg makes it. A man who'd leave out the nutmeg---! I could---!''
He put out both his hands to lift the tray, and his eyes fell on them. He sat very still, staring at them.
Cortázar, Julio. Cronopios and famas. Translated by Paul Blackburn. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969 (originally published by Ediciones Minotauro, 1962).
A small cronopio was looking for the key to the street door on the night table, the night table in the bedroom, the bedroom in the house, the house in the street. Here the cronopio paused, for to go into the street, he needed the key to the door.
Maugham, W. Somerset. The world over. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1952.
Saki. The best of Saki. New York: The Viking Press, 1961.
Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wood hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things. ... And every night, in the welcome darkness of his bedroom, and every evening in the dusk of the tool-shed, Conradin's bitter litany went up: ``Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.''
Twain, Mark. Collected tales, sketches, speeches, and essays. New York: The Library of America, 1992; two volumes.
``O Lord, our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of the sun-flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.''
It was believed afterwards, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
Frank, Anne. The diary of a young girl. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1952.
Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Harper & Row, 1961 (originally published by James R. Osgood and Company, 1883).
Presently he turned on me and said: ``What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?'' I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1981.
If a male comes home from a war, especially with serious wounds, everybody agrees: Here indeed is a man. When I came home to Indianapolis from the Second World War in Germany, an uncle of mine said to me, ``By golly -- you look like a man now.'' I wanted to strangle him. If I had, he would have been the first German I'd killed. I was a man before I went to war, but he was damned if he would say so.
I suggest to you that the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young males in our society is a scheme, devised cunningly but subconsciously, to make those males eager to go to war, no matter how terrible or unjust a war may be.
Crews, Frederick. Postmodern Pooh. New York: North Point Press, 2001.
Felicia Marronnez is Sea & Ski Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine. ...
In 1998, after a fierce bidding war among several institutions, Professor Fassell joined the faculty of Rice University, where he now holds the coveted Exxon Valdez Chair in the Humanities. ...
... It was her influential graduate seminar Junior Postmodern Literary Dialectic, however, that earned her the cross-departmental chair she now holds at Duke as Joe Camel Professor of Child Development. ...
... Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Theatricals Professor of World Literature ...
... Classic Coke Professor of Subaltern Studies at Emory University. ``With this appointment,'' as Emory's president declared in a press release, ``marginality now takes center stage at Emory.'' ...
Borgmann, Dmitri A. Language on vacation: an olio of orthographical oddities. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965.
Fjord-buck zags whelm qvint pyx. Male deer frequenting the banks of a fjord, moving in a somewhat zigzag course, overturn a box with a capacity of 77.16 grams.
Kahn, David. The codebreakers: the story of secret writing. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1967.
Kelly-Bootle, Stan. The computer contradictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995.
buffer n. [Origin obscure: possibly Italian buffo ``farcical, comic'' or Latin bufo ``a toad.''] 1 A region between two devices designed to distort or, if possible, prevent the flow of data in either direction. 2 An old, greasy, and abrasive rag used to clean tape heads and floppy drives.
Kim, Scott. Inversions: a catalog of calligraphic cartwheels. Petersborough, New Hampshire: BYTE Books, 1981.
Mencken, H. L. The American language: an inquiry into the development of English in the United States. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; fourth edition, 1936; Supplement One, 1945; Supplement Two, 1948.
Few persons would recognize Smackover, the name of a small town in Arkansas, as French, yet in its original form it was Chemin Couvert. ... In the same way Bob Ruly, a Michigan name, descends from Bois Brulé; Glazypool, the name of an Arkansas mountain, from Glaise à Paul; Low Freight, the name of an Arkansas river, from L'Eau Frais; Loose creek, in Missouri, from L'Ours; Swashing creek from San Joachim; Baraboo, in Wisconsin, from Baribault; Picketwire, in Arkansas, from Purgatoire; and Funny Louis, in Louisiana, from Funneleur.
Queneau, Raymond. Exercises in style. Translated by Barbara Wright. New York: New Directions, 1981 (originally published by Editions Gallimard, 1947).
Hellenisms. In a hyperomnibus full of petrolonauts in a chronia of metarush I was a martyr to this microrama: a more than icosimetric hypotype, with a petasus pericycled by a caloplegma and a eucylindrical macrotrachea, anathematized an ephemeral and anonymous outis who, he pseudologed, had been epitreading his bipods, but as soon as he euryscoped a coenotopia he peristrophed and catapelted himself on to it.
At a hysteretic chronia I aesthesised him in front of the siderodromous hagiolazaric stathma, peripating with a compsanthropos who was symbouleuting him about the metakinetics of a sphincterous omphale.
Raymond, Eric S. The new hacker's dictionary, second edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993.
syntactic sugar [coined by Peter Landin] n. Features added to a language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans, features which do not affect the expressiveness of the formalism (compare chrome). Used esp. when there is an obvious and trivial translation of the `sugar' feature into other constructs already present in the notation. C's a[i] notation is syntactic sugar for *(a + i). ``Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.'' -- Alan Perlis.
I am indebted to Phill Wolf 1990 for detecting a typographical error in an earlier version of this document.
created April 17, 1995
last revised June 26, 2005