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Ancient Athenians would sometimes encounter a remarkable sculpture on roads and in public places: The bearded head of the god Hermes set on a squared pillar of stone, with male genitals carved at the appropriate height. Hermes had been a phallic god before becoming a guardian of merchants and travelers, and so was associated with fertility, luck, roads, and borders. The hermae served as...

A Statesman who attended a meeting of a Chamber of Commerce rose to speak, but was objected to on the ground that he had nothing to do with commerce. ‘Mr. Chairman,’ said an Aged Member, rising, ‘I conceive that the objection is not well taken; the gentleman’s connection with commerce is close and intimate. He is a commodity.’ — Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

One summer afternoon in 1932, William Faulkner and his wife Estelle were sitting on the side porch of their home in Oxford, Mississippi. She said, “Does it ever seem to you that the light in August is different from any other time of the year?” He said, “That’s it!”, disappeared into the house, and returned a moment later. “What he had done was to...

If you rearrange the letters in WHAT IS THE MEANING OR PURPOSE OF LIFE?, you get WINNIE-THE-POOH, SUFFER PIGLET’S AROMA. (Discovered by John Henrick, Word Ways, May 1989.)

In a 1985 op-ed in the New York Times, writer Maggie Sullivan proposed some irregular verbs to match go, went, gone: furlough, furlent, furlon: “All the soldiers were furlon except those the captain furlent last week.” subdue, subdid, subdone: “Nothing else could have subdone him the way her violet eyes subdid him.” frisbee, friswas, frisbeen: “Although he had never frisbeen before, after watching the...

If we have two numbers a and b such that ab + 1 is square, then it’s always possible to find a number c for which ac + 1 and bc + 1 are both square. For example, 8 × 3 + 1 = 25 = 52, and 8 × 21 + 1 = 169 = 132 and 3 × 21 + 1 =...

Every March since 2010, a white stork named Yaren has departed Africa, flown to the village of Eskikaraağaç in Turkey, and landed on the boat of fisherman Adem Yılmaz on the shore of Uluabat Lake. It spends six months in the village, fishing with Yılmaz every morning, then returns to Africa. A statue of the two now stands in the village’s central square. A...

calophantic adj. pretending or making a show of excellence velleity n. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it fode v. to lead on with delusive expectations magnoperate v. to magnify the greatness of Roman diplomat Sidonius Apollinaris describes the hunting skill of Visigoth king Theodoric II: If the chase is the order of the day, he joins it, but never carries...

The British post office had to make sense of this address in 1893. It reads “The Right Hon. Sir James Fergusson, P.C., 25, Tedworth Square, S.W.” Ironically Fergusson had been postmaster-general of Australia. The writer was Thomas Denman, the future governor-general. The first page of the letter is below: “Dear Sir James, — I hardly think of coming before 11th to London. I am...

Princeton mathematician John Horton Conway memorized π to more than a thousand decimal places by marrying it to the periodic table of the elements: 3 Neutronium 1415926535 Hydrogen 8979323846 Helium 2643383279 Lithium 5028841971 Beryllium … Between each pair of elements are sandwiched ten digits of π. (Neutronium is Andreas von Antropoff’s notional “element of atomic number zero,” an element with zero protons in its...

We’ve got a new maid called Chrysanthemum Who said, “I have just come from Grantham, m’m. I lost my last place In the sorest disgrace, ‘Cos I snored through the National Anthem, m’m. — Anonymous Further unrhymable words: month, silver, orange, bilge, oblige, poem, Rachel, Carthaginian, W, wasp.

In 2015 Nature published an alarming article suggesting that dragons are real and had only gone to sleep during the Little Ice Age. A medieval document discovered “under a pile of rusty candlesticks” in the Bodleian Library showed that the creatures were once common but had entered a state of brumation when temperatures dropped and their traditional diet of knights began to thin. Rising...

In 1991, artist Michael Dennis installed his sculpture Reclining Figure in Vancouver’s Guelph Park. In 2012, prankster Viktor Briestensky erected the sign below at the park’s southwest corner. Park staff initially removed the sign, but when a petition gathered 1,800 signatures they replaced it in 2014. The city now recognizes it as an official public art installation.

“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.” — Aldous Huxley

From a letter from English scholar Walter Raleigh to Mrs. F. Gotch, July 2, 1898: Doe you lyke my newe phansy in the matere of Spelynge? I have growen wery of Spelynge wordes allwaies in one waye and now affecte diversite. The cheif vertew of my reform is that it makes the spelynge express the moode of the wryter. Frinsns, if yew fealin frenly,...

Two sets of reversible faces by Rex Whistler, from 1930 — above, Mayor & Judge; below, Scotsman & Englishman.

English poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed was renowned for his charades — this one, published in the 1830s, has never been solved: Sir Hilary charged at Agincourt,– Sooth, ’twas an awful day! And though in that old age of sport The rufflers of the camp and court Had little time to pray, ’Tis said Sir Hilary mutter’d there Two syllables by way of prayer. My...

In 1979 Auberon Waugh was working as a columnist at Private Eye when his editor offered him a trip to Senegal to help celebrate the anniversary of the magazine’s sister publication. “All I would have to give in exchange was a short discourse in the French language on the subject of breast feeding.” The assignment struck Waugh as strange but not unaccountable — he’d...

Suppose you’re hiking in the woods and become lost. What’s the best path to follow to find the boundary? You know the forest’s shape and dimensions, but you don’t know where you are within it, nor which direction you’re facing. This has remained an open problem ever since mathematician Richard Bellman posed it in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 1956. The...

Much blood has … been spilled on the carpet in attempts to distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. I have suggested an operational definition: science fiction is something that could happen — but usually you wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen — though often you only wish that it could. — Arthur C. Clarke, foreword, The Collected Stories of Arthur...

“This seems to be my most ingenious two-mover,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in 1970. He had composed it a year earlier in Montreux. White to mate in two moves.

Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level, Dutch farmers needed a way to leap waterways to reach their various plots of land. Over time this evolved into a competitive sport, known as fierljeppen (“far leaping”) in which contestants sprint to the water, seize a 10-meter pole, and climb it as it lurches forward over the channel. The winner is the one who...