Haggard Hawks 7

Kangaroos. Devilish dates.

And an ever-growing sentence. 

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O MY, HOW TEXT GROWS

 

One of this week’s most popular tweets was the curious word rhopalic, a 17th century adjective describing a sentence (or originally a line of poetry) in which each successive word is one letter longer than the one before it.

 

Over on Twitter, we illustrated this fact with this mindboggling example from a 1981 article in Word Ways, that somehow managed to blossom from an opening “I am not very happy” to “counter-revolutionizing magnetohydrodynamicists”, and beyond.

 

I am now very amply amazed; letters increase forthwith, puzzlingly. (Hm. This is a lot harder than it sounds...) 

 

Elsewhere this week, we found out that:

 

  • you can thank Norman Mailer for factoids—which aren’t what we think they are
  • just as kangaroos have joeys, kangaroo words have smaller words inside them 
  • Mullum Mullum, a creek in Melbourne, has a unique claim to linguistic fame 
  • if you like music but don’t play an instrument, you’re an alligator
  • and there’s an awful lot of interfulgence around this time of year 

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CHRONOGRAM

 

A few days ago, this frankly terrifying fact cropped up on the HH Twitter feed: 

 

Added together, the six Roman numerals used to spell the phrase ‘expect the Devil’—X (10), C (100), D (500), V (5) I (1), L (50)—total 666.

 

This is an example of a chronogram, an intricate bit of word play defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a phrase, sentence, or inscription, in which certain letters, usually distinguished by size or otherwise from the rest, express ... numerical values”.

 

Take this quote from Psalm 123, for instance, that appeared on the title page of a pamphlet published by the English Puritan poet and hymn-writer George Wither in the mid seventeenth century:

 

LorD haVe MerCIe Vpon Vs

 

Read as Roman numerals, all those seemingly randomly-assigned uppercase letters add up as follows:

 

L (50) + D (500) + V (5) + M (1,000) + C (100) + I (1) + V (5) + V (5) = 1666

 

...which just so happens to be the year of the Great Fire of London. In fact, besides their uses in inadvertently summoning the Devil, chronograms are very often used like this as epitaphs or inscriptions commemorating some momentous event.

 

So Queen Elizabeth I has been commemorated with the line “My Day Closed Is In Immortality”, the initial letters of which spell out the year of her death, 1603. When George Villiers, the 1st Duke of Buckingham, was murdered in 1628, a Latin reading of his title, “georgIVs DVX bVCkInghaMIae”, was used to commemorate the date. And an inscription outside St Edmund Hall, one of the oldest academic buildings at Oxford University, reads “sanCtVs edMVndVs hVIVs aVLae LVX”—a tribute, literally meaning “Saint Edmund Light of this Hall”, to Edmund’s canonization in 1246.

 

For precisely this reason, the word chronogram itself essentially means “time-writing”, and is derived from the same roots as words like anachronism and synchronize (Greek chronos, “time”), and anagram and diagram (Greek gramma, “letter, text”).

 

It’s all very clever, of course—but it’s hard to impress everyone.

 

In a 1711 edition of The Spectator, the magazine’s founder and editor Joseph Addison singled out chronograms as an example of a kind of “false wit ... that vanished in the refined Ages of the World [but was] discovered ... again in the Times of Monkish Ignorance.” Monks seemingly with little else to occupy their time, Addison argued, dedicated themselves to composing “anagrams and acrosticks” and other “tricks in writing” that “required much time and little capacity”. Of chorongrams he wrote:

 

This kind of wit appears very often on many modern medals ... when they represent in the inscription the year in which they were coined ... For as some of the letters distinguish themselves from the rest and overtop their fellows, they are to be considered in a double capacity, both as letters and as figures. Your laborious German wits will turn over a whole dictionary for one of these ingenious devices: a man would think they were searching after an apt classical term, but instead of that they are looking out a word that has an L, and M, or a D in it.

—Joseph Addison, The Spectator (No. 60, 1711)

 

Not that there’s anything wrong with laboriously searching through old dictionaries, of course...

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THANK YOU!

PLAYING TO WIN

 

A huge thank you to everyone—all 9,000 of you, and counting in fact—who played, shared and commented on the HH Word Cloud game, which went live last weekend. 

 

If you managed to score a perfect 50/50, count yourself among the top 5% of players; if you failed to spot that extasy was misspelled, apologies, you’re among the bottom 15%...

 

Keep your eyes peeled for another word game coming very soon, but in the meantime, do keep your comments and suggestions coming. Was this too hard? Too easy? Too addictive? Drop us an email at haggard@haggardhawks.com. 

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THE MAGNIFICENT MAMAMOUCHI

 

The word mamamhouchi popped up on our Twitter feed the other day, defined as “someone who believes themselves to be more important than they really are”.

 

It totally sounds like a totally made up word—for the very good reason that it is. The French playwright Molière invented it, seemingly at random, as a suitably magnificent-sounding title bestowed on one of the characters in his 1670 comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, “The Bourgeois Gentleman, or the Would-Be Noble”. 

 

The word was so magnificent, however, that it was too good to leave alone. Soon other writers had adopted it and began using it as a fanciful, exotic-sounding title—and in particular one bestowed on someone who doesn’t deserve it, or who matches the pomposity of the word with appropriately pompous behaviour. As the Oxford English Dictionary now defines it, mamamouchi is not only “a pompous-sounding title” but also “a person assuming such a title—a pretender to elevated dignity, viewed as an object of derision.”

 

And you can provide your own example of that.

TEMPLATE No. 7

 

And finally, just for our subscribers: only one English dictionary word (that we could find) fits each of the templates below. What are they? 

 

_ _BC_P

_ _ _SQ_ _ _ _SS 

_ _ _ _KL_ _ _ ED

 

 

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: PIANOFORTE, ALPHABETICAL, ANTEPENULTIMATE]

 

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