Barking dogs and Monte Carlo gamblers

MOST POPULAR THIS WEEK

BARKING DOG

We don’t always stick to English here at HH; the rule at HHHQ is that if a word’s interesting enough then the language it’s from doesn’t matter. Case and point, this week’s most popular tweet, the word peninkulma: a Finnish unit of distance based on the furthest distance at which a dog’s bark can be heard. 

As a unit of measurement, that being said, the peninkulma was originally defined not using the fairly imprecise yardstick of a dog’s long-distance bark, but as a unit of length equal to 5 virsta—a measurement (based on the even older Russian verst) equal to around two-thirds of a mile. That made the original peninkulma equivalent to roughly 3.3 miles, but in the early seventeenth century it was redefined as 10 virsta—or 6.6 miles. Then, when Finland adopted the metric system in 1880, the peninkulma was redefined to 10 kilometres—or 6.2 miles. 

But while it’s length may have changed over the years, etymologically the peninkulma has kept its canine definition throughout. The word itself brings together peni, a Finnish word for “dog” (apparently not much used in modern Finnish except as a stock name for a dog, like “Rover” or “Rex”) alongside the Finnish word kuulua, essentially meaning “to be heard” or “to be audible”. All told, that makes a peninkulma essentially a “dog’s-hearing”. 

Elsewhere this week we found out:

• the earliest description of baseball was a poem in an 18th century children’s book
• moxie derives from the name of the Moxie soda company in Lowell, Massachusetts
• no one really knows why the alphabet is in the A–B–C order that it’s in
• etymologically speaking, the “wall” in Cornwall and the “wal” in walnut are the same
• and politcal nepotism is nothing new: just ask Ulysses S Grant’s three brothers-in-law

POPULAR THIS WEEK

CHANCES ARE

The curious Monte Carlo fallacy cropped up on HH this week, defined as “the misguided belief that because something has happened less frequently than might be expected, it is now more likely to occur”.

Over on Twitter, we gave the example of a flipped coin: imagine a coin is tossed 10 times in a row, and every single time, bar none, it lands on heads. To some, that curious run of heads might make it appear that the coin landing on tails is now somehow “overdue”, and therefore somehow more likely to appear on the next flip—or, at least, sooner rather than later. 

But every toss of a coin of course yields a 50/50 chance of either heads of tails; with each flip taken in isolation, a run of ten heads in a row doesn’t seem all that unusual, and would do nothing to alter the odds of tails coming up next. 

Although misguided, this presumption is a common trait: humans are hard-wired to look for and appreciate patterns, and to find any perceived imbalances worthy of note. And it’s that that led to this curious phenomenon—also known as the gambler’s fallacy, or the maturity of chances—earning itself a nickname name-checking Monte Carlo, the gambling capital of Europe. 

In August 1913, a game of roulette at a casino in Monte Carlo attracted the attention of a crowd of gamblers when the ball landed on black numbers 26 times in a row. The longer this streak of black numbers continued, the longer the game seemed to play up to the fallacy: surely, the gamblers started to feel, a red number was now long overdue?

The fact that each spin of the roulette wheel—like each flip of a coin—has a roughly equal change of landing on red or black did not matter. The bets were placed, and as the run of black numbers went on, the bets grew larger and larger. Millions of francs were placed and lost as more and more players bought into the misguided feeling that this uncommon, but not impossible, run of black numbers had to be balanced out by a red number.

Eventually, a red number did appear—and by then, presumably, the players had learned a very valuable and very expensive lesson... 

AND FINALLY...

ANAGRAMS 20

Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they? 

STATIC

ANOETIC

SCHEMATIC

PSEPHITIC

Last week’s solution:

EXAMINATIONS, EXTEMPORANEOUS, EXEMPLARINESS, MYXOMATOSIS