On a tiny island in the Indian Ocean live a people who have never heard of Patty Hearst or the Symbionese Liberation Army. The island is North Sentinel Island, and the people are known in English as the Sentinelese. While their island, part of the Andaman Archipelego, is nominally controlled by India, the [...]
Entries from January 2009
January 18, 2009
Curiously Excited
The word “interrobang” just rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it‽ This funny bit of punctuation (a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, aka an interrogative mark and a bang in typographical lingo) was invented in 1962 by Martin Speckter, editor of the magazine Type Talk and head of “a New [...]
January 17, 2009
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Moses Harmon
At the age of 75, Moses Harmon had spent much of his life fighting for the rights of women and for freedom of speech. For these efforts, Harmon was sentenced to one year of hard labor in Joliet (the same prison that John Belushi was released from in Blues Brothers.) Unlike “Joliet” Jake [...]
January 13, 2009
Useless Word of the Moment: Zenzizenzizenzic
This beautiful oddity comes by way of Michael Quinon’s World Wide Words. Coined by the Welsh mathametician Robert Recorde in his 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte, it means the eighth power of a number. So the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 would be 256. This word, which would have made of Lewis Carroll (of Jabberwocky fame) [...]
