Group read-through of "Gödel, Escher, Bach"

Every few decades an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event. [This] is such a work.

- Martin Gardner

One summer, long ago, I read the first half of an amazing book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, but then I had to return it to the library, and I never found the time to finish it.

Now I've discovered that a group read-through of "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is being organized through Reddit. It's being run by Rob Speer who has previously taught seminars on this book (and who has read it five times!).

What makes it amazing? It discusses Escher's art, Bach's music, and Gödel's mathematics and ties them all together. It's got puzzles and paradoxes and ponderings about the nature of consciousness. And it is terribly fun. It has a whimsical style evidenced by its wordplay and humor. The author incorporated a wonderful dialogue written by Lewis Carroll called "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" in which the Tortoise and Achilles have a discussion which illustrates a paradox of logical inference.

Here is how it begins:

Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back.

"So you've got to the end of our race-course?" said the Tortoise. "Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I thought some wiseacre or another had proved that the thing couldn't be done?"

"It can be done," said Achilles; "It has been done! Solvitur ambulando. You see, the distances were constantly diminishing; and so—"

"But if they had been constantly increasing?" the Tortoise interrupted. "How then?"

"Then I shouldn't be here," Achilles modestly replied; "and you would have got several times round the world, by this time!"

"You flatter me—flatten, I mean," said the Tortoise; "for you are a heavy weight, and no mistake! Well now, would you like to hear of a race-course, that most people fancy they can get to the end of in two or three steps, while it really consists of an infinite number of distances, each one longer than the previous one?"

"Very much indeed!" said the Grecian warrior, as he drew from his helmet (few Grecian warriors possessed pockets in those days) an enormous note-book and a pencil. "Proceed! And speak slowly, please. Short-hand isn't invented yet!"

He then wrote similar dialogues with the Tortoise and Achilles and other characters to accompany and introduce each of the book's chapters. And these are just a fraction of the things that make this book so great!


The plan is to read the book slowly, over six months (from January to July of 2012), so even if you start a little late, there's plenty of time to catch up. Rob will post insights and discussion threads in the group forum at http://reddit.com/r/GEB.

It is a challenging book, but a rewarding one. If you have ever thought about trying to read it, this is a great opportunity to follow through.

The Deeper Meaning of Liff

While cleaning out my closet, I came across The Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. The preface to the original, unexpanded version of this book (The Meaning of Liff) read:

In Life* there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no word exists. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.

* And, indeed, in Liff.

Lloyd had helped Adams on the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio scripts, and while visiting Greece, where Adams was supposed to be writing the novelization, they wound up playing a game that Douglas adapted from an English class exercise. As related in Neil Gaiman's
Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (also from my closet),

...someone would say the name of a town, and someone else would say what it meant. [...] As John Lloyd explained [...] "Near the end of the holiday, I started writing them down, not having very much else to do. By the end of the holiday, we had about twenty of these things, some of the best ones in The Meaning of Liff, like 'Ely' — the first, tiniest inkling that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong."

Here are some of my favorite words from the book:

Ahenny (ah-HEN-nee) adj.
The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves.

Ballycumber (ba-li-KUM-ber) n.
One of the six half-read books lying somewhere in your bed.

Boolteens (BOOL-teenz) pl. n.
The small scattering of foreign coins and halfpennies which inhabit dressing tables. Since they are never used and never thrown away boolteens account for a significant drain on the world's money supply.

Dalmilling (dal-MILL-ing) ptcpl. vb.
Continually making small talk to someone who is trying to read a book.

Delaware (DEL-a-wair) n.
The hideous stuff on the shelves of a rented house.

Duddo (DUD-doh) n.
The most deformed potato in any given collection of potatoes.

Dufton (DUF-tn) n.
The last page of a document that you always leave face down in the photocopier and have to go and retrieve later.

Farnham (FAR-num) n.
The feeling you get at about four o'clock in the afternoon when you haven't got enough done.

Ferfer (FER-fer) n.
One who is very excited that they've had a better idea than the one you've just suggested.

Frating Green (FRAY-ting GREEN) adj.
The shade of green which is supposed to make you feel comfortable in hospitals, industrious in schools and uneasy in police stations.

Fulking (FUL-king) ptcpl. vb.
Pretending not to be in when the carol-singers come round.

Hewish (HEW-ish) adj.
In a mood to swipe at vegetation with a stick.

Hoggeston (HOG-us-tn) n.
The act of overshaking a pair of dice in a cup in the mistaken belief that this will affect the eventual outcome in your favor and not irritate everyone else.

Kabwum (KAB-wum) n.
The cutesy humming noise you make as you go to kiss someone on the cheek.

Kent (kent) adj.
Politely determined not to help despite a violent urge to the contrary. Kent expressions are seen on the faces of people who are good at something watching someone else who can't do it at all.

Kentucky (ken-TUK-ee) adj.
Fitting exactly and satisfyingly. The cardboard box that slides neatly into an exact space in a garage, or the last book which exactly fills a bookshelf, is said to fit 'real nice and kentucky'.

Liff (lif) adj.
A common object or experience for which no word yet exists.

Millinocket (MIL-in-ok-et) n.
The thing that rattles around inside an aerosol can.

Nacton (NAK-ton) n.
The 'n' with which cheap advertising copywriters replace the word 'and' (as in 'fish 'n' chips', 'mix 'n' match', 'assault 'n' battery'), in the mistaken belief that this is in some way chummy or endearing.

Plymouth (PLIM-uth) vb.
To relate an amusing story to someone without remembering that it was they who told it to you in the first place.

Quoyness (KWOY-nes) n.
The hatefullness of words like relionus and KopyKwik.

Rochester (RO-ches-ter) n.
One who is able to gain occupation of the armrests on both sides of their cinema or aircraft seat.

Scethrog (SKETH-rog) n.
One of those peculiar beards-without-moustaches worn by religious Belgians and American scientists which help them look like trolls.

Thrupp (THRUP) vb.
To hold a ruler on one end on a desk and make the other end go bbddbbddbbrrbrrrrddrr.

Woking (WOH-king) n.
Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for.


There ought to be a word for a book that you've never fully read and haven't looked at in years, but suddenly can't bear to part with. Inspired by Douglas Adams, I've decided to call it a "Spennymoor".

Seasons Greetings from Bananagrammer

Impossible objects. Impossible words.

*

Impossible objects are drawings of apparently three-dimensional objects which look correct when their individual parts are examined, but when you look at the object as a whole, it turns out to be not realizable. One of the most famous examples was created by D. H. Schuster and published in a psychology journal in 1964. The paper was titled "A New Ambiguous Figure: A Three-Stick Clevis", and said figure looks like this:

As emphasized by the colored background, the top of the object resembles the upper part of a stirrup (which has the basic form of what is known as a "clevis") and the bottom of the object looks like three parallel rods. Somewhere in between lies the ambiguity that destroys the three-dimensionality. Martin Gardner referred to such drawings as "undecidable figures".

The three-stick clevis has since gone by many other names: blivet, devil's tuning fork, widget, and poiuyt.

Mad Magazine used "poiuyt" as the name for the above blivet when they featured it on their March 1965 cover. The difficulty you may be having in deciding how to pronounce "poiuyt" is due to its unusual origin. The word "QWERTY" was formed by starting from the left side of the top row of a typewriter and taking the first six letters. Applying the same technique to the other end of the keyboard you get the looking glass version of "QWERTY"... "poiuyt".

Just as perspective drawing was invented to allow us to make two-dimensional depictions of three-dimensional things, spelling was invented to allow transcription of spoken language. And just as we can draw objects that are logically inconsistent, so can we write combinations of letters that correspond to no spoken word.

"Poiuyt" has no apparent, standard, or authoritative pronunciation. Dictionaries ignore it. If the reader will indulge me, I will nominate it as our first impossible word.

Another candidate for impossibility is "balge" (as in "balge yellow"), a term that is listed in Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary as having no known pronunciation and no known origin (as if it spontaneously generated on a piece of paper on some lexicographer's desk). "Balge yellow" has been defined as "a brilliant yellow color" and "sunflower yellow", so at least that part of its wordhood is known.

A 1976 survey of color names by the National Bureau of Standards identified

balge yellow as the color pictured here, which also goes by names such as "jonquil" and "Naples yellow". These redundant names may explain why "balge" use ended.

Even though no one seems to know how to pronounce "balge", it doesn't feel undecidable in the way that "poiuyt" does, probably due to the latter's discombobulating four consecutive vowels.

My third nomination for impossible word is YHWH which is the English version of the Hebrew word: יהוה. Controversy surrounds this word. It is used throughout the original Hebrew texts of the Old Testament as the primary name for God. Some pronounce it as "Jehovah" or "Yahweh". Since ancient Hebrew lacked was written without vowels, the correct pronunciation of יהוה is not known. There is a strong taboo against speaking this name in Judaism, so it may be that whatever correct pronunciation might have existed has disappeared due to lack of use. Some believe that the pronunciation is a secret preserved by only a few people in each generation. What I like best about this word is that there is another name you can use when talking about it: "the Tetragammaton" (from the Greek for "having four letters"). The undecidability of YHWH's pronunciation is in an entirely different class than that of poiuyt, but maybe a property of impossible words is that they are all impossible in their own ways. This one seems to be more of an arms-crossed, exasperated "Tetragammaton, you're impossible!" way.

I feel obligated to mention one word that I thought would be impossible but has turned out not to be: Mxyzptlk. Mister Mxyzptlk is a mischievous prank-playing imp from the fifth dimension who occasionally visits Earth to wreak havoc until Superman deals with him. The gimmick was that the only way to send Mister Mxyzptlk back home was to trick him into saying his name backwards.

While Mxyzptlk has been pronounced in a variety of ways throughout the years, allegedly the DC Comics editor gave an authoritative pronunciation early on: "mix-yez-PIT-elick". But I suppose that one could claim that it is in Mxyzptlk's trickster nature that the pronunciation of his name refuses to be nailed down.


Then there are heteronyms which are words that are spelled the same way but pronounced differently:

"bass" can rhyme with "glass" or "space".

"wind" can be pronounced with a short I (like the thing that blows) or a long I (the verb that describes forming a ball of yarn).

They're better classified as ambiguous than outright impossible.

As heteronyms change pronunciation based on the context they are used in, they are analogous to the Necker Cube:

Rather than representing a figure that has no sensible three-dimensional realization, the Necker cube confounds the viewer because it has more than one realization. Most people initially see it as a wire-frame cube, viewed from the top, with the lower-left square as the front face. After studying the figure for some time, it may seem to suddenly shift to a cube seen from above with the upper-right square as the front. I find that I can switch between the viewpoints by focussing on a face that appears to be at the back of the cube which seems to cause it to pull forward.


The impossible word is an exceedingly rare thing because we tend to make up pronunciations for words, even if we have to break the laws of phonics. (Doing so yields ultraphonic words (words outside the range of normal phonics), such as Big Bird's pronunciation of ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ as a single long word by sneaking vowel sounds into strings of consonants like JKLMN.)


Spelling a word is a reductive, lossy process. Accents, tones, sarcasm, are all generally omitted. English orthography, in particular, requires collapsing the full spoken word into a few characters, introducing considerable ambiguity, but from this ambiguity is born many good things, like puns and poiuyts.

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Further reading:

• On balge: According to an 1875 Bulletin from the National Association of Wool Manufacturers, balge yellow was "generally employed on cassimere for vestings". Google Books also has the recipe for dying wool balge yellow.

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A word about the very cool font used for the IMPOSSIBLE graphic above: “ISOSIBILIA Typography Designed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida for Neo2. - [Back to footnote reference]

How Scrabble dictionaries are made

A web site called Word Buff has an interview with Darryl Francis on the making of the British Scrabble tournament word lists. From his self-description, Francis sounds like a cool guy with interests in wordplay and language. He writes articles for Word Ways, a magazine of recreational linguistics (which I can recommend if you enjoy wordplay). And he cites Martin Gardner's Scientific American columns as a major influence.

Darryl Francis and Allan Simmons are the Dictionary Committee for WESPA, the World English Scrabble Players Association. They've basically been in charge of the British Scrabble word list since its inception.

The British Scrabble tournament word list (previously called SOWPODS and now apparently "CSW" as an abbreviation for Collins Official Scrabble Words) is formed by taking all the words in the most current American Scrabble tournament word list and adding in any valid words from the Chambers Dictionary and the Collins English Dictionary. Francis's interpretation of what constitutes a valid word is given in his response to a question about whether he would ever exclude words that satisfy all the rules:

Let's go back to a group of dictionary entries I mentioned earlier - the internet domain names for countries. There's around 200 of these, running from AC (Ascension Island) to ZW (Zimbabwe). They appear to satisfy the criteria for acceptability of words.

They're not dictionary-listed with an initial capital letter, nor a hyphen nor an apostrophe. They're not marked as abbreviations, they're not marked as foreign. On what basis should they not be allowed as two-letter words?

My answer to this question is that a) these two-letter abbreviations (called "country code top-level domains") are proper nouns, and b) they are in fact abbreviations, whether the dictionary says so or not.

Francis goes on to say:

Yet to allow a sudden influx of two-letter words, most of which are unpronounceable and not recognisable to the man in the street, would be to upset the fine balance that already exists with two-letter words.

Two-letter words are so key to the game that to double their number overnight would almost certainly provoke an outcry from Scrabble players - and probably the media, too.

I could portray this as a question of how to balance strict rule-following with common sense. Ultimately the Dictionary Committee chose not to include all those country codes, so they do use some common sense in their decisions. And they do have to make many difficult judgment calls. But it seems like they only rejected these country codes because there are so many of them and because Scrabble players would be upset by their inclusion.

To me, this demonstrates the subtle biases that have crept into the system to make official Scrabble dictionaries (unsurprisingly) give tournament Scrabble players what they want. As I understand it, what a plurality of them want is a word list that retains the words they have spent so much time memorizing, while occasionally adding handfuls of new words that increase Scrabble scores and make the game easier and more fun for them.

And this is perfectly fine, so long as these Scrabble word lists aren't misappropriated as authoritative sources for other games...

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Further reading:
• Well, that about wraps it up for the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary
• All of my dictionary rants

The 27th Letter of the Alphabet

Rogues, to speak thus irreverently of the alphabet, I shall live to see you glad to serve old Q — to curl the wig of great S — adjust the dot of little i — stand behind the chair of X. Y. Z. — wear the livery of Etcetera — and ride behind the sulky of And-by-itself-and.

From Act I of Charles Lamb's Mr. H

If you were a schoolchild in the 19th century, the alphabet that you learned would have had 27 letters: all 26 letters of our current alphabet, plus the ampersand symbol.

A	B	C	D	E
F	G	H	I	J
K	L	M	N	O
P	Q	R	S	T
U	V	W	X	Y
	Z		&

Due to the awkwardness of ending a recitation of the alphabet with "W X Y Z and", it was traditional to instead say "W X Y and Z, and per se and", where per se, Latin for "by itself", means that &, standing by itself, represents "and". (Words with one letter spellings, like A or I, were often orally spelt as "A per se" or "A per se A".) It was this process of alphabet recitation, and hurried enunciations of "and per se and" which spawned a variety of names for the & symbol which ultimately converged on "ampersand". & had been part of the alphabet going back to the days of Old English.

Other than standing for the conjunction "and", the ampersand also sometimes appears in the abbreviation &c, for et cetera. This is due to the origins of the & symbol in the first century A.D., when the Romans would write et (Latin for "and") in cursive in a run-together fashion which became a stand-alone written symbol.

So why do we no longer consider & to be part of the alphabet?

The leading theory is that it's because of that alphabet song, the one that goes

A B C D E F G
H I J K LMNOP
Q R S, T U V
W X, Y and Z.
Now I know my A B Cs.
Next time won't you sing with me?

Many incorrectly believe that this is based on a tune by Mozart. While Mozart wrote variations on this theme at the age of 25 [see Köchel listing K. 265], the original melody that inspired him was a French folk song called "Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman" which eventually served as the music for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. In 1835, the alphabet song was copyrighted under the name "The A.B.C., a German air with variations for the flute with an easy accompaniment for the piano forte", so it does seem like Mozart was responsible for popularizing the melody.

It turns out that that song has influence beyond the ousting of the ampersand. Historically, it has been mainly in the U.S. that Z has been pronounced zee; pretty much everywhere else they say zed. But a quick look at the rhyming scheme of the alphabet song, shows that the zee pronunciation works better. And apparently a lot of children who learn English outside of the U.S. are still exposed to this alphabet song through American children's programming, like Sesame Street. Teachers in England reportedly have to correct kindergarteners who enter school singing the alphabet song in an American accent, right down to the zee.

I leave you with this quote from Steven Wright:

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? The guy who wrote that song wrote everything.

PAX, the Omegathon, and novelty in video games

I love books and documentaries that examine quirky subcultures. The book Word Freak provides a fascinating look inside the world of tournament Scrabble. Murderball was a great film about the players of wheelchair rugby. My favorite quirky documentary though is The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters which dramatizes the competition between two players for the high score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.

I've just found an amazing article online called PAX Primer which is the perfect introduction to the quirky subculture that is the Penny Arcade Expo. It covers the origins of the Expo (in case you ever wanted to know how a web comic can spawn a convention dedicated to video games and board games), the growth of video games, and their transition from fringe to mainstream culture.

Earlier this year, I posted about PAX because Bananagrams was an event in the PAX East Omegathon. It turns out that the Omegathon organizers decided to feature Bananagrams in the west coast PAX Omegathon as well. The article says that in the convention program, Bananagrams is described as "like Scrabble, only not boring and for old people".

It later goes on to discuss a few computer games which I might opine are "like video games, only not boring and for old people". The new wave of computer games does not suck you into endless repetition.

Portal is a game where you solve puzzles by shooting two holes on different walls, ceilings, or other surfaces in your environment. These "portals" are connected (as if by a wormhole), so whatever goes in one, comes out the other, with the same momentum. I recently started playing this game and can not get enough of it.

Braid is an even stranger game in which the player gets to control the flow of time. The selling points of the game are listed on the game's web site:

• Every puzzle in Braid is unique. There is no filler.
• Braid treats your time and attention as precious.
• Braid does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.

Braid's programmer, Jonathan Blow, self-financed the game as he coded it over three years as a statement about how video games could and should be different.

Braid does not look like any other computer game. The artwork is great. It was done by the artist behind the surreal web comic A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. Braid also does not sound like any other computer game. Its atmospheric music helped to win me over.

With the success of these games, even more ambitious games are in the works, on topics such as non-Euclidean geometry (Antichamber) and four-dimensional space (Miegakure).


In a world where video games have become mainstream, it makes sense for a niche to develop for games that emphasize originality. I am glad that quirky subcultures exist to sustain this kind of bold experimentation.