A few chronological oddities: Legal
documents in Massachusetts in 1655 that require signatures of women (half of whom used only X) indicate a
50% illiteracy rate among the Puritan ladies. In 1675, Cotton Mather entered Harvard at age twelve. In
1770, a lawyer named Thomas Jefferson argued in a Virginia court for the
freedom of a mulatto slave on the grounds that “under the law of nature all men
are born free.” In 1775, Patrick Henry gives his “liberty or death” speech
while his wife is chained, insane, in the basement of their house. In 1818
Thomas Jefferson cautioned against the reading of a relatively new form of
fiction, the novel, saying “When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its
tone and revolts it against wholesome reading.” In 1833 Edgar Allan Poe won a
$50 prize in a contest for his story “MS Found in a Bottle,” called by some the
first science fiction story. In 1842, Charles Dickens visited America for the
first time and hated it. In 1863 Samuel Clemens, working in Virginia City,
Nevada, heard of the death of Isaiah Sellers, a little-known writer who wrote
under the pseudonym of Mark Twain. Clemens decided to take it for his own. In
1866 Horatio Alger was removed from his pulpit at the First Unitarian Parish of
Brewster, Massachusetts, for the “abominable and revolting crime of unnatural
familiarity with boys.” (Hello, Catholic priests, are you listening?) In 1889 Thomas Wentworth Higginson advised Mabel Loomis
Todd not to publish the works of an obscure poet named Emily Dickinson, calling
her poems “too crude in form.” In 1895 Mark Twain began a world-wide lecture
tour to pay back a $100,000 debt, all of which he eventually repaid. In 1926
the world’s first science fiction magazine, Amazing
Stories, was published by Hugo Gernsback, whose first name was taken for
the annual award for best sf novel of the year, the “Hugo.” In 1933 Ernest
Hemingway went on his first African safari. In 1938 on Halloween, Orson Welles
aired his radio broadcast of War of the
Worlds and scared the bejesus out of his listeners, many of whom assumed
the Martian invasion was for real.
Word games: Most of us know what an
anagram is (using all the letters of a word or phrase to form another word or
phrase, as in the wonderfully serendipitous Listen
and Silence. But almost no one knows
what an ananym is. It’s a sort of sub-category of an anagram, but one in which
the new word or phrase is a reversal. For example, Seltaeb is the name of the
Beatles’ merchandising company, an allerdnic is what you call a reverse
Cinderella, someone who goes from riches to rags. I remember trying to find a
name I could use based on my own name. Yrrej Sivart didn’t sound so good, so I
went to Dyolf Sivart. And somewhere in the early fifties, a female singer named
Yma Sumac put out a record in which she demonstrated a vocal range of
four-and-a-half octaves. The bio information said she was Peruvian and her
songs were examples of a genre called exotica,
but a lot of people thought she was really an American woman ananymically named
Amy Camus. Another word game is the palindrome—words, phrases, series of
numbers that read the same backwards and forward, like madam or nurses run. If
you’re ever looking for something longer and want to impress your friends, use
“Rats live on no evil star,” which, by the way, is the title of a song by the
reggae group called Ooklah the Moc. There are longer examples, but this science
fictional one about rats is my favorite.
By now, dear reader, you must be sick
and tired of my sick and tired blogs about literature and language. I think I’m
sick and tired of writing them. I’ll try to find something more interesting to
conclude the year, after which I think I’ll go on vacation for a while.
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