Category Archives: The Devil’s Details

Short posts about those weird little things that get stuck in my head.

The Devil’s Details: Flatland and a Nine-Year-Old

Off the grid.

Off the grid.

A conversation about Star Wars turned into multiverse theory, the shape of the universe, and infinite dimensions this morning.

There’s a wonderful book called Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. It’s essentially a discourse on the theory that there can be an infinite number of spatial dimensions under the guise of a delightful fictional story. A square lives in Flatland, where his entire world is in two dimensions.

Flatland Illustration 1

One day he meets a sphere, but of course can’t quite understand what he’s looking at: to him, he simply sees a line getting gradually bigger, and then gradually smaller.

Flatland Illustration.004

To help him understand the limitations of his two-dimensional universe, the sphere lifts the square high above his kingdom, where he can now look down upon all that he has, unto this point, seen only as lines.

Flatland Illustration 2.002

He eventually travels to a one-dimensional kingdom as well, before suggesting to the sphere that there could, in fact, be any number of higher dimensions, simply unobservable to our eye. The sphere rejects this notion as absurdity, and the square returns to his land, only to be accused of blasphemy for speaking of his adventures, and spends the rest of his life in jail. Fun stuff.

I tried reading Flatland to Little Satis once, but the language was too high for him. It’s a shame, because the concept within is presented in a wonderfully clear and understandable way.

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The Devil’s Details: And & And & And

getimage.phpA friend of mine wrote the other day the following:

We all know that that so isn’t how it works.

It amused me, but also seemed to be (as far as I can tell) grammatically fine. It led to the response:

I’m glad that that that that amused you.

Even better.

I came across this article the other day on Mental Floss. It has some further examples of grammatical weirdness:

  • The horse raced past the barn fell.
  • The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
  • The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt.

And of course my favorite:

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

In case you need help with that one, “buffalo” can mean the animal, the city, and the action “to buffalo” (i.e. to bully or intimidate).

But, I believe I have one to top all of that, and it’s true, too. Here is a sentence with the word “and” in it five times in a row:

There’s too much space between north and and and and and son.

Got it? No?

This relates to my grandfather’s business in North Yorkshire. When the eldest son came of age, he needed to change the business sign from North to North & Son. When the sign maker came back, the words had been crushed together:

North&Son

Enraged, he returned to the sign maker the next morning with the words:

There’s too much [bloody] space between North and & and & and Son!

I never knew if they got it fixed.

barnes-and-noble-booksellers

Like this.

The Devil’s Details: Tell Me About Your Parents

pictureIt’s still early days in therapy for me, but last week the Lovely J (to borrow a phrase from a good friend) asked me something straight out of a Ben Stiller comedy.

So, tell me about your parents.

I almost cracked up. I understand that it’s a perfectly valid question to ask, and important in the ‘getting to know me’ part of it all, but there was a part of me that wanted to retort, “Tell me about yours!”

What did I do in the end? Naturally, I told her about my parents. About how my mother was a obsessive, controlling compulsive liar who loved me nonetheless (if in all the wrong ways), and my father was an emotionally distant power figure. Could it get more clichéd?

Sigh. It was kind of fun, if not terribly insightful. I wonder what she’ll conclude?

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