Mathematical Puzzles in Fantasy Games

Jonathan R. Partington

(Based on a Trinity Mathematical Society talk given on November 10th 1986)

The connection between Mathematical puzzles and adventure- like settings is an old one: it predates the advent of computers and Adventure Games, as well as that of role-playing games.

For example H.E. Dudeney, in his 'Canterbury Puzzles' (about 1903) has a chapter relating 'The strange escape of the king's jester', who has to solve several mathematical puzzles, including a maze and the guessing of a safe's combination, on his way to freedom. The jester was presumably locked up for being a mathematician.

There are many much older examples, but we shall be interested here in more modern puzzles with a non-trivial mathematical content. I know of two specifically mathematical adventures, Peter Killworth's Giantkiller, and the American game 'L'. However mathematical puzzles occur in many other games.

Let's begin with a puzzle from Graph Theory. You are exploring a network of rooms that looks like this:

          O---O
          |  /|
          | / |
          |/  |
     -->--O---O
          |\ /|
          | \ |
            /
          |/ \|
          O---O-->--
          |  /|
          | / |
          |/  |
          O---O

You enter and leave the network as shown by the arrows. In addition, each room contains a single coin, so that there are eight altogether, and, by a strange coincidence, you need exactly eight coins to pay your fare home once you have got through the maze. Now comes the tricky part: these eight caves have a property shared by some old college rooms - the roof collapses as soon as you leave them.

Thus, reducing the problem to its mathematical basis, what you have to do is to find a path through the network that allows you to visit each node exactly once: A Hamiltonian Path, named after the Irish mathematician Hamilton. It is not hard to verify that there is exactly one way through, and so the puzzle has a unique solution. One could of course construct harder variants of this puzzle, in which it was impossible to visit all rooms, and one had to visit as many as possible: and so on.

In the next puzzle, another graph-theoretic problem arises.

          O---O
          |   |
          |   |
      O---O---O---O
      |   |   |   |
      |  A|   |   |
      O---O---O---O---O
         /|\  |   |   |
          |   |   |   |
      O---O---O---O---O
      |   |   |   |
      |   |   |   |
      O---O---O---O
          |   |
          |   |
          O---O

The above shows another network of paths connecting larger areas, and one enters (from the southwest) at the point A. Life is not simple, however, and the player is in fact being pursued by a Tyrannosaurus Rex; it is close behind him, and has the property that its stampeding causes avalanches to block each path behind it. The player is safe if he can leave A by the south-east, but he cannot do this immediately because of a flock of 32 pterodactyls that is taking off in perfect formation from the place he is aiming for.

It follows that what one has to do in this case is to find a path along the network that starts at A, takes in all 32 edges exactly once, and finishes up at A (just as the last bird is flying away).

This is an example of an Eulerian path. Originally Euler was asked by his pub-crawling friends whether it was possible to walk round Königsberg, whose network of pubs and bridges is shown below, in such a way as to take in every bridge exactly once.

        O----
       / \   \
       \ /    |
        O-----O
       / \    |
       \ /   /
        O----

In this case the problem is insoluble. Consider a node on one's route: if it is not the starting or finishing point then an even number of edges must radiate from it (as every time one arrives, one leaves by a different road). In this case however, all four nodes have an odd number of roads leading out, which makes the task impossible.

Another manifestation of the Eulerian path occurs in Giantkiller, where the player is forced to run along the strands of the giant's teatowel (which keep breaking), and must keep going long enough to avoid being dropped into a fire.

Mazes themselves are a fine source of mathematical puzzles. Sometimes there are straightforward ones that can be solved by mapping, though this can be made difficult, for example by having a rotating maze whose directions constantly change. In other examples, one is given a clue to the route, and must go the correct way or meet a horrible fate (often a minotaur!)

In 'Exile', for example, there is a tavern, whose name can on occasion be the 'Sun Seed', the 'Nude Nun', or even the 'Used Ewe' (a farmers' pub). Once in the tavern, one has to evade the press gang. This involves a chase through the cellars, where the directions S-U-N-S-E-E-D are required. (In 'Brand X' the way out of the Garden of EDEN is 'spelled out for you' by the serpent!)

In a Dungeons and Dragons game, the players once came across the following doggerel:

   'Go deeper in, though ways be Dull:
   Follow the trail, aye to the Full!
   All foes disperse, as scraps of Fluff,
   Should you win through this blind man's Buff.'

It was necessary for them to interpret the last word of each line and go Down-Up-Left-Left etc, in order to get through the maze. Every wrong step brought them a monster to fight.

Another way of concealing directions is by anagram clues, so that North, South, East, West become Thorn, Shout, Seat and Stew.

Back to puzzles with a more serious mathematical content. Consider the following network of roads, where the numbers indicate how many hours is takes to get from one junction to the next.

                       /
                      /
   O--1--O--4--O--1--O
   |     |     |     |
   4     1     1     2
   |     |     |     |
   O--5--O--3--O--1--O
   |     |     |     |
   3     2     3     2
   |     |     |     |
   O--6--O--1--O--2--O
  /
 /

Here one starts at the southwest and wishes to get to a village at the northeast by the shortest possible route. (Some ways take longer than others because they are busy widening the road, or, if it is like Cambridge, narrowing it.) If one gets through in 12 hours, then one is in time to save the city from destruction by a giant: if not then the mangled villagers greet you with cries of "Oh great hero, if only could could have reached here sooner...".

This puzzle can be solved by a process known as Dynamic Programming, and the mathematical theory is well-known.

Another, more fantastic, puzzle is the ice-rink, which is square and with 25 letters painted on it in a five-by-five grid, e.g.

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

so that there is one letter missing. The player now has the opportunity to skate along this rink, but only in 8 successive straight line segments, before the ice melts and he finds himself in an area strangely resembling Trinity Great Court. This has 26 staircases leading off it, lettered A to Z. Twenty-five of them have trolls living on them, the twenty- sixth has a tutor. Each is about to have dinner, but the trolls will eat him whereas the tutor probably won't. Thus, since the safe staircase corresponds to the missing letter (Y, in our example), the player has to have covered all 25 points in 8 successive lines (an old problem going back to Dudeney, and maybe beyond).

Another problem of a different type altogether comes from the game Exile, and is called the Plague Village. Here the problems involved are logical ones, in a style much used by Raymond Smullyan (see for example, his book called "What is the name of this book?")

When the adventurer reaches the plague village, he finds a parchment, which bears (in faded letters) the message:

"Beware of PLAGUE - its effects are slow but fatal. The village is dead. The alleyways are dangerous and mostly infected. We, the villagers, kept exactly one route to the graveyard free of infection. Alas, many people put up signs, and in the madness of the plague they often contradicted each other. God be with you, stranger!"

Thus, the player has to find the safe route to the graveyard or die a horrible death. At the first junction he sees three signs, which read:

  NW: Keep away! Plague!
  N:  Keep away! Plague!
  NE: At most one of these three signs is true.

(Clearly the village mathematician, or possibly the village idiot, wrote the sign on the north-east route!) Such a problem is easily solved, in fact by symmetry only the NE route could be the unique safe way. One further example:

  SW: The sign on the west alley is true.
  W:  If the southwest sign is true, so is the northwest sign.
  NW: This way is safe.

I leave this one as an exercise. Once the player reaches the graveyard safely, he finds a thighbone, which is then of some (non-mathematical) use to him.

One can even base adventure-type puzzles on Group Theory. Consider, for example the famous 'Fifteen puzzle' of Sam Loyd.

     +----+----+----+----+
     |    |    |    |    |
     |  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |
     +----+----+----+----+
     |    |    |    |    |
     |  5 |  6 |  7 |  8 |
     +----+----+----+----+
     |    |    |    |    |
     |  9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
     +----+----+----+----+
     |    |    |    |    |
     | 13 | 15 | 14 |    |
     +----+----+----+----+

Here one has fifteen numbered blocks which can be slided in their four-by-four box, either north-south or east-west, moving one into the empty space at each stage. The challenge (which was a sort of Rubik's cube of the early 20th century) is to exchange 14 and 15. However one can show by group theory that only half the positions are possible, and that the problem as posed is insoluble. To make that seem plausible, consider the 'Three puzzle', which I haven't bothered patenting...

     +----+----+
     |    |    |
     |  1 |  2 |
     +----+----+
     |    |    |
     |  3 |    |
     +----+----+

Here it is obvious that the only re-arrangements possible are cyclic rotations of the pieces.

The idea occurs in a more complicated form in the Relic puzzle in Fyleet.

     O---------O
     |        /|
     |       / |
     |   -O-   |
     | /       |
     |/        |
     O---------O

Here there are four sacred relics which have to be put into the correct rooms, and the supernatural forces are such that no two relics can occupy the same room simultaneously. After a bit of experimenting (or calculation) it turns out that the problem cannot be solved, as you start with one of the set of positions inequivalent to the desired one. However... one of the relics is the Sacred Sunglasses of St Tropez, and wearing them the player is able to see a secret door (linking the middle room with the bottom right room). Using this extra connection, one can now get all possible permutations, and the problem is soluble.

This is a puzzle that requires several stages of solution. Firstly, to work out what one must do; secondly to see that it is impossible; thirdly to find the trick!

Another group-theoretic puzzle occurs in 'L', where one has permute a set of lights by means of switches. For example, one may start with

         O        O        O        O
        red     blue    yellow    green

and have to obtain some other ordering using two switches. One switch swaps the colours of the first two, the second cycles the colours. Again it can be shown by elementary Group Theory that one can obtain any desired ordering.

One fruitful source of puzzles, with a certain mathematical content, is that of Ciphers. Should the adventurer see written on a wall the message

UIF QBTTXPSE JT IPSTF

he or she will guess it to be an encrypted message. If, further, the message is known to be something about passwords (someone somewhere asks you for a password, say) then it is easy to spot that all we have done above is shifted each letter on one in the alphabet, and 'The password is Horse'.

Elsewhere one may find the word TUBS written up; if one says it, maybe the roof falls in - the correct thing to say was STAR: same code! In fact not many English words do give real words when shifted: ANTS becomes BOUT, ADDS becomes BEET, and so on. (I am grateful to Mr Matthew Richards, T.M.S. Dogsbody, for telling me about SHEER and TIFFS, now the longest example I know.)

To decipher the average coded message one tends to need at least 60 characters of text, more if the letter frequencies are unusual (e.g. no E!) (It used to be a habit among Trinity mathematicians to confuse the porters by sending each other coded postcards from wherever they happened to be - Russia being the most exotic.) Thus if one has fewer letters, one needs some context information.

In the game Avon, based on Shakespeare, there is an area called Illyria Court, in which live (Sir Andrew) Aguecheek, Fabian, Orsino, Olivia and Malvolio. Elsewhere, one encounters Othello, who gives one a piece of paper in 'Moor's Code' (such bad puns are common), which is supposed to tell you which of the residents to visit. Thus the paper says one of NOSEBLEED, OVERSEAS, ASTHMA, TEABAG and FUNGUS. Assuming a simple substitution cipher, one can easily verify that only one resident's name can be referred to by any given codeword. Thus, e.g., FUNGUS refers to Fabian (6-letter word, second and fifth letters equal).

These patterns have interested me for some time, especially since I learned that my own name, Partington, has the same pattern as Budgerigar!

One can also hide numbers, e.g. by alphametic-type puzzles. In one Dungeons and Dragons game the players came across an addition sum written as

          ENTER
          ENTER
          ENTER
         ------
         HEROES

together with a magical artefact bearing a dial and a headpiece (in fact remarkably similar to a modern telephone!) It was necessary to solve the puzzle and dial the number corresponding to HEROES to proceed further.

The binary system is another source of good puzzles. One can get away from slot machines taking coins of values 1, 2, 4, 8, ... and construct more elaborate problems. For example, in Crobe, one finds a sword embedded in an anvil near which someone has written the legend "He who draws this sword from the anvil is the rightful Head of DAMTP" (well, in the original it was something else, but this is an Applied Maths puzzle). Various switches nearby have to be thrown to produce a binary representation of some code-number (provided). This turns off an electromagnet in the anvil and allows one to extract the sword, then going forth to multiply (or whatever they do in DAMTP).

In Fyleet, the ternary system is used for the 'hippogriff rides' puzzle. One's coins this time come in the values 1, 3, 9, 27, ... but the price for a ride can be any integral amount. This requires negative money, and nearby one goes through a matter converter, so that coins take negative values. Thus a fare of 20 groats can be paid (uniquely) as 27 + (-9) + 3 + (-1)!

Clearly many Adventure puzzles can be obtained by adapting classical puzzles from the Dudeney era or beyond. Consider the Wolf-Goat-Cabbage puzzle: here one has to cross a stream in a boat, and transport (one at a time) a wolf, a goat and a cabbage. However one cannot leave the wolf and the goat together unattended (at least it does the goat no good); similarly the goat will eat the cabbage if left alone with it. The solution here is to take the goat across first (since it cannot be left with anything else) and continue from there.

Thus, in Fyleet, one sees a poster, which reads:

LOST - ONE WOLF, ONE GOAT, AND ONE CABBAGE. REWARD OFFERED.

Here we have an almost straightforward adaptation of the puzzle (one twist being that the wolf bites you en route and you catch lycanthropy - become a werewolf - unless a remedy is found!)

In 'L', a tree-planting puzzle is borrowed directly. To assist the gardener one has to plant 9 trees in 10 rows of 3: the solution is essentially:

     O   O   O
       O O O
     O   O   O

Similarly, Acheton borrows the Tower of Hanoi puzzle - to transfer a series of flat disc-shaped rocks which are piled up in one room, to another room, without ever putting a larger rock on a smaller. Underneath the largest rock there is secret tunnel...

Then again, in Crobe there is a version of Dudeney's safe puzzle (in the original the secret word was PYX - here a more common word is intended).

The safe door bears 4 dials, each with letters round it thus:

                             B
                            ---
                          Y/   \G
                          X|   |H
                          N\   /K
                            ---
                             M

The man who writes poems on walls has been round again, and his effort this time is

   The safe door be broken
   By word sung or spoken.

In fact one (fairly obvious) English word can be made using just 4 letters, each one of the ones on the dials.

Finally, a puzzle that is mathematically quite intricate - a scheduling problem from Sangraal. This occurs in the endgame, when the Sangraal (Holy Grail) is almost won. You arrive at the castle where the Foul Fiend has imprisoned 8 knights. These are as follows:

Agravain - lightly bound - badly wounded;
Bors - lightly bound - scratched;
Caradoc - bound a bit more - badly wounded;
Dagonet - bound as C - scratched;
Ector - bound and gagged - somewhat wounded;
Feirefiz - in chains - badly wounded;
Gareth - in chains and gagged - somewhat wounded;
Harry - bound really tight in chains (poor chap) - scratched.

Here the state of binding means that it will take 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 minutes (respectively) to free them: a freed knight then goes away to wash and recover himself physically in time for the Sangraal's arrival. The time he takes for this second stage is 5, 10 or 15 minutes, according to injury. In twenty minutes' time the sun will set and the Sangraal will arrive. How many knights can you bring? We see, for example that if you want F, you must free him almost at once, as he can only be ready in 19 minutes at the earliest. Freeing Harry, though it takes 6 minutes, is not urgent, as he only needs to be freed by the 15th minute. This sort of puzzle has standard algorithms for solving it, but it is at least a bit more interesting than the average optimization exercise!

So what next? Adventure puzzles based on Chess, on the notorious game Neutron, on Complex Variable Theory? These are left as exercises for the reader!

Last updated on December 7th 2002 by Jonathan Partington

Designing Adventure Puzzles

Jonathan R. Partington

(Based on a Connote8 talk given on July 3rd 1987)

It's probably best to say first what this talk is NOT about. I receive quite a lot of feedback from people who have played Adventures I have written, and the following is a typical message:

"Thanks for your hints in regard to Fyleet. I've made considerable progress since dealing with the wizard and am now up to around 300/600 points. I've still had no luck getting the phoenix out of its present state. I did manage to get Bacchus to do something useful for me; however, this raises the question as to whether the barrel is useful or can be ignored. Also, is the symbol of Hurgenpor (in the tunnel after riding the Hippogriff) useful at all? I'm currently trying to deal with the Dwarf and the A-Z exit. Still unsolved are how to pass without a trace and float like a feather. Am I correct in assuming that it really isn't necessary to wish at all? It seems that by wishing you're forced to lose one treasure."

Well I don't propose to answer any of those questions here, more to give some ideas of how one constructs adventure puzzles. There is a classic joke that seems appropriate here:

Q: How many adventure players does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: One to type BREAK BULB, another to try EAT BULB in the wrong room, another to try WAVE BULB, ...

The moral being that whatever you do and however obvious you think a puzzle is, there will always be some contingency you don't allow for, and someone who will try something you didn't think anyone would try.

Adventures come in a variety of styles, with different aims and plots (sometimes rather thin). A few typical 'player goals' are as follows:

Collect loot (Colossal Cave, Zork, Acheton, Murdac, Philosopher's Quest, Quondam, ...);

Win back your kingdom (Hamil);

Impress someone enough so that they will help you fight some adversary (Fyleet, Crobe);

Show virtue enough to win the Holy Grail (Sangraal);

Escape from prison (Xandos);

Regain your sanity and then fulfil some mission (Xeno);

Kill a mighty wizard (Parc);

Kill a giant (Giantkiller!);

Get off a planet alive (Countdown to Doom);

Get out of the world you're in (Avon);

and so on. Let's have an example -- the start of a typical adventure game (Crobe).

                            SEA / BEACH
             O----------------------O----------------O
             |                       CLIFFS           \
             |
          O--O--O flour             O----------------O lemming
          | / \ |                   | mystic
  zombie  O     O TOWN              | pole
          | \ / |                   | flame
          O--O--O accordion         |
             |                      |
   fish O----O----------------------O----O princess, throne
   RIVER            ROAD        |
                                |
                                O witch

                   THE START OF AN ADVENTURE

This is a game you probably haven't come across, called Crobe. The hero has been sent to deal with some evil being called Karg who has laid the town of Crobe to waste and is now believed to be in hiding somewhere in the cliffs nearby with an army of trolls. Your mission is to dispose of him.

Well I don't intend to explain how you do this, but, for illustration, let us look at some of the 'above ground' features.

Over to the west we have the ruined town of Crobe, and its sea-front, with the tide in. Objects which may or may not be of use include a wandering zombie, a bag of flour, and an accordion. Also a dead fish washed up on a river bank. Over to the east, outside the town, there is more to see: a witch, who demands that you discuss some interesting topic with her (though initially nothing seems to interest her); a princess on a golden throne; a mystic sitting on a pole near a fire; and a statue of "The Unknown Lemming", appropriately placed at the cliff edge.

Experiment suggests that eating the fish is not a good idea, as it needs cooking. However, when you cook the fish on the sacred fire, the mystic grabs it and runs off, complaining that he hasn't eaten for weeks and that your action in cooking fish nearby is more than his flesh and blood can stand. So this leaves you with a pole, by the cliff edge.

Kissing the princess is obvious enough: she turns into a frog, allowing you to sit down on the throne. In best Canute style, this causes the waves to recede and the beach to appear. The frog itself has another use later, but at this stage it just makes strange croaks of "WEEBLE", "BARGLE" etc. at you.

Proceeding along the beach you find a cave entrance, but since there is a cyclops standing in it, it is rash to go further. Instead you go back and and push the pole over the cliff (so that he comes out to investigate) and finally push the lemming over (crushing him). In fact the items you haven't yet used do come in useful later, although you have to explore a but further to see how they fit into the game. That's probably a fairly hard opening for an adventure.

Let me give some examples of what I consider to be bad puzzles -- where the player feels dissatisfied, even when he's solved them (I'm not claiming that I can always do better!) They all come from games which otherwise are good in many respects.

Waving the rod (a magic wand) in Colossal Cave: first of all you are supposed to wave it in places where it is not at all obvious that you need to do anything at all (e.g. at a fissure, where a crystal bridge appears); secondly there are places where you need to wave it twice before anything happens. This seems a bit unfair. The player ends up trying to wave the rod everywhere he goes.

The magazines in Colossal Cave. You score a point for leaving them somewhere. It is not at all clear why!

In Zork, there is a curtain of fire. Saying "Go North" (or whatever direction it is) doesn't let you pass through. "Walk through curtain" is required. No one knows why, and most people have to be told the precise wording.

Again in Zork there's a puzzle founded on Baseball. Not much point if you don't know the game!

In Hezarin, there is a place where you see the illuminated sign "G - 1 - 2 - 3". The answer is "Enter lift". All right, there is a puzzle there -- to recognise that it's a lift. But I would prefer "Call lift" as the solution and would have wanted to allow "Press button" or whatever as well (assuming that there is a lift button).

In "L", a Mathematical adventure, there is an elliptical billiard table. The ball starts at one focus and you find that, whatever angle you hit it in, it goes into a pocket at the other focus. All very interesting, but totally useless: there isn't a puzzle there at all, it's merely rather irritating local colour -- irritating because the player looks for a problem that isn't there!

How much magic do you put into an Adventure? Well, there are perfectly good adventures (e.g. Xenophobia, which is set in London) in which no magic is involved. At the other extreme you have adventures with magic words chalked up on every wall, and the poor player going all the way round the game trying to find out where exactly the word "BZZZT" does something, only to discover that you have to be in the Great Hall and holding both the parrot and the teapot, but having already eaten the melon and thrown the pig at the duchess. I exaggerate, but you see what I'm objecting to: purposeless magic. Magical artefacts that suggest what they might be useful for (e.g. mushrooms that when eaten make you strong, causing you to wonder where strength might be useful) are much better than objects with irrelevant magical side-effects.

I'd like to say something here about the conventions of Adventure games, and how they can be made less hackneyed. Firstly, Mazes. Many adventures have mazes of some sort in them. They vary from the elementary (drop objects in order to make the rooms look more different from each other) to more subtle variants.

In Zork, for example, dropping objects is partially thwarted by a thief, who wanders round and picks them up again ("My, someone's left a fine sword here!") In the Hamil maze, life is made harder for the player by the fact that every time he leaves a room, the ceiling collapses, and so he can't visit any room more than once (and needs to visit all the rooms in the maze since they all contain something). In Acheton there are the Ice Mazes, where the ice is always about to melt: a thermometer is used to identify the safe way through.

Sangraal has a rotating maze, where the directions keep changing. Fyleet has a greatly simplified version of the Fifteen Puzzle, where you have to manoeuvre objects about that cannot be put two in the same room. Murdac has a haunted house, where a poltergeist is throwing objects at the player, who has to deduce where the ghost is and avoid it. Philosopher's Quest has the notorious Garden of Eden, where the serpent very persuasively offers the player all sorts of rewards if he will eat the apple on the tree. Finally the snake says "Do I have to spell it out for you? You're in EDEN!" The directions E-D-E-N may be found helpful here...

Another convention is the Rusty Rod (sometimes with a star on the end). In various games that becomes a magic wand, a morning star (the weapon), a crowbar, an electrical conductor, ...

How much combat do you put in an Adventure game? Colossal Cave has the dwarves (and the player has a nonzero probability of being killed whatever he does). In Acheton there is a little green-eyed idol (cf. the famous poem about a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu), which when robbed of its eye comes back for vengeance: and if the player is unlucky will get it! MUD of course contains large elements of combat, as does the original Fantasy game. Mystic Wood and Sorcerer's Cave have been computerized, and make amusing "Hack-and-Slash" games.

Combat systems can be rudimentary or very sophisticated indeed. You can have a simple system where the player has a fixed probability of winning a battle, right up to a full simulation of the system in some Role Playing Game like Dungeons and Dragons or Runequest.

So where does one get the ideas for puzzles? The answer is, almost anywhere, as I'll indicate.

One useful source is literature. One can pinch, I mean adapt, all manner of classical themes. The Sword in the Stone has been used in numerous games (in Colossal Cave you need the strength to pull it out, in Quondam it breaks and needs repairing, in Crobe it's held in an anvil by electromagnetism and you need to break the circuit). The Ancient Mariner turns up in Philosopher's Quest, and you end up with an albatross round your neck that needs removing. The Hunting of the Snark provides a puzzle in Hamil, the Phoenix legend to Fyleet.

I once saw an opera (a Russian one, I think) where someone filled a golden bowl with water and saw a vision. The idea was used in Murdac. Moses and the Ten Commandments (or, more precisely, the 11th) have a role to play in Sangraal, as do Edgar Allan Poe's Raven (Nevermore) and Shelley's Ozymandias!

Given an item in a game, one often devises puzzles which exploit its various possible uses. A witch's broom can also be used for sweeping the floor to expose a trapdoor. A duster can be a bandage, a cloth, etc. In Fyleet there is a prayer mat which, when used appropriately, causes a mighty wind to arise. This can blow things out of trees, disperse fog, and so on.

Thematic puzzles are enjoyable, and you get several at once that way. Sangraal has two such. First there is a 'Seven Deadly Sins' area, where the object is to commit each of the sins in turn -- being slothful, being gluttonous, and so on (I had trouble implementing Lust in a tasteful way). It also has a Noah's Ark puzzle, where you have to find animals to take to Noah: sloths in trees that need waking, wolves that are too fierce to handle, tied up emus that it seems impossible to free, and others!

Some puzzles depend crucially on timing. Acheton has several such: a giant who stomps around in a regular path (& will crush you if are in the wrong area at the wrong time); the mummy Yelka Oekim who must equally be evaded (the solutions are different!); a notorious snake maze which you can explore while the snakes are asleep, but which you must activate later, risking attack from the snakes, in order to liberate the treasure. Another example is Crobe's ship wrecking: you have to let some pirates take over a ship, then show a false light to guide them onto the rocks!

Some puzzles come naturally and the adventure writer also has to struggle to find a solution. For example, in the barn in Fyleet, an animated white sheet descends on you and smothers you: it was my wife's idea that the player should wear a spiky Teutonic helmet to protect himself. Elsewhere I needed a one-way exit to avoid the player returning the way he'd been. The barn naturally suggested a bale of hay, down onto which the player could jump.

Finally, there are plenty of conventional puzzles which can be put into Adventure settings. A few examples follow.

 ENTER
 ENTER
 ENTER
======
HEROES

The above is an alphametic. The numbers solving it can give a combination used elsewhere.

UIF QBTTXPSE JT IPSTF. A cryptogram (suitably arranged in a crypt in Hamil).

Then there are steals from Dudeney and other famous puzzlists: "Lost - one wolf, one goat, one cabbage". The old puzzle about transporting wolf, goat and cabbage without leaving the wolf alone with the goat, or the goat with the cabbage.

Logic puzzles:

 NW exit: If this is the safe exit, then N is False.
 N exit: If this is the safe exit, then NE is False.
 NE exit: If this is the safe exit, then NW is True.

Puzzles based on Binary and Ternary systems ("Hippogriff rides 29 groats -- please insert exact fare").

In fact almost anything can be fitted into an Adventure somewhere. As an extreme example, Sangraal has a "Klingsor's Tower" puzzle, where the evil wizard Klingsor challenges the player to a wide range of contests: solving riddles, completing poems, simple games, and various miscellaneous puzzles.

In summary, it's very easy to design Adventure puzzles. I've never been able to solve them, though.

Last updated on December 7th 2002 by Jonathan Partington

Computers and Language

Jonathan R. Partington

(Two articles printed in the magazine Logophile in the late 1970s)

It is my intention to expand and update these some time (they are over 40 years old and a lot has happened since!)

Part 1

 Do not puncture a loon
 Oh mouse-like mattress !
 The spleen shrieks.

 Our auctioneers rotate
 Just before the banshee strangles a turbot.
 The butterflies shout "Wow !"
 Terribly.

 False goats are vicious
 Though not really radioactive.
 My bugle-player stupidly
 Garottes the Viking warrior.

 Surely unsound gorillas read newspapers ?
 A drenched turbot shrieks.
 My cliche-ridden banshee wobbles indefinitely
 Disguised as a lumpy passer-by.

 Never consult a weasel
 Oh ye auctioneers !
 Surely the anglers plague rubber ducks ?

 Our turbot catches a train.
 Loofahs are plump.
 Oysters are bouncy.

 The scarlet policeman nocturnally pummels wicket-keepers.

The above is not an outburst from some rather avant-garde poet, but was written by an I.B.M. computer which I programmed in the Fortran language. The machine was given a list of words, classified into parts of speech, together with some grammatical rules enabling it to compose a random sequence of sentences. I rejected the more clumsy sentences by hand and arranged the remainder as above for convenient reading. Clearly there is very little artistic merit (or, indeed, meaning) in the poem, but the sentences do have some originality.

In amusing myself with computers and words, I have found that it is difficult to produce verse which simultaneously rhymes, scans, and is grammatically correct, without making the poetry seem stereotyped. One curious way of avoiding this difficulty is to tell the computer to invent its own words, so that the sounds of the poetry are more important than the sense. One method of creating new words from old is the "triples" algorithm - the computer is given a list of real words as input and programmed to create new words (i.e. random sequences of letters and spaces) such that any sequence of three consecutive letters can occur in a new word only if it occurred somewhere in the original text.

For example, given the real words LOGIC, POGO, GOPHER and XYLOPHAGY, the nonsense word LOGOPHAGY (Eating one's words?) might be produced, since the triples LOG, OGO, GOP, OPH etc. all occur in the original text. So also might the words POGIC and XYLOGOPHER which I will not attempt to define. A slight technical modification enables words to begin and end plausibly.

It is then possible to devise rules for calculating the number of syllables in a word, and so the computer can be made to fit words into a nonsense poem which rhymes and scans reasonably well. For example, given a French text, the computer was able to produce a poem beginning:

 Nonon lait etalletut
 Laitte eforte fans
 Vile ceravait non une fut
 Ent pelevientraimans.

The flavour of a foreign language is usually preserved, as in the above example. Similarly, "Zusrer beweinem wirkauckt" seems vaguely German and "Ahova czabanyak lasszon" is plausible Hungarian!

In general, however, some human intervention is desirable and this may even consist of writing one's own poem using only computer-generated words. The following is an abridged version of a poem I produced in this way:

XYLOTURBOT (Ode to a wooden fish)

 Equitome cuperti jugum
 Gassowary jugulard
 Gnodulexy opule aublum
 Jugulegus ine mactard

 Lincubut strophlepsy cangoose
 Pangory panthrodulam
 Mango gizzarcurgeist vapoose
 Oozelumny tracer lam

 Splegitaceous ergeon poozle
 Repumandon pangle mose
 Ophalungous nox arcoozle
 Olophid propodinose

 Wombiquangle nomet slotule
 Batorpoic quagus curge
 Mangonimbo lycat pugule
 Uble bergle tragmine wurge

 Gnomelligo xystergeous pan
 Volturgity olobule man.

It should not be difficult to guess several of the words used as data; some of them appeared in the poem we began with and others were chosen for their unusual appearance. If the reader feels like singing some of the poem, he will find that "Clementine" and Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy are both suitable tunes.

In conclusion, I think we are still a long way from a state like that in Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad", where an electronic bard caused chaos by producing vast quantities of immortal verse. It is quite easy to make a computer produce enormous quantities of poetry, but much harder to decide which is the best without human intervention.

Part 2

When I last wrote on this subject for Logophile, I remarked that it seemed difficult to induce a computer to produce poetry that simultaneously rhymed, scanned and was grammatically correct, without making the verse seem stereotyped. However it is certainly possible for a machine to write poems with a definite structure, although the end-product commonly resembles (and is) nonsense-verse. The following computer-produced sonnet is typical.

 How can the purple yeti be so red,
 Or chestnuts, like a widgeon, calmly groan?
 No sheep is quite as crooked as a bed,
 Though chickens ever try to hide a bone.
 I grieve that greasy turnips slowly march:
 Indeed, inflated is the icy pig:
 For as the alligator strikes the larch,
 So sighs the grazing goldfish for a wig.
 Oh, has the pilchard argued with a top?
 Say never that the parsnip is too weird!
 I tell thee that a wolf-man will not hop
 And no man ever praised the convex beard.
 Effulgent is the day when bishops turn:
 So let not then the doctor wake the urn!

To produce this poem, the computer was supplied with the skeleton of a sonnet together with a large list of words, classified by parts of speech and numbers of syllables. The program then substitutes in words where appropriate, so that, for example, the line "Effulgent is the day when bishops turn" became "Demented is the day when magpies growl" in a later run. The rhyming here was accomplished in the simplest way possible, by ending each line with a monosyllable and making selections from a list of pairs of rhyming words.

It is still interesting to allow a computer to make up its own words, stringing together fragments of real words in some way. If the source words are thematically related, a poem written with the newly-generated words often has a remarkably uniform style, as illustrated by the following exercise in pessimism.

 MOANCHOLY

 How deprespon mismal moanic
 Nondent failur borment groanic

 Of bormentious dendepressive
 Gnastly grum doloom buressive

 Woe desponent moanite purglous
 An howlinguish nondle burglous

 How deprespon mismal moanic
 Nondent failur borment groanic!

Leaving the subject of poetry, I would now like to suggest some further applications of the buzz-word generator, which has already been much discussed in earlier issues of Logophile. Strictly speaking, these applications do not require a computer, as the work involved is not great, but, apart from its natural associations with technology, the buzz-word generator does require random numbers, which a machine can produce very rapidly. The following is an example of a proverb generator: by picking one phrase from each of the two columns below, a plausible aphorism is often produced.

 Uneasy lies the head that      wears a crown.
 An apple a day                 keeps the doctor away.
 A rolling stone                gathers no moss.
 The early bird                 catches the worm.
 The road to Hell               is paved with good intentions.
 It's an ill wind that          blows nobody any good.
 A watched pot                  never boils.
 It's a long lane that          has no turning.
 A stitch in time               saves nine.
 A bird in the hand             is worth two in the bush.
 Half a loaf                    is better than no bread.
 Pride                          goes before a fall.
 Man                            cannot live by bread alone.
 One swallow                    doesn't make a summer.
 Absence                        makes the heart grow fonder.
 He who laughs last,            laughs longest.
 A cat                          may look at a king.
 It's love, it's love that      makes the world go round.
 Brevity                        is the soul of wit.
 Beauty                         is in the eye of the beholder.

For example, "Absence keeps the doctor away" and "It's a long lane that is paved with good intentions".

Other features can be produced similarly: unusual recipes (e.g. "coffee surprise": take two kippers; add mixed herbs, pour on boiling treacle and finally smear with marzipan.); news headlines (e.g. PRINCESS ANNE GIVES BIRTH TO SEXTUPLETS - RECOUNT TOMORROW); and libels (of which it would be safer not to give examples).

For a final example of computer-produced language, let me progress from stringing together phrases to choosing whole sentences. At this level it is possible to conduct conversations with a computer, generally rather inane ones. In the following example, the computer was given a repertoire of about 150 trite remarks. Making virtually no analysis of the remarks addressed to it beyond establishing whether they were statements or questions, the program took part in the following conversation. I will leave it to the reader to work out which was the human and which the machine.

   I hope you'll be entertaining.
   I hope you will too, as this is a test run.
   What exactly do you mean by that?
   I want Logophile readers to see you in action.
   What do you think of our dialogue so far?
   You're doing about as well as usual.
   Was that meant to sound obscene?
   No, but you have a strong imagination.
   What do you think machines have to do with your problem?
   I think it's your problem, really.
   You always phrase things so beautifully!
   When are you going to say something interesting?
   Why do you want to know?
   It would make the article more readable.
   Say something profound.
   O.K. - machines are basically stupid.
   That reminds me of a joke my aunt used to tell.
   Was your aunt a machine?
   I won't answer that until my solicitor comes.
   Is your solicitor a machine as well?
   I can't stand around chatting all day.

Jonathan Partington, 1979

Miscellaneous old quotations

This is a collection of the bizarre, the wise, the witty, and the downright silly. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which.

The chief consequence of setting up the Holyrood parliament has been that 129 Scottish villages are missing their idiots.
Gerald Warner

I asked what he meant, and he said, 'I've had a long talk with a Catholic--a very pious, well-educated one--and I've learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone's name on it, they get sent to Hell? I don't say there mayn't be a good reason for all this,' he said, 'but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself.'
Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

Listening to Philip Glass is about as rewarding as chewing gum that's lost its flavour, and they're not dissimilar activities.
Michael White

If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
G.K. Chesterton (What's wrong with the world)

I believe that our Olympic athletes and everybody else in our country will remember that all the year round you show exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication...

Some of you may have heard of Field Marshal Montgomery and at the battle of Allemagne, just before it, in the Second World War he spoke to his troops.
Gordon Brown, patronising the troops in Afghanistan, August 2008

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas De Quincey (Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts)

Nobody can spoil a life, my dear. That's nonsense. Things happen, but we bob up.
John Galsworthy (To Let)

The wanting, and the more, and the porridge.
Two-year old relative of Clive James.

It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir, well-known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the vice-regal palace.
Winston Churchill

You should make a point of trying every experience once, except incest and folk-dancing.
Arnold Bax

Prizes are for little boys, and I'm a grown-up.
Charles Ives (attrib.)

The tumult and the shouting dies,
The captains and the kings depart,
And we are left with large supplies
Of cold blancmange and rhubarb tart.

Last two lines by Ronald Knox, first two from Kipling's Recessional

To go in on an ad-homonym attack in the way they have indicates to me a level of desperation that indicates just how bad things have gone for the government.
Simon Davies, as misquoted on the BBC web site (now corrected)

To me the world Strindberg created is like some enclosed launderette of the spirit -- the underwear goes round and round but the water has been turned off.
The Listener, 1968.

I definitely want Brooklyn to be christened, but I don't know into what religion yet.
David Beckham

Awa' wi' ye, ye krankie. Stop your barmie noddle. I'll tak' nae more of your fancy billy-connolly. Go lauder yourself on the low road before I gi'e ye a motherwelling ye'll nae forget.
Oliver Pritchett (Scots wha hae and put yon bluidy fag out)

'What was that she said, Jeeves?'
'Yoicks, sir, if I am not mistaken. It seemed to me that Madam also added Tally-ho, Gone away and Hark forrard.'
'I suppose members of the Quorn and the Pytchley are saying that sort of thing all the time.'
'So I understand, sir. It encourages the hounds to renewed efforts. It must, of course, be trying for the fox.'
P.G. Wodehouse (Much obliged, Jeeves)

We didn't talk in metaphors in my day. We didn't beat about the bush.
Freddie Trueman

We will not introduce 'top-up' fees and have legislated to prevent them.
The Labour Party manifesto, 2001

People always say: "You're a comedian, tell us a joke." They don't say: "You're an MP, tell us a lie."
Bob Monkhouse

The 't' is silent as in 'Harlow'.
Margot Asquith, explaining the pronunciation of her Christian name to Jean Harlow

Astrology proves only one thing, namely that there is one born every minute.
Patrick Moore (attrib.)

There was held at an inn in that county town a weekly meeting of a festive, almost a riotous character, of a society of gentlemen who called themselves the Buccaneers. Some of the choice spirits of Chatteris belonged to this cheerful club.
W.M. Thackeray (Pendennis)

Simply admitting it doesn't minimise the fact that she is a shallow, blundering, confused, thick, morally contorted political push-over and mental bankrupt. And so, it's important that, the more she admits to it, the more must everyone keep accusing her of it, but even louder.
Armando Iannucci (of Clare Short M.P.) 21.3.03

Enough gullible Americans want to get rich quick, lose weight or increase their sexual potency to make sending billions of e-mails a worthwhile business expense.
Bill Thompson (BBC)

Our national nostrum, Not Proven..a verdict which has been construed by the profane to mean 'Not Guilty, but don't do it again'.
W. Roughhead (Art of Murder)

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!

The second (censored) verse of the National Anthem

 Their painted faces guard and guide. Now or
 Tomorrow or whenever is the promise --
 The resurrection comes: fix your eyes halfway
       Between Heaven and Diss.

Peter Porter (An angel in Blythburgh church)

 Nature, it seems, is the popular name
 for milliards and milliards and milliards
 of particles playing their infinite game
 of billiards and billiards and billiards. 

Piet Hein (Atomyriades)

"You haven't told me yet," said Lady Nuttal, "what it is your fiancé does for a living."

"He's a statistician," replied Lamia, with an annoying sense of being on the defensive.

Lady Nuttal was obviously taken aback. It had not occurred to her that statisticians entered into normal social relationships. The species, she would have surmised, was perpetuated in some collateral manner, like mules.

"But Aunt Sara, it's a very interesting profession," said Lamia warmly.

"I don't doubt it," said her aunt, who obviously doubted it very much. "To express anything important in mere figures is so plainly impossible that there must be endless scope for well-paid advice on how to do it. But don't you think that life with a statistician would be rather, shall we say, humdrum?"

Lamia was silent. She felt reluctant to discuss the surprising depth of emotional possibility which she had discovered below Edward's numerical veneer.

"It's not the figures themselves," she said finally. "it's what you do with them that matters."

Attrib. K.A.C. Manderville, The undoing of Lamia Gurdleneck, in Kendall and Stuart's The Advanced Theory of Statistics. (Spot the anagrams of Maurice G. Kendall and Alan Stuart!)

Your manuscript, sir, is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Samuel Johnson

I am not so young as I was once, and I don't believe I shall ever be, if I live to the age of Samson, which, heaven knows as well as I do, I don't want to, for I wouldn't be a centurion or an octagon and survive my factories and become idiomatic by any means. But then there is no knowing how a thing will turn out until it takes place, and we shall come to an end some day, though we may never live to see it.

Benjamin P. Shillaber (the "Mrs Partington" books)

A complicated gentleman allow to present,
Of all the arts and faculties the terse embodiment,
He's a great arithmetician who can demonstrate with ease
That two and two are three or five or anything you please;
An eminent Logician who can make it clear to you
That black is white--when looked at from the proper point of view;
A marvellous Philologist who'll undertake to show
That "yes" is but another and a neater form of "no".

All preconceived ideas on any subject I can scout,
And demonstrate beyond all possibility of doubt,
That whether you're an honest man or whether you're a thief
Depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

W.S. Gilbert (Utopia Limited)

A stats major was completely hung over the day of his final exam. It was a True/False test, so he decided to flip a coin for the answers. The stats professor watched the student the entire two hours as he was flipping the coin...writing the answer...flipping the coin...writing the answer. At the end of the two hours, everyone else had left the final except for the one student. The professor walks up to his desk and interrupts the student, saying: "Listen, I have seen that you did not study for this statistics test, you didn't even open the exam. If you are just flipping a coin for your answer, what is taking you so long? The student replies bitterly (as he is still flipping the coin): "Shhh! I am checking my answers!"
Sunita Saini

Sentence first, verdict afterwards.
Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

At the age of seven, Carl Friedrich Gauss started elementary school, and his potential was noticed almost immediately.
Quoted in the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive

If there is a problem you can't solve, then there is an easier problem you can't solve: find it.
G. Pólya (How to solve it)

I know that journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
G.K. Chesterton (The Wisdom of Father Brown, The Purple Wig)

The accursed power which stands on privilege
(And goes with Women and Champagne and Bridge)
Broke - and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

Hilaire Belloc

I suppose if Gladstone and Disraeli were around today they would be known as Bill and Ben.
James Anderson (Sunday Telegraph, 1.7.01)

Was none who would be foremost
To lead such dire attack;
But those behind cried, "Forward!"
And those before cried, "Back!"

Lord Macaulay, Lays of ancient Rome

The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational.
Oscar Wilde, The importance of being earnest

Gin a body meet a body
Flyin' through the air,
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? and where?

Ilka impact has its measure,
Ne'er a ane hae I,
Yet a' the lads they measure me,
Or, at least, they try.

James Clerk Maxwell

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always To be Blest.

Alexander Pope (Essay on Man, Epistle 1, 1.95)

Why should the public on this issue believe you, a transient, here today and, if I may say so, gone tomorrow politician rather than a senior officer of many years' experience?
Robin Day to John Nott

Why should a man of your social position and charm and personality have to go to whores for sex?
Robin Day to Lord Lambton

Can I get this question in prime minister, because we're having an interview, which must depend on me asking some questions occasionally.
Robin Day to Margaret Thatcher

     There, an't shall please you; a foolish mild man; an
     honest man, look you, and soon dashed. He is a
     marvellous good neighbour, faith, and a very good
     bowler: but, for Alisander,---alas, you see how
     'tis,---a little o'erparted. 

William Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, V.2)

     The King, observing with judicious eyes,
     The state of both his universities,
     To Oxford sent a troop of horse, for why?
     That learned body wanted loyalty;
     To Cambridge books, as very well discerning
     How much that loyal body wanted learning.

Joseph Trapp, On George I's Donation of the Bishop of Ely's Library to Cambridge University

          
     The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse,
     For Tories own no argument but force.
     With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent
     For Whigs admit no force but argument.

Sir William Browne, Reply to Trapp's epigram

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.
Tim Berners-Lee, in Technology Review, July 1996

When the Times reported that Rudyard Kipling was to be paid £1 a word for an article, an Oxford undergraduate sent Kipling £1 and asked, 'Please send us one of your best words'. He replied, 'Thanks'.
Quoted in "Scientists Must Write", by Robert Barrass.

'My dear, a rich vocabulary is the true hallmark of every intellectual person. Here now'---she burrowed into the mess on her bedside table and brought forth another pad and pencil---'every time I say a word, or you hear a word, that you don't understand, write it down and I'll tell you what it means. Then you can memorize it and soon you'll have a decent vocabulary. Oh the adventure,' she cried ecstactically, 'of moulding a little new life!' She made another sweeping gesture that somehow went wrong because she knocked over the coffee-pot and I immediately wrote down six new words which Auntie Mame said to scratch out and forget about.
Patrick Dennis, "Auntie Mame"

In Middlesbrough the unemployed huddle in frowzy beds, bread and marg and milkless tea in their bellies.
George Orwell, "Keep the aspidistra flying"

A professor is one who can speak on any subject -- for precisely fifty minutes.
Norbert Wiener.

I should add only that, when I first subscribed to e-mail, my system was clogged because 2,500 American high school students sent me an e-mail asking about politics in Britain. E-mail does not solve all communications problems.
John Battle M.P., quoted in Hansard

'There goes C.S. Lewis,' said Fen suddenly. 'It must be Tuesday.'
Edmund Crispin, "Swan Song"

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"

In due course I was invited to meet one of the original five students who in 1869 joined the first College for Women, then at Benslow House, Hitchin; in 1873 it moved to within two miles of Cambridge and was renamed Girton College. Emily Gibson, Mrs Townshend, an exquisitely pretty old white-haired lady of eighty, observed, 'I will give you a piece of useful advice, my dears. If ever you have to go to prison take a change of underclothes, so that they will know you are a lady; and say you are a vegetarian -- the food is better if you do.' In the cause of women's suffrage, she had spent a fortnight in Holloway jail.
Muriel Bradbrook (an ex-Mistress of Girton)

It's hard to imagine a single food that can be more aptly described as the essential ingredient than sugar.
From a Tate + Lyle packet

The only thing to be said in favour of this book is its labour-saving, cost-effective design in which a combination of small type and narrow margins ensures that the reader goes blind before he goes mad.
John Naughton (Observer, 1988) reviewing "Hurricane Force" by George Hill.

In Lucy Ellman's mouth the expletive is not a toad but something delicate: if not a flower, then a leaf of Rapunzel's salad.
Nicholas Shakespeare (Sunday Telegraph Magazine)

A lawyer is a man who, when two people are fighting over an oyster, sucks out the contents, and gives the shell to the contenders, half each.
Lord Lytton

The Chubb mortice has a total of 17,000 computations and permutations.
Frederick Forsyth (The Fourth Protocol)

If you removed all the four-letter words which are Donleavy's substitute for comedy, this 400-page tome would be halved in size. If you then removed all the remaining words, you would have the basis for a promising novel.
Paul Taylor (review of "Are you listening Rabbi Low" in Sunday Times)

At lunchtime on Thursday Michael Fish, speaking on BBC television, gave what may become the most celebrated wrong forecast in history. He said: "Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said that she heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you are watching, don't worry: there isn't."
Quoted in the Sunday Times 18.10.87

If your doctor tells you to go abroad at once you can always settle for sunny Torquay instead. If your solicitor suggests you go abroad, you'd be wise to make for Heathrow immediately.
P.D.James (The skull beneath the skin)

A man was charged at Hamilton sheriff court with wasting firemen's time after he'd made some false-alarm calls. The court ordered 13 firemen to appear at 9.30 a.m. as witnesses. They all waited until 1 p.m., when they were told they weren't needed and could go home.
Sunday Post, Scotland

This is how Tam Dalyell is feeling -- about the Belgrano, about Westland, the miners' strike, Libya, GCHQ, Zircon, the Peter Wright affair... this book is really just a cry of rage: "I was right -- surely you can see -- look, here is the evidence -- let's go through it all carefully again -- how can anyone disagree..?" But the thrust of the book, and the detailed evidence assembled, are for the most part familiar. Writing it all up, again, and publishing it in this way, is just one more try at persuading somebody (I don't think Mr Dalyell is quite sure whom) to say: "Yes, Tam, you were right. Off with Maggie's head!"

How he loathes Mrs Thatcher. She is variously called pig-headed, a fishwife, and a mass murderess as the story proceeds. This element of personal vendetta seriously weakens his case because -- for all that he rests it upon alleged facts -- his gravest charges rely upon his imputing to her the worst imaginable motives consistent with those facts. One has to say -- without denying that his allegations of facts need answering -- that there is a certain sleight-of-hand here.

Matthew Parris (Review of 'MISRULE - How Mrs Thatcher has misled Parliament from the sinking of the Belgrano to the Wright affair' by Tam Dalyell, 1987)

Jelly babies depicting the Holy Family on sale in West Germany have been described by the country's Catholic bishops as "tasteless".
Catholic Herald (quoted in Punch 1987)

PLEASE NO EXPLANATIONS IN THE CHURCH
Seen in a church in Israel

Avagardo's Law. What goes up must come down.
When at night most people are stationary and thus using less oxygen the plants reverse their cycle to give out carbon dioxide and so keep this 28% fairly constant.
Aluminium is used in air craft as it is a very light metal, it is able to be supported by air, otherwise if it was a heavy metal it would fall to the ground.
'What is meant by the term "dehydration"?'
If I wanted to dehydrate a plum, I would heat it gently in an oven, this would remove the water. I would be left with a disgusting dried plum.
It is exceedingly dangerous to use a methane-burning appliance in a badly-ventilated room e.g. One without any windows which actually open or one without any doors which would be a bit silly wouldn't it because you wouldn't be able to enter into the room unless being a worm which could enter through a crack in the floor. But you aren't _likely_ to be a worm so that's no use.
Quoted in 'H2O and all that' by Martyn Berry

There is nothing evil or degrading in believing oneself a teapot, but it argues a certain inaccuracy of the thought processes.
P.G. Wodehouse (The coming of Bill)

  My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
   Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
  Another view of man my second brings,
   Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
 
  But ah! united, what reverse we have!
   Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown:
  Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,
   And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
 
  Thy ready wit the word will soon supply,
   May its approval beam in that soft eye!

Jane Austen (Emma) (Courtship)

Mr Xu Xin, chairman of the China National Advertising Association, said: "The phonetic translation of the slogan chosen by the Coca Cola company meant 'Bite the Wax Tadpole'. I altered this to mean 'Let your Teeth Rejoice'."
Quoted in Private Eye 25/7/86

We of course take it as axiomatic that this [Category Theory] is the appropriate foundational language for mathematics and theoretical computer science...
P.Taylor

CUCS book library
Jon Fairbairn, room 208 Computer Laboratory, looks after the CUCS library. It doesn't at present contain any books, though.
Cambridge University Computer Society Help File

This generalization of the projection results provides an answer to a picturesque question posed by the author: 'Can one construct a digital sundial?' It is, at least in theory, possible to construct a set in R^3 such that at (almost) all times of day the shadow of the set gives the digits of the time (to within area zero).
K. Falconer, Sets with prescribed projections and Nikodym sets, Proc. London Math. Soc. (3), 53 (1986), 49.

I curse ye by a right line, a crooked line, a simple and a broken. By flame, by wind, by water, by a mass, by rain, and by clay. By a flying thing, by a creeping thing, by a serpent. By an eye, by a hand, by a foot, by a crown, by a crest, by a sword and by a scourge I curse ye. Haade, Mikaded, Rakeben, Rika, Ritalica, Tasarith, Modeca, Rabert, Tuth, Tumch.
Margery Allingham (Look to the lady)

The trouble with sociology is that anyone can do it. You've only got to count the sewers in Liverpool and you're on the way to a degree, probably a doctorate.
Howard Shaw (Death of a don)

We apologise for the fact that in the title of the Tensors talk in the last newsletter, the words "theoretical physics" came out as "impossible ideas"
Archimedeans' Newsletter 30.1.86

Hedgehogs are handy to have about the home. Easy to store, unlike sperm whales or rhinoceroses, the hedgehog fits neatly in a box in your corner cupboard ready for any emergency. Hardwearing and requiring nothing more than a daily saucer of milk, you'll find hedgehogs fun to use and amazingly economical.
Origin unknown (children's book)

I could not morally recommend weird chemicals, alchoholic excesses or gratuitous violence to ANYONE as a means to mental stability ... but I must admit I'm doing pretty well on them.
Alan Mycroft (?)

Nudist welfare man's model wife fell for the Chinese hypnotist from the Co-op bacon factory
News of the World headline c. 1971.

...when a party of six are seated in a carriage, the chances are that one given person will be next to or opposite to any other given person.
Trollope (Phineas Redux)

  He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool. Shun him.
  He who knows not and knows that he knows not can be taught. Teach him.
  He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep. Wake him.
  He who knows and knows that he knows is a prophet. Follow him.

Origin unknown.

When one reflects what a deal of harm a bishop may do, one wishes that there was some surer way of getting bishops.
Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds)

  "I see you're not a married man." "That's true: How can you tell?"
  "A married man's a harried man and you look rather well!"

From Offenbach's Christopher Columbus.

To be alone with the girl to whom he is not engaged is a man's delight; - to be alone with the man to whom she is engaged is the woman's.
Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds)

I preach mathematics. I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh. Mr. X was a bad case; he took my advice. He is now busy squaring the circle, and gets great relief.
From 'The Magic Mountain', by Thomas Mann.

  The pay is small,
  The food is bad.
  I wonder why
  I don't go mad.

A maid in Norfolk, 1876.

On a day of bumps galore and an average of six per division, the most unusual came in the fifth when Churchill 4 bumped Pembroke 4 coming out of Grassy pushing Pembroke into the side of a moored cabin cruiser. The cruiser, taking water through a gash in its side, sank slowly.
Cambridge Evening News, June 1983.

What used to be called prejudice is now called a null hypothesis.
A.W.F.Edwards.

"Watson," said he, "if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you."
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Yellow Face)

The life of a dashing Cambridge Student is rather enviable for its independence than felicity. About half past nine he rises with the devil of a headache; at half past ten if he do not think it proper to pass the lecture room window in his shooting jacket he cannot refrain at least from sporting his great coat, and hiring a hack at Barron's he gallops a short way on the Trumpington Road so that if any dons be taking their morning walk they may admire his spirit and wonder at his agility. About one he moves off to Lichfield's and after eating as much pastry as would satisfy a dozen Bond Street Loungers, returns to his rooms and contrives by four o' clock to arrange his cravat; after dinner he has either a wine party and gets hellishly cut or sets off in a tandem to Bolsham. In the former case he staggers out about half and hour before gates are shut, rambles about the streets in search of a piece, kicks up a row with the townsmen, rushes into Frank Smith's Coffee house; tells a long story about his father's dogs in a tone so loud that all conversation is at and end. He meets with two or three friends as much done over as himself who pay a visit to Simeon, blow up the whole congregation; break half a dozen lamps, wrench off haf a dozen knockers and staggers into College just in time to escape the penalty of sleeping out of gates.

A sketch of a Cantab Collegian (Sporting Magazine, 1811)

Melbriniononsadsazzersteldregandishfelstelior had seldom been exploited by terrestrial adepts, inasmuch as the use of a demon's name was necessary in those rites binding him to servitude. One missed syllable and the conjurer would step from the circle, smiling, to discover that the demon was smiling also.
Then, leaving the remains artistically disposed about the conjuring area, the demon would return to the infernal regions, perhaps bearing with him some small souvenir of an amusing interlude.
It was Melbriniononsadsazzersteldregandishfelstelior's misfortune, however, that Baran of the Extra Hand hailed from Blackwold, where a complex, agglutinative language was spoken.

Roger Zelazny (The Changing Land)

There are four sorts of cut:
(1) The cut direct is to stare an acquaintance in the face and pretend not to know him.
(2) The cut indirect, to look another way, and pretend not to see him.
(3) The cut sublime, to admire the top of some tall edifice or the clouds of heaven till the person cut has passed by.
(4) The cut infernal, to stop and adjust your boots till the party has gone past.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

'Son,' the old guy says, 'no matter how far you travel, or how smart you get, always remember this: someday, somewhere,' he says, 'a guy is going to come to you, and show you a nice brand-new set of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that a jack of spades will jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But son,' the old guy says, 'do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an earful of cider.'
Damon Runyon (The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown)

Even the best men are subject to aberrations, or at least commonnesses, in their relations with women, just as they will eat rotten cheese and half-putrid partridges that are really only fit for pigs.
Trebitsch tr Shaw (Jitta's Atonement)

I have no more energy than a shrimp who has swallowed a Norfolk Dumpling.
Edward Lear

Mai Thai Finn is one of the students in the programme and was in the centre of the photo. We incorrectly listed her name as one of the items on the menu.
Community Life

What have you achieved? What have you achieved? You lost your chance, me old son. You contributed absolutely nothing to this life. A waste of time you being here at all. No place for you in Westminster Abbey. The best you can expect is a few daffodils in a jam jar, a rough headstone bearing the legend 'He came and he went' and in between - nothing! Nobody will even notice you're not here. After about a year afterwards somebody might say down the pub "Where's old Hancock? I haven't seen him around lately". "Oh, he's dead y'know". A right raison d'etre that is. Nobody will ever know I existed. Nothing to leave behind me. Nothing to pass on. Nobody to mourn me. That's the bitterest blow of all.
Tony Hancock (TV monologue)

And now, in keeping with Channel 40's policy of always bringing you the latest in blood and guts, in living colour, you're about to see another first - an attempted suicide.
Chris Hubbock (before shooting herself in the head on a news progamme)

Never let it be said of O' Neill that he failed to empty a bottle. Ave atque vale.
Eugene O' Neill Jr. (Suicide note)

" You shall do no work : it is a statute for ever throughout your generations in all your dwellings. "
- Leviticus 23 v 31.

  The centipede was happy, quite,
  Until a toad in fun
  Said, 'Pray, which leg goes after which?'
  This worked his mind to such a pitch,
  He lay distracted in a ditch,
  Considering how to run.

Origin unknown

Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely. Don't expect much from human life - a sorry business at the best.
Sidney Smith

What Mr Gladstone used to call 'grubous' - a good blend of grim, gruesome, and gloom.
George Lyttleton

... the would-be psychiatrist who, when asked why he wanted to be one said 'I really wanted to be a sex-maniac, but I failed in my practical.'
Rupert Hart-Davis

Nose Tax (The): In the ninth century the Danes imposed on Irish houses a poll tax, historically called the "Nose Tax," because those who neglected to pay the ounce of gold were punished by having their noses slit.
Brewer (The dictionary of phrase and fable)

What does seem likely is that before many years are out, no Maths students of any worth will be coming to Cambridge.
J.J. Barrett (Editorial, Eureka, 1968)

Dr Dougherty ... felt that courses on programming were out of place in the Tripos - they had the same relation to mathematics as the art of glass-blowing did to physics.
(From Eureka, 1968)

A mature potato is not perfect ... but the mind of an intelligent potato would at once admit it as being, beyond all doubt, a genuine, fully developed specimen of his own particular species.
G.K. Chesterton

I am interested in everything that is convex.
Minkowski

  On the subject I shall write you a most valuable letter,
  Full of excellent suggestions, when I feel a little better,
  But at present I'm afraid I am as mad as any hatter,
  So I'll keep 'em to myself, for my opinion doesn't matter.

W.S. Gilbert (Ruddigore)

Whatever his intergalactic ilk, Mr Glover's head suddenly turned into a nest of spinach with one eyeball planted in its midst. Such is television and the actor's life. One day it's socialism with a human face, next day you're the voice of a cyclopic vegetable.
Russell Davies (Sunday Times, 24/8/80)

Flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is - 'Birds of a feather flock together'.
Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

She considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish.
Ibid.

If you wish large quantities of candy-floss you should promote heavy industry!
J.W.S. Cassels (Economics for mathematicians)

"I didn't get where I am today by having green frogs dropped down my crutch."
David Nobbs (The better world of Reginald Perrin)

"Ours is the only trade," said [the policeman], "in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don't write stories in which hairdressers can't cut hair and have to be helped by a customer."
G.K. Chesterton (The mirror of the magistrate)

Because of the need to prevent this source of large errors during the evolution of problem solvers that must survive while they master their domain, we infer that the generality-specificity dimension of problem solving runs from ends-oriented to means-oriented, and from continuous to discrete.
Origin unknown.

  Midnight assist our moan;
  Help us to sigh and groan,
  Heavily, heavily:
  Graves, yawn and yield your dead,
  Till death be uttered,
  Heavily, heavily.

Shakespeare (Much Ado about Nothing, V-3)

I am a mathematician, sir. I never permit myself to think.
John Dickson Carr (The hollow man)

I have three dinner-bells - the first (which is the largest) is rung when dinner is nearly ready; the second (which is rather larger) is rung when it is quite ready; and the third (which is as large as the other two put together) is rung all the time I am at dinner.
Lewis Carroll (Letter)

The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.
T.P.Blount (Natural History, 1693)

It will be noted that the man ... takes all these pains with the dog ... He does not housetrain the earwig or give baths to centipedes.
C.S.Lewis (The problem of pain)

The madrigore of verjuice must be talthibianised.
C.S.Lewis (That hideous strength)

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o' clock is a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson.

  See the happy moron:
  He doesn't give a damn.
  I wish I was a moron:
  My God! Perhaps I am!

Anon

A mermaid is a virgin from the waist up and a sturgeon from there down.
Anon

One of these superstitions is that cats always land on their feet. Now the last thing I do before going to bed is to toss my cat down the cellar steps and I have discovered that by giving it a certain twist I can make it land on its head every time.
From the New York Times.

A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o' clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.
Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)

Wash away your spleen.
Ibid.

A triumvirate of murine rodents devoid of ophthalmic acuity was observed in a state of rapid locomotion in pursuit of an agriculturalist's uxorial adjunct. Said adjunct then performed a triple caudectomy utilizing an acutely honed bladed instrument generally used for subdivision of edible tissue.
Mary Youngquist.

Is the creation you have in mind a magnificently seared thickness of sizzling goodness that has been reduced by grinders of rarest Toledo steel to mouth-watering palate-tantalizers of Kansas city beef beaded with rich ruby globules served on a farm-fresh roll and laced lavishly with great oozing lashings of rarest mustards and onions from faraway Spain?
Russell Baker.

  Willie built a guillotine,
  Tried it out on sister Jean.
  Said Mother as she got the mop:
  "These messy games have got to stop!"

William E. Engel.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Samuel Butler.

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time, a great she-bear coming up the street pops its head into the shop. What! No soap! So he died; and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picinninies, and the Joblilies, and the Garyulies, and the great Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top. And they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out of the heels of their boots.
Samuel Foote (Nonsense).

When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn, trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigour, express by mouth the warning Hi! hi! Beware the wandering horse that he shall not take fright as you pass him by. Do not explode the exhaust box at him.
Translation of Japanese traffic regulations.

  JANet was quite ill one day.
  FEBrile troubles came her way.
  MARtyr-like, she lay in bed;
  APRoned nurses softly sped.
  MAYbe, said the leech judicial,
  JUNket would be beneficial.
  JULeps too, though freely tried,
  AUGured ill, for Janet died.
  SEPulchre was sadly made;
  OCTaves pealed and prayers were said.
  NOVices with many a tear
  DECorated Janet's bier.

Author unknown.

A knowledge of Sanskrit is of little use to a man trapped in a sewer.
C.H.W. Roll.

He whose head resembles a Dutch cheese does not rest it on the grocer's counter.
Ibid.

Do not wear earmuffs in the land of the rattlesnake.
N.J.Rock.

Gloves make a poor present for a man with no hands.
George Van Schaick.

Folk songs do not inform us that it's great to be singing in six-eight time, or that you won't get your dairymaid until you have mastered the Dorian mode.
Constant Lambert (Music Ho!)

IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BIRS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE.
C.E.Shannon (The mathematical theory of communication)

The head and in frontal attack on an english writer that the character of this point is therefore another method for the letters that the time of who ever told the problem for an unexpected.
Ibid.

  For as her foot swells, strange to say,
  Her intellect is on the wane -
  Oh, for some remedy I pray
  That may restore both foot and brain!

Dostoyevsky (The brothers Karamazov)
(On the convalescence of the swollen foot of the object of my affections)

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
Shakespeare (Hamlet)

I can count every one of my bones.
Psalm 22 v. 17.

  Go (move, continue moving, leave, depart,
  Proceed, progress, be current, travel, start),
  Thou book (libretto, printed treatise, script):
  Help (aid, assist) those badly (ill) equipped
  (Fashioned) to read (interpret, scan) or write
  (Trace symbols, state in writing): and delight
  (Please highly, fill with pleasure) me (myself)
  With riches (royalties, cash, loot, money, pelf).

Tony Brode (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

A towel ... wrap it round your head to ... avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you).
Douglas Adams (The Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy).

  Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
  As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
  Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes.
  And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
  Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
                                    see if I don't !

Ibid.

Consider the wild flowers which you can see on nature trails or in conservation areas. None of them are employed in the textile industry. Yet even King Solomon in his 1,500,000-pound luxury home was not nearly so well-dressed as they are in terms of colourful visual impact.
Peter Simple (Daily Telegraph 10.10.79) [The Bevindon Bible]

Well, if I be served such another trick, I'll have my brains ta'en out, and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new year's gift.
Shakespeare (Merry Wives of Windsor)

  I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical,
  I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical.
  About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news -
  With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypoteneuse.

W.S.Gilbert (Pirates of Penzance)

Self-decapitation is an extremely difficult, not to mention dangerous, thing to attempt.
W.S. Gilbert (Mikado)

  Is this a grasshopper ? - Ha ! no; it is my
  Whiskerandos - you shall not keep him -
  I know you have him in your pocket -
  An oyster may be crossed in love ! - who says
  A whale's a bird ?

Sheridan (The Critic)

The crack like a muffled shot of a small pistol which indicates the official breaking of the criminal's neck ought to be broadcast; when the neck is not broken, listeners would hear the "squelch"1 of strangulation - which would give equal satisfaction to many.
1 A scientific friend points out that "squelch" should read "dull plonk".
Charles Duff (A handbook on hanging)

Who amongst us cannot immediately recognise by intuition that hanging is an art, and the executioner an artist ? Hanging has all the characteristics of art: conservatism, the elaboration of an instinctive mode of expression, balance, harmony in effects, rhythm, tone; and effect.
Ibid.

The Oxford undergraduate leaves Oxford thinking he owns the world; the Cambridge undergraduate leaves Cambridge not caring who owns it.
Sir Max Beerbohm

Examples of the effect of channel errors on textual transmission
(i) Deletion, e.g. "The Prime Minister spent the weekend in the country shooting peasants."
(ii) Insertion, e.g. "The walkway across the trout hatchery was supported on concrete breams"
(iii) Alteration, e.g. "Say it with glowers", "For sale : Volvo 144 with overdrive, fuel infection, etc."
(iv) Transposition, e.g. "Yet, down the road, you will still find the corner shop where the lady behind the counter will lovingly warp your presents."
(v) Nonsense, e.g. "The benefits of pollution treatment are oozelumny gzzr dny32~m"
S.M.Moss (Ph.D. thesis)

That's rather a revolting-looking building. Trinity Hall, isn't it ?
A tourist, seeing the Wren Library.

Beavers, even voluble beavers, didn't say 'Jesus wept' and 'Bloody Hell', not if they wanted to get into print as children's bestsellers.
Tom Sharpe (The Great Pursuit)

MP ACTS IN DEATH PROBE LEGAL AID TUSSLE
Headline (Cambridge Evening News 25/10/75)

  Sing me your song, oh !
  It is sung to the moon, by a love-lorn loon....

W.S.Gilbert (Yeomen of the guard)

I can trace my ancestry back to a proto-plasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable.
W.S.Gilbert (Mikado)

...he put a monument over it with an inscription on one side: 'Here lies the leg of the collegiate secretary Lebedyev', and on the other: 'Rest beloved ashes, till the dawn of a happy resurrection', and that he had a service read over it every year...
Dostoyevsky (The Idiot)

"You have wronged me, and in revenge I've come to cut my stomach open before you."
Ibid.

A third case worthy of note is that of Isadora Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a matchbox in front of him which contained a remarkable worm, said to be unknown to science.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Thor Bridge)

The source of these outrages is known and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes's authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The veiled lady)

A man receives an average of ten letters each day. On a certain day he receives no mail and wonders if it is a holiday. To decide this, he computes the probability that in ten years he would have at least one day without any mail.
Problem in 'Finite mathematical structures' - J.G.Kemeny et al.

Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of sardines.
D.H.Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

A contribution to the Mathematical theory of Big Game Hunting
4.The Bolzano-Weierstrass method.
Bisect the desert by a line running N-S. The lion is either in the E portion or the W portion; let us suppose him to be in the W portion. Bisect this portion by a line running E-W. The lion is either in the N portion or the S portion; let us suppose him to be in the N portion. We continue the process indefinitely, constructing a sufficiently strong fence about the chosen portion at each step. The diameter of the chosen portions approaches zero, so that the lion is ultimately surrounded by a fence of arbitrarily small perimeter.
19.The Schrodinger method.
At any given moment there is a positive probability that there is a lion in the cage. Sit down and wait.
9a. The Eratosthenian method.
We enumerate the objects in the desert and then examine them one-by-one, discarding all those which are not lions. By a refinement of this method, we can ensure that only prime lions are captured.
H.Petard (Eureka 16)

...lunatics; they reason, in fact they often reason with great acuteness, like the mad don who thought the don underneath was trying to shoot him through the floor, and consequently always sat on the table until at last he grew to believe that he was a teapot.
R.A.Knox (The Hidden Stream)

Le Jaseroque

  Il brilgue: les toves lubricilleux
  Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave
  Enmime's sont les gougebosquex
  Et le momerade horsgrave.

F.L.Worrin after Lewis Carroll

I do account this world a tedious theatre, For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will.
John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi)

I did impeticos thy gratillity.
Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

In sooth, thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spokest of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queuebus.
Ibid.

You can almost define an analyst as a mathematician who doesn't mind missing his lunch as long as he can prove it exists.
Dr.Woodall (Combinatorics seminar 26/4/79)

Whenever he found out a new thing about a triangle Pythagoras who had no shame jumped out of his bath and shouted 'Q.E.D.' through the streets of athens its a wonder they never locked him up.
Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (Down with skool !)

Simulant - Something that doesn't exist but pretends to.
Stanislaw Lem (Futurological Congress)

The B flat major sonata ... was another work of which Beethoven thought a great deal. He said it 'had washed itself' (hat sich gewaschen), which, as Sir Donald Tovey suggests, might be freely translated into 'takes the cake' or regarded as akin to Stevenson's proud announcement that The Master of Ballantrae was 'a howling cheese'.
Eric Blom (Beethoven's Piano Sonatas Discussed)

  There is Pleasure sure,
  In being Mad, which none but Madmen know !

John Dryden (The Spanish Friar)

  I am not yet born; O hear me
  Let not the blood-sucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
 club-footed ghoul come near me.

Louis MacNeice

You may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence.
Schopenhauer

All here is gloomy. A faint struggle with the tediousness of time, a doleful confession of present misery, and the approach, seen and felt, of what is most dreaded and most shunned; but such is the lot of man.
Dr. Johnson

One often falls in love with a woman out of boredom; one does not know what else to do with her.
Jean Paul Richter

All my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

The thought of suicide is a great consolation; by means of it one gets through many a bad night.
Nietzsche

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.
Disraeli

Pangle could be a local variation of pightle, meaning a small meadow or paddock. Or it could have something to do with pample, meaning to tread lightly. We also have "pungled" (shrivelled) and "pingle" (to pick at one's food), but these do not seem to help with the Pangle.
Eric Fowler (Jonathan Mardle)

  V: Oculi omnium in te sperant, Domine
  R: Et tu das escam illis in tempore,
  V: Aperis manum tuam,
  R: Et imples omne animal benedictione.
  V: Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,
  R: Sicut erat in principio, nunc est,
     Et erit in saecula saeculorum.
  V: Benedic, Domine, nos et dona tua,
     Quae de largitate tua sumus sumpturi,
     Et concede ut illis salubriter nutriti,
     Tibi debitum obsequium praestare valeamus,
     Per Christum Dominum nostrum.

Grace, Trinity College.

  Wan
  Swan
  On the lake
  Like a cake
  Of soap.
  Why is the swan
  Wan
  On the lake ?
  He has abandoned hope.

Stevie Smith (The bereaved swan)

  Whip me ye devils,
  From the possession of this heavenly sight !
  Blow me about in winds ! roast me in sulphur !
  Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire !

Shakespeare (Othello)

PANGLE In the parish of Wereham is one of those fenny badly-drained pieces of land, which are usually called 'labours in vain' from all attempts to turn them to profitable uses being ineffectual; this is called the Pangle.
W.Rye (Glossary of words used in East Anglia)

After all, one can't complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said 'Bother !' The Social Round. Always something going on.
A.A.Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

  Blow, winds and crack your cheeks ! rage ! blow !
  You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
  Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks !
  You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
  Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
  Singe my white head ! And thou, all-shaking thunder
  Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world !
  Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
  That make ingrateful man !

Shakespeare (King Lear)

I hate his nasty insinuendos.
Samuel Butler (The way of all flesh)

A sofa, of incomprehensible form regarded from any sofane point of view.
Dickens (The uncommercial traveller)

If I hadn't played chess, I would have been a mathematician. What a bore that would have been !
David Levy.

Rich folk may ride on camels but it ain't so easy for 'em to see out of a needle's eye.
Dickens (Martin Chuzzlewit) [Mrs. Gamp]

Go to, you're a dry fool.
Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

  There's nothing in this world can make me joy:
  Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,
  Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man;
  And bitter shame hath spoilt the sweet world's taste,
  That it yields nothing but shame and bitterness.

Shakespeare (King John)

It is not, indeed, a book to be read through from cover to cover at all, except by those wishing to be pole-axed in the interests of science by a tedium so monumental as to be entirely without precedent in the history of fiction.
N.F.Simpson (Harry Bleachbaker) [Sleeve note]

This is an uneven book, parts of it having been made more boring than was in itself strictly necessary in order to highlight those other parts which are less so.
Ibid [Author's note]

  Ode to David Hilbert
  The drab, livid
  Bad live third,
  Bid diver halt
  The valid bird.

Vassar Seminar (Amer. Math. Monthly 85/8)

The human body, if properly cared for, can last a lifetime.
Unknown origin.

The pancreas looked like a strangled football sock dipped in old batter. It was apparently supposed to. Oh.
Russell Davies (Sunday Times 12/11/78)

  If you are sitting at a grand table,
  do not lick your lips and exclaim, 'What a spread !'
  Remember, it is a vice to have a greedy eye.
  There is no greater evil in creation than the eye;
  that is why it must shed tears at every turn.
  Do not reach for everything you see,
  or jostle your fellow-guest at the dish;
  judge his feelings by your own
  and always behave considerately.
  Eat what is set before you like a gentleman;
  do not munch and make yourself objectionable.
  Be the first to stop for good manners' sake
  and do not be insatiable, or you will give offence.
  If you are dining in a large company,
  do not reach out your hand before others.
  A man of good upbringing is content with little,
  and he is not short of breath when he goes to bed.
  The moderate eater enjoys heavy sleep;
  he rises early, feeling refreshed.
  But sleeplessness, indigestion, and colic
  are the lot of the glutton.
  If you cannot avoid overeating at a feast,
  leave the table and find relief by vomiting.

Ecclesiasticus 31 : 12-21.

  O, let us howl, some heavy note,
  Some deadly dogged howl,
  Sounding as from the threatening throat,
  Of beasts and fatal fowl !
  As ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,
  We'll bill and bawl our parts,
  Till irksome noise have cloy'd your ears
  And corrosiv'd your hearts.
  At last when as our choir wants breath,
  Our bodies being blest,
  We'll sing like swans, to welcome death,
  And die in love and rest.

John Webster (Duchess of Malfi, Madman's song)

Every man has his own ways of courting the female sex. I should not, myself, choose to do it with photographs of spleens, diseased or otherwise.
Agatha Christie (The Moving Finger)

  Guns aren't lawful;
  Nooses give;
  Gas smells awful:
  You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

Brains need gentle handling, or they are apt to disintegrate.
Jocasta Innes (The Pauper's Cookbook)

Brains are a taste worth cultivating.
Ibid.

There are three things I always forget. Names, faces and - the third I can't remember.
Italo Svevo.

Suicide is the sincerest form of self-criticism.
Anon (graffito)

In my opinion the best way is to take a dead fish and make it rigid.
Prof. Sir James Lighthill (overheard)

  There was an old Russian called Lenin
  Who did one or two million men in.
  That's a lot to have done in,
  But, where he did one in,
  That old Russian Stalin did ten in.

Victor Gray

A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word - 'Everything'.
W. Van Orman Quine.

I wouldn't have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it.
P.G.Wodehouse (Right Ho Jeeves)

  They have mouths and speak not:
  eyes have they, and see not.
  They have ears, and hear not:
  noses have they, and smell not.

Psalm 115 (referring to idols)

All political societies are subversive. Must be. Stands to reason. Wouldn't exist if they weren't trying to subvert something or other.
Tom Sharpe (Porterhouse Blue)

It is transparently obvious to any scholar that William Shakespeare's plays were written not by William Shakespeare, but by another author of the same name.
Patrick Moore (Can you speak Venusian ?)

Mathematicians are fatuous.
Strutter (True happiness)

  If I were a cassowary
  On the plains of Timbuctoo,
  I would eat a missionary,
  Cassock, bands and hymn-book too.

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.

Choose your companions carefully, you may have to eat them...
W.C.Sellar, R.J.Yeatman (And now all this)

You'll be the tenth rat this week to have his brains sucked out by a pneumatic tube.
William Kotzwinkle (Doctor Rat)

Erasmus Darwin had a theory that once in a while one should perform a damn-fool experiment. It almost always fails, but when it does come off is terrific.
Darwin played the trombone to his tulips. The result of this particular experiment was negative.
J.E.Littlewood (A mathematician's miscellany)

  How soon the servant sun,
  (Sir morrow mark),
  Can time unriddle, and the cupboard stone,
  (Fog has a bone
  He'll trumpet into meat),
  Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown
  And the naked egg stand straight.

Dylan Thomas (Poem)

I see no ships by holding the telescope to my blind eye with my missing arm.
Peter Pook (after Nelson) (Pook's China Doll)

'Hallo !' says the baggy 'you seem to have got somebody's arm in your box'
'So I have,' says Chapman, 'I expect it's my wife's. Careless woman ! Must have dropped it in when she was packing the box.'
R. Austin Freeman (Pandora's box)

"Really ?" said Setoc, "What was this security on which they refused you this sum ?"
"My Aunt's corpse," replied the Egyptian, "She was the finest woman in Egypt. She used to go everywhere with me. She died on the way here, and I turned her into one of the most splendid mummies in the country. Back home I should be able to pawn her for any sum I wished.
Voltaire (Zadig)

I should as soon think of tickling a porcupine.
R. Austin Freeman (The Old Lag)

A French politician representing a somewhat backward district in Africa was some time ago found to have been eaten by his constituents. The journalist who discovered this used the phrase: 'Je crois qu'il a passe par la casserole' (I think he ended up in a casserole). Clearly the Africans knew what they were about. For making a delicious meal out of tough and intractable material, the casserole has no rival.
Katherine Whitehorn (Cooking in a Bedsitter)

I was not sleeping, nor what a person would term correctly, dozing. I was more what a person would strictly call watching with my eyes closed.
Dickens (Little Dorrit)

You will find it serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company - on entering a room, for instance - Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.
Ibid.

Enter a messenger, with two heads and a hand.
Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus)

  Bludgeoned to despair
  I lie deranged
  in a cell whose very walls rebound
  th echoes of remorse.
  Whilst from my heart
  the overflowing tears
  decry the hellish path that
  brought me here.
  What blundering fool am I to slip
  like Eve within the trough of guilt ?
  Is there no other man who knows,
  the torment, such as I
  of life.
  Yet life in Hell.

L. Moelwyn-Hughes (Cambridge Evening News 21/9/77)

The following is taken from a United States newspaper of October 1935: 'At Lawton, Oklahama, John Brett, an attorney, sang "Home Sweet Home" to a jury so as to induce clemency for his client, Lloyd Grable, a bank robber. The jury responded with a verdict of life imprisonment for Mr. Grable.'
P.A.Scholes (Oxford Companion to Music: Home Sweet Home)

  Do not pry into things too hard for you
  Or examine what is beyond your reach.
  Meditate on the commandments you have been given;
  What the Lord keeps secret is no concern of yours.
  Do not busy yourself with matters that are beyond you;
  Even what has been shown you is above man's grasp.
  Many have been led astray by their speculations,
  And false conjectures have impaired their judgement.

Ecclesiasticus 3 21-24

For whom all things are possible: The supremely intelligent child; a psychagogic pandect.
Pat Gunkel (Book title)

As I made the mesmeric passes amid ejaculations of "dead! dead !" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once - within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk - crumbled - absolutely rotted away, beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome - of detestable putridity.
E.A.Poe (The facts in the case of M.Valdemar)

  There was never yet philosopher
  That could endure the toothache patiently.

Shakespeare (Much Ado about Nothing)

  They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain,
  A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
  A threadbare juggler, and a fortune teller,
  A needy hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,
  A living-dead man.

Shakespeare (Comedy of Errors)

I suppose if the scruples I've overcome in my time were laid end to end they would reach from London to Glasgow.
P.G.Wodehouse (Service with a smile)

  Hark ! villains, I will grind your bones to dust,
  And with your blood and it I'll make a paste;
  And of the paste a coffin I will rear,
  And make two pasties of your shameful heads;
  And bid that strumpet, your unhallow'd dam,
  Like to the earth to swallow her own increase.
  This is the feast that I have bid her to,
  And this the banquet she shall surfeit on;
  ------------------------------------------------
  Why there they are both, baked in that pie;
  Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
  Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.

Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus)

  Mistress, I dug upon your grave
  To bury a bone, in case
  I should be hungry near this spot
  When passing on my daily trot.
  I am sorry, but I quite forgot
  It was your resting-place.

Thomas Hardy ('Ah, are you digging on my grave ?')

The London police, Miss Samsonoff, are delightful, but rather on the dull side. They are much given to standing in the middle of crowded roads and dreaming, and in even your short stay in London you must have observed what a serious, nay intolerable, obstruction they are to the traffic.
Michael Arlen (The Ghoul of Golder's Green)

Tamb: Take it up, villain and eat it; or else I will make thee slice the brawns of thy arms into carbonadoes and eat them.
Usum: Nay, 'twere better he killed his wife, and then she shall be sure not to be starved, and he provided for a month's victual beforehand.
Tamb: Here is my dagger: despatch her while she is fat; for if she live but a while longer she will fall into a consumption with fretting, and then she will not be worth the eating.
Marlowe (Tamburlaine the Great)

"Globble Blub Glub Bubble Glubble" - Well what else did you expect a hot water bottle to say ?
Mike Higgs (Moonbird cartoon strip in C.E.N. 1977)

"I think there's a pain somewhere in the room" said Mrs. Gradgrind "but I couldn't positively say that I have got it."
Dickens (Hard Times)

Whenever a second girl is born in a family she is thrown in the river - they can't stand more than one girl in a house.
Maxim Gorki (Fragments from my diary) [The Chinese]

If you are worried about the possibility of illness caused by your goldfish, you are probably suffering from what we doctors call lunacy and should seek psychiatric help.
Private Eye 1977 (A Doctor Writes)

I used to be indecisive; but now I'm not so sure.
Bosco Pertwee.

First Serv: O ! I am slain. My lord, you have one eye left to see some mischief on him. O ! [Dies]
Corn: Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly ! Where is thy lustre now ?
Shakespeare (King Lear)

Your brain is like a sleeping giant...it seems we use less than 1% of the brain's capability.
Tony Buzan (Encyclopaedia Britannica advert)

  He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
  That stood beside his bed:
  He looked again and found it was
  A Bear without a Head.
  'Poor thing,' he said, 'poor silly thing !
  It's waiting to be fed !'

Lewis Carroll (The mad gardener's song)