More Eponymous Tools

I'm inspired to revive this blog by today's crossword (.puz link) in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

We've all cowered under the Sword of Damocles or cut through complicated choices with Occam's Razor. But I, and probably you, have never been stuck with Morton's Fork nor lost a head to Hume's Guillotine.

Morton's Fork forms by contradictory arguments leading to the same conclusion. As a two-tined fork, it especially recalls Heller's Catch-22: If you ask for a mental health discharge, you must be sane because if you were insane, you'd claim to be sane.

Hume's Guillotine is a philosophical tool for severing what is from what ought to be, a gap Hume thought other writers should respect more. Amusingly, Hume has his own fork dividing the logic of ideas from the states of the real or actual.

I did not know.

How far east can you go?

A user of my crossword puzzle pointers page wrote to say he was seeing wrong dates on the page. I wasn't, so I asked him what browser and operating system he was using, and what time zone he was in. The time zone was the interesting bit: Venezuelan time is four and a half hours behind UTC, which made me think that either Javascript or I had a problem with partial-hour offsets. I was wrong.

The real problem is that Javascript thinks Venezuela is 19:30 east of UTC instead of 4:30 west. I can work around that, I thought, by subtracting a day from the time in any time zone that's impossibly far east. But how far is that?

Twelve hours is the obvious answer, so naturally it's wrong. According to Wikipedia's List of time zones, the easternmost zone is UTC+1400, used by the Line Islands. These islands are mostly possessions of Kiribati, which is centered much further west. The Line Islands' unusual time zone has the advantage of making it usually the same day as in Tarawa, the capital city and island.

Amusingly, the Line Islands used to observe the same time as Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands (UTC-1000), but switched to their current zone by skipping the entire day of 31 December, 1994.

I did not know.

METONYM

The New York Times puzzle for March 14th had a clue reminiscent of those infamous SAT analogy questions: 36a. "The White House," for "the presidency," e.g. The answer was METONYM, a thoroughly unfamiliar term. Metonymy is the practice of substituting an associated thing for the actual subject, often putting a concrete noun in place of an abstract one. When they say that you can't fight city hall, they mean, metonymically, that you can't fight the government.

I did not know.

ZARF

In Sunday's Boston Globe Puzzle, 1 across is "Coffee cup holder" and the answer is ZARF. The Wikipedia article on zarf explains that these holders originated in Turkey, perhaps with the rising popularity of coffee in the thirteenth century, and took their name from an Arabic word. While those holders were often highly ornamental, a web search suggests that the word applies now even to those cardboard sleeves that sometimes surround disposable coffee cups at Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, or McDonalds. It also names the mildly decorative foam rubber sleeves that keep your beer cold while promoting your favorite sports team.

I did not know.

TENKEY

The Jonesin' puzzle for March 6th had the clue "12d. Typist's setup usually performed with the right hand". I had no idea. The crossing words forced the answer to be TENKEY. I still had no idea. I mean, the number keys go to 9 and then 0. There is no 10 key.

TenKey (or tenkey, or ten key) refers to the ten numeric digit keys of a numeric keypad or calculator. With a little help from Google (444,000 hits for "tenkey"), I see that the web is swarming with TenKey tutors, speed tests, and calculators.

I did not know.

I Did Not Know - but I'm glad I do

I do a lot of crossword puzzles. I watch Jeopardy! (The exclamation mark is part of the name, not an editorial statement.) I read widely. Part of the attraction, especially of the puzzles, is the opportunity to exercise what I know and another part is the opportunity to learn more.

Usefulness isn't the point: hepatomancy is a wonderful word, yet the topic scarcely arises. It's entertaining to know the connections among a rabbit's scut, an armadillo's scute, a Roman soldier's scutum, your family escutcheon, and the nearby Scutra restaurant. If I ever make it on Jeopardy!, I'll be ready.

I plan to blog about words and facts that catch my interest. Peripeteia and ostents might make the cut, while J.Lo and the Hiltons never will.