Poem of the Day: Suzanne Buffam, "Trans-Neptunian Object"

The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don't exist yet.

Facts exist for whole centuries and then suddenly cease.

Pluto used to be a planet and now it is a chunk of debris, number 1341340.

My grandmother's house stands on the hill above the sea where she left it.

When I come back to visit I discover a crater in its place.

This room is full of facts.

All day I let the cat out, let it in, then let it back out again.

I mean this metaphorically.

Some facts never exist.

It is winter. It is summer.

All night the branches tap at the glass.


Source: A Public Space 8 (July 2009); online here.

Wife Kills Herself Because Her Husband Chews Tobacco

A great headline from the New York Times, 19 July 1860, p. 8. The article reads:

Mrs. Rebecca Neshing, a native of Germany, thirty-nine years of age, residing in Tenth-street, near Avenue D, was walking with her husband and some acquaintances, on Sunday evening, on Harlem bridge, when reaching the centre of that structure, she suddenly stopped, and, without giving any intimation of her intention, jumped into the water.

First off, let me say that this is a terrific sentence. Saves the dark punchline for the very end. And such a long sentence! Can you imagine a newspaper containing a sentence that long today? It sounds like the beginning of a Kafka story. Anyway, the article continues:

Her friends, as soon as they recovered from their astonishment, raised an alarm, which was promptly responded to by Capt. Porter, of the Twelfth Precinct Police. When this body, however, was taken from the water, life was extinct. Yesterday Coroner Schirmer held an inquest upon the remains, at the Station-house, whither they had been removed, and it transpired that the deceased was married nine years since, but that during the greater part of the time her relation with her husband had been unpleasant, that she has refused to live with him, and had visited Europe and California in the capacity of nurse to invalid tourists. Returning from the latter place some three months since, a reconciliation between herself and husband was effected, which was not disturbed until a few minutes previous to her death, when a dispute arose during the progress of their walk, on the subject of tobacco chewing, to which practice Mr. Neshing was addicted, and which was a source of great offence to his wife. Neither he, nor the others who heard the argument, believed for a moment, that a difference, upon what some look upon as a trivial matter, would have sufficed as a motive for suicide.

Nor would I. What an odd note to end the article on. Stuff was so weird in 1860.

P.S. The bridge below is probably where Mrs. Neshing resolved her argument with Mr. Neshing. The High Bridge crosses the Harlem River, connecting Manhattan and the Bronx. Built in 1848, it is the oldest surviving bridge in New York City and is still used by pedestrians.

Source: Library of Congress, via Wikipedia.

There's a Spot in Idaho Where You Can't Go to Jail for Killing Someone

Or for committing any felony, for that matter. Yellowstone National Park is mostly in Wyoming, but chunks of it are in Montana and Idaho. To simplify matters, Congress made it so that all of Yellowstone National Park lies within the legal jurisdiction of the District of Wyoming. So if you commit a crime in Yellowstone National Park, even if you've crossed the line into Montana or Idaho, you'd be tried at the Wyoming district court.

But. However. The Sixth Amendment says that when you undergo a trial, the members of your jury must be from the state and district that the crime was committed in.

So if you kill someone in the 50-square-mile stretch of Idaho that's part of Yellowstone National Park, your jury could only be made up of people who are from the state of Idaho and the district of Wyoming. In other words, they'd have to be from that 50-square-mile stretch.

But that chunk of land has a population of zero. So no one could be on your jury. And theoretically, you would get off scot-free.

I hope this information is helpful.

Source: Brian C. Kalt, "The Perfect Crime," Georgetown Law Journal 93.2 (January 2005): 675-688, online here, via Futility Closet.

Cranberry Morphemes

More specifically, these are fossil words. I'll post more every few days.

ulterior

As in ulterior motive. Nothing else is ever ulterior, is it? "I suspect she has ulterior sandwiches." No one says that. Ulterior comes from the Latin word meaning "further." It's actually the comparative form of the Latin word ulter, where we get our prefix ultra-, so ulterior basically means "more ultra." I guess motives can be ulterior when they go further than the ostensible motive.

 fro

As in to and fro. It's an old form of the Old Norse word fra used in Scotland and northern England. It's a cognate of the word from.

mum

As in mum's the word. It was a Middle English interjection equivalent to Shut up! or Quit yer yappin'! In early modern English it came to be an adjective meaning "silent." Now we only use it in the phrase mum's the word, which may be inspired by a line from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2: "Seal up your lips, and give no words but mum." This word is etymologically unrelated to the homophonic pet name for a mother. They do, however, share a basic root in onomatopoeia. The fossil word mum imitates the sound of humming, while mamma (which mum is an abbreviation for) imitates the sound of a suckling child. The same sound is at the root of many words related to motherhood: mother, ma, maternal, mom, mammal, mammary.

Cod Found with Woman's Hand Inside It

While looking through old issues of the New York Times, I found this story about a bizarre find near the Memphis riverfront:

Memphis is in a profuse perspiration. A very large codfish has been caught with a lady's hand in his possession. The question which now agitates the souls of Memphis Editors is, How did he come by it? It is of course impossible to arrive at the exact facts of the case; but quite a plausible conjecture may be offered. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a select party of mud-maids were sitting in a parlor cave of the Mississippi, engaged in a subaqueous game of poker. That codfish happened along and took a hand in. (NYT, 21 June 1860, p. 4)

There are several interesting elements of this story, besides the gruesome mystery and the awful climactic pun. What was a cod doing in the Mississippi River? So far as I can tell, cod are salt-water fish. Apparently some fish are called "cod" because their taste resembles cod, even though they're not closely related. But what fish are they talking about?

Also, what are mud-maids? This story will continue as I search for some answers.

P.S. "Subaqueous" is a cool word.