It will come as no surprise to you that I am hooked on word games like the NYT’s Spelling Bee and Wordle. The newest one that I can highly recommend – an exercise in finding synonyms – is called Wordy Bird. Try it and rip your hair out.

Today is all about words, then. Words (and phrases) photographed across years, usable as guides to deal with stressors of the moment. For balanced reporting, however, today is also about numbers. Go figure.

Words by clever wordsmiths can be found beyond shop boards….

Take these, for example, attributed to Lewis Carroll.

A Square Poem.

I often wondered when I cursed,
Often feared where I would be—
Wondered where she’d yield her love,
When I yield, so will she.
I would her will be pitied!
Cursed be love! She pitied me …

Read the lines in the normal way, then read it in columns – either way, it reads the same! words, with some quick math thrown in!

And talking about numbers:

((12 + 144 + 20) + (3 × √4)) ÷ 7 + 5 × 11 = 9² + 0

A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus 3 times the square root of 4,
Divided by 7,
Plus 5 times 11,
Is 9 squared, and not a bit more.

This Limerick is believed to have been written by British mathematician Leigh Mercer, known for inventing the famous palindrome “a man, a plan, a canal—Panama!” in 1948.

And then there is Miles Kington, who got away with two lines, making my morning:

A Scottish Lowlands Holiday

In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?
Inertia, hilarious, accrues, helas! 

This is a holorime, where both the last syllable of a pair of lines of verse rhyme with one another, as do the entire lines themselves. Best read out loud.

Finally we get to this: for some unrelated reason I slogged through a scientific article on word prevalence norms – i.e. how many people know the meaning of a given word. 5 million pages and a headache later I learned that more men know the words on the left hand of the table, more women the ones on the right. Surprise!

Of course, you could have asked your grandma. She would have been perfectly able to predict and verify the statistical pattern… Do we really need the scientific seal on this kind of common cultural knowledge? Of course we weren’t taught words that did not pertain to our spheres, still rigidly divided by gender in so many areas.

Hope the music delivers free happy for the weekend with every word and/or number.

First a classic: Tom Lehrer.

Then something pretty (if not entirely accurate) about π.

And here are some smart kids helping us to remember the challenges of calculus…