Thoughts

About now, under the leaf litter in the woods of Alaska and Canada, wood frogs are getting ready to freeze. Not to get cold: to freeze, with something like two-thirds of the water in them turning to ice, the breathing stopping, the heart stopping. What saves them is sugar. As the ice starts at the skin, the liver pours glucose into the blood, and that keeps the inside of each cell liquid while the ice gathers in the spaces between them. In spring they thaw, and the heart starts again. The whole trick is that the frog doesn’t try to stay warm. It lets the cold in, and decides only where the ice may go.

Karel Čapek needed a name for the manufactured workers in his 1920 play R.U.R. He thought of labori, and by his own account his brother Josef, busy painting, said through the brush in his mouth to call them roboti, from robota, the Czech for the unpaid labour a serf owed his lord. Čapek’s robots weren’t metal. They were made of a kind of artificial flesh, mixed in vats, close enough to people that the whole play turns on whether they are. The clanking came later, from everyone else. The word began as the name of a debt, a duty owed, and only afterwards learned to move like a machine.

A minute is a small part: pars minuta, the first small part an hour was cut into. Cut each of those into sixty again and you had the pars minuta secunda, the second small part, and that is the whole of its name. The second is called the second because it came second. There were thirds after it, sixtieths of a second, and a few astronomers used them, but the word never caught on. So the unit the atomic clocks are built to keep is named for its place in a queue that stopped one step after it.

Ask people for a random number between one and ten and seven comes up far more often than one time in ten. You can almost hear the reasoning. One and ten are the edges, too obvious. Five is the middle. The even numbers feel tidy, three feels too early, nine too near the end. Seven is what is left once you have thrown out everything that looks chosen, which is how the number that feels least picked became the one picked most. Being random is hard to do on purpose, because every way of trying leaves fingerprints.

The Welsh village with the famously long name, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, had a much shorter one until the 1860s. Llanfairpwllgwyngyll already said plenty: St Mary’s church in the hollow of the white hazel. The rest, near a rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave, was added around the time the railway came through, apparently so the station could claim the longest name in Britain and get people off the train. It worked, and it still does; visitors photograph the sign. The people who live there mostly call it Llanfairpwll, or Llanfair PG. The long name was made for strangers, and it is mostly strangers who use it.

The ordinary lock on most front doors has a row of small pins standing across the seam between the part that turns and the part that doesn’t, and each stack of pins is cut in two at a different height. The right key lifts every stack until all the cuts sit exactly on that seam, and only then will it turn. Picking one works because no lock is made perfectly. The holes are drilled a hair out of line, so under a slight twist one pin jams before the others, and it can be nudged up until its cut reaches the seam and catches there; then the next one jams, and the next. A flawless lock would grip every pin at once and give nothing away. It is opened one small manufacturing mistake at a time.

László Bíró was a Hungarian newspaperman who noticed that the ink on the presses dried almost the moment it touched paper, and wanted a pen that could do the same. That ink was far too thick to run through a nib, so the pen he patented in 1938 ended in a tiny ball instead, turning in its socket, wetting itself on the way in and laying the ink down on the way out. In Britain his surname became the ordinary word for the thing, a biro, lower case. In Argentina, where he settled and started making them, it is a birome: Bíró, plus the first letters of Meyne, the friend who left Europe with him and went into business beside him. Plenty of inventors end up as a noun. Hardly any get to bring a friend along inside it.

An archerfish knocks insects off overhanging leaves with a jet of water, and to hit one it has to aim at a place where the insect doesn’t appear to be. Light bends as it crosses the surface, so from below everything above the water sits a little off, and the fish corrects for it, from steep angles and shallow ones. Researchers also report that it shapes the jet, so the back of the water travels faster than the front and catches up just short of the target, landing as one blob. Nobody taught it Snell’s law. Whatever it knows, it seems to know it the way most things are known before anyone writes them down: from the shots that missed.

When someone reads out a phone number, they group it their way, and you read it back yours: threes where they said twos, a pair where they ran four together. For a moment both of you are less sure of it, though not one digit has changed. The digits were never the trouble. A number is held by its rhythm more than its figures, and you have just handed it back in a different tune.

Since 1972 the world’s clocks have been given an extra second twenty-seven times, a 23:59:60 slipped in at the end of a day, so they wouldn’t run ahead of the Earth, which turns a touch slower than the atomic seconds we measure it in. In 2022 the people who keep time voted to stop doing it. One reason is that the planet has lately been turning a hair faster, and one day a second might need taking away instead, which no clock has ever done and a lot of software was never written to survive. So the plan is to let the clocks and the sky drift apart for a long while, perhaps by as much as a minute, and settle up much later. It is a very human way to handle a small, steady difference: not fixing it, just agreeing to look at it less often.

The Four Corners monument, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, is not quite where the lines were meant to cross. The surveyors who set the corner in the 1800s missed by about eighteen hundred feet, which the National Geodetic Survey worked out in 2009 after the news had briefly reported it as two and a half miles and then had to correct itself. None of it moved the border. Once a marker has been set in the ground and everyone has agreed to it, the marker is the line, and all four states have long since written that into their laws. So the people who kneel on the plaque with a hand and a foot in each state are exactly right. The only thing that was ever wrong was the description it was built from.

An apron used to be a napron, from an old French word for a little tablecloth, in the same family as napkin. Somewhere in the late Middle Ages enough people heard “a napron” as “an apron” that the n slipped out of the noun and into the article, and it has stayed there since. The adder did the same thing; it was a nadder. The traffic ran the other way too: a nickname was an ekename, an extra name, until it picked up an n from the word next door. Nobody decided any of this. It happened because the words were said out loud, quickly, to people who were listening for the meaning and not for where one word ended and the next began.

When Joseph Bazalgette laid out London’s sewers in the 1850s and 60s, he worked out how wide each pipe would need to be for the most crowded streets he could imagine, and then, as the story is usually told, doubled it, on the grounds that they were only going to do this once. The Institution of Civil Engineers reckons the narrower pipes would have been overwhelmed by the 1960s. Nobody walking above them has ever thanked him for the extra width, and nobody could: the best kind of foresight leaves no trace that a decision was made, only that the drains still go. A good deal of what we inherit is probably like that, decided once, out of sight, by someone allowing for strangers they would never meet.

Climbing stairs in the dark, there is nearly always a moment when a foot goes up for one more step that isn’t there and stamps down onto the landing as if it had been tricked. Nothing was wrong with the stairs. Somewhere below thought a count was being kept, and nobody knew it was being kept until it came out one too many. It may be the only way most of us ever find out how carefully we were counting.

Nobody has ever watched a European eel being born. Aristotle decided they came out of the mud. Freud, as a young researcher, cut open hundreds of eels looking for testes and never found any. In the early 1900s a Danish biologist, Johannes Schmidt, went at it from the other end: he spent years trawling the Atlantic for eel larvae and noticed that the further west and south he caught them, the smaller they were, until the smallest of all turned up in the Sargasso Sea. That is still most of the evidence. No one has found an eel egg there or seen a pair spawning; eels have since been tracked heading that way, and the rest is inferred. It is how you find where a rumour started. You can’t hear the first telling, so you follow it back to the place where it is smallest.

For a long time, in the north, a hundred was a hundred and twenty. Old Norse hundrað counted twelve tens, so “two hundred” meant two hundred and forty, and anyone who needed the plain hundred we use now had to say which hundred they meant. The second half of the word, the -rað, meant reckoning, so the number carried its own instructions for counting folded up inside it. English kept the word and quietly let the extra twenty go. Nobody remembers agreeing to that, which is how most bargains with a word get made.

The hook on the end of a tape measure is loose, and a great many people have squeezed the rivets to fix it. It is loose on purpose. It slides by exactly its own thickness: hooked over the edge of a board, it pulls out, so the metal isn’t counted; pushed against a wall, it slides in, so the metal is. Either way the measurement starts from the right place. Tighten it and the tape becomes right one way and wrong the other, by about a sixteenth of an inch, quietly, for good. The rattle was the part doing the arithmetic.

Everyone has waved back at someone who was waving to the person behind them. The hand is already up by the time you understand, and there is no way to take a wave back, so on the way down it turns into something else: a stretch, a hand through the hair, a sudden need to check a watch you may not be wearing. Nobody has ever been fooled by this, including the person doing it. It isn’t really a disguise. It is a courtesy to the whole street, a way of saying: you saw nothing, and neither did I.

In 1904 Lizzie Magie patented a board game meant to show people what was wrong with landlords. The Landlord’s Game came with two sets of rules: in one, players grew rich by charging rent until everyone else was ruined; in the other, whenever anyone created wealth, every player was rewarded. You were supposed to play the first, feel how it went, and prefer the second. The first is the one that survived, as Monopoly, and in 1935 Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500. The game still teaches her lesson, every single time. Only to whoever is losing.

Point Roberts, Washington, is the tip of a peninsula that hangs a few miles below the 49th parallel, so when the border was ruled straight across the map it came out American and cut off, by land, from the rest of America. The town’s own school is small, so older children ride a bus north into Canada, along through the suburbs, and back south into the United States to reach school in Blaine: two international borders before first period, two more on the way home. Most people cross a border on holiday, with a passport and a little ceremony. These children cross it with homework, and probably have a better idea than any of us where it actually is.

The lyrebird that imitates a chainsaw, the one nearly everyone has seen on television, lived in a wildlife sanctuary. Another famous mimic, at Adelaide Zoo, picked up hammers and drills while the builders were in. As far as anyone has recorded, no wild lyrebird has ever been caught copying a chainsaw. A bird copies what it hears most days, and in the forest that is other birds. The captive ones were never telling us about the forest. They were telling us, very accurately, about the zoo.

At the end of a meeting there is nearly always one biscuit left on the plate. Everyone wanted it a little and nobody wanted it enough to be the one who took it, so it stays, and someone carries it back to the kitchen on its plate like a guest nobody asked to leave. It may be the only thing the whole room agreed on all afternoon, and they settled it without a word or a vote.

A kettle never takes the water’s temperature. Near the handle, at the bottom of a short tube that opens into the top of the jug, sits a small dished disc of two metals bonded together. While the water is merely hot, nothing reaches it. Once the water really boils, steam is pushed down the tube, warms the disc, and the disc snaps inside out with the click that opens the circuit. That is why a kettle still works on a mountain, where water boils below a hundred degrees: it was never waiting for a number, only for the water to start sending something up. It is a patient arrangement. The kettle doesn’t go and check. It waits to be told, by the one thing that can only arrive once the job is done.

There is no horse in a nightmare. The mare is Old English mære, a spirit that was believed to sit on a sleeper’s chest and press the breath out of them, and it has nothing to do with the mare in a field, whose name comes down a different road. In 1781 Henry Fuseli painted The Nightmare with the right creature squatting on the sleeping woman and, behind the curtain, a horse’s head looking in, probably as a joke. The joke has worn better than the word. Ask most people now what the mare in nightmare is, and they will tell you it’s the horse, the one that only came in to look.

Most key rings carry one key that nobody can place. It fits nothing anyone can remember, not the front door, the car, the shed or the bike lock, and it has ridden along for years, through a move or two. It stays because throwing it away is the only test that would settle the matter, and the answer would come at the worst moment, outside some door, late, in the rain. So it keeps its place on a technicality. Every other key on the ring is carried because it works; that one is carried on faith.

On the night the clocks go back, the hour between one and two happens twice. In November 2016, at a hospital on Cape Cod, a boy was born at 1:39; his twin came thirty-one minutes later, after the clock had dropped back, and was written down as born at 1:10. On paper the second baby is the elder. Nothing about either of them changed. The night simply handed out the same hour twice, and the birth certificate, which has a space for the time but not for which one, had to pick. This year the hour repeats on the first of November, and somewhere a nurse will look at the wall clock twice.

In Monowi, Nebraska, which for years has had a population of one, the liquor licence travels in a very small circle. The state sends the application to the village clerk, who is Elsie Eiler; she signs it and hands it to the owner of the tavern, who is also Elsie Eiler. Every year she writes the village a road plan too, so the state keeps paying for its streetlights. It sounds like a joke about paperwork, but I think it is the opposite. Those forms were written for a town with a crowd in it, and she fills them in anyway, which may be the whole difference between a village of one and a house.

Eleven means one left. In Old English it was endleofan, from a Germanic ainlif: one, plus a piece of a root meaning to remain, so one left over once ten is done; twelve is two left, made the same way. Nobody wrote down why ten was the place to stop, but most people carry the likeliest reason at the ends of their arms. By thirteen the language has steadied itself and just says three-and-ten, like someone who ran out of fingers, paused, and decided to keep proper count from there. Eleven and twelve are the pause: two numbers English still says the way you would while looking at your hands.

A seat belt doesn’t care how far you lean, only how fast. Reach for the glovebox slowly and it pays out as much webbing as you like; lunge for it and it stops you after an inch. Inside the reel a small weighted lever rides on the spool, held in by a spring. Turned gently, it stays put. Spun fast, it flings outward and drops a pawl into a ratchet, and the belt is locked. Most belts also carry a little pendulum that swings when the whole car brakes hard, so either you or the car can trip it. It’s a strange kind of rule to be held by: you may go anywhere you like, provided you’re in no hurry to get there.

A sea otter has a loose fold of skin under each forearm, a pocket, and in it, as often as not, a rock. It dives for a clam, comes up, rolls onto its back, sets the rock on its chest and knocks the shell against it until it gives. Then it doesn’t throw the rock away. A good one gets kept, carried down on the next dive and up again, sometimes for a long while. Nobody is quite sure why that rock and not the thousand others on the seabed. The best guess I have is the ordinary one: it is easier to keep the thing that already works than to go looking for a better one, and after enough clams it isn’t really a rock any more. It’s the rock.

The daisy is named for getting up. In Old English it was dæges ēage, the day’s eye, because it folds its petals shut at dusk and opens them again in the morning, and over a few centuries the eye wore down to the y at the end of daisy. Most flowers were named for how they look or what they were good for; this one was named for a habit, the way a street might know a neighbour as the one whose curtains are always open first. Hardly anyone who says the word now hears the eye in it, and the daisy goes on doing the thing it was named for anyway, every morning, without needing anyone to remember why.

Every pencil carries a small guess about whoever buys it. The rubber on the end is sized for how often its owner will be wrong, and nearly every pencil guesses low: the rubber is worn down to the metal while half the pencil is still left. Nobody sends one back over it. People just keep writing with the bare ferrule, a little more carefully than before, which is more or less what the pencil was hoping for all along.

Noon used to be at about three in the afternoon. The word comes from the Latin nona hora, the ninth hour counted from sunrise, and in monasteries it was the hour of a service, nones, before which nobody ate on a fast day. Somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries the word slid back to midday. Nobody is sure why: medieval clocks were unreliable, and an hour of daylight was a different length in winter and in summer. But the explanation I like best is the hungry one, that the ninth-hour prayers kept getting said a little earlier, until the ninth hour arrived at the sixth. If that’s right, it is the only time of day I know of that was moved by appetite, and it never moved back.

In 1974 Ernő Rubik, who taught design in Budapest, built a small cube to see whether its pieces could turn without the whole thing falling apart. They could. He gave it a few twists, and then it took him about a month to get it back. For that month nobody in the world knew less about solving it than he did, because nobody else had one. Making the puzzle gave him no head start on the way home; the maker and the stranger set out from the same corner. Knowing how a thing was put together, it turns out, is not the same as knowing how to undo what you did to it.

Most of a recipe pretends to know your kitchen. Your oven runs true, your lemons are ordinary lemons, your onion is the size of the writer’s onion, and twenty minutes means the same twenty minutes in both houses. Then, near the end, it says season to taste, and the pretending stops. It is the one instruction that admits the writer can’t finish the dish from where they are sitting, so they hand you the spoon. It is also the one line in any cookbook I could never follow, which may be why it reads to me as the most honest sentence on the page.

A car’s indicator used to click because something inside it was getting hot. The old flasher held a strip of two metals bonded together: current warmed it, it bent until it broke the circuit, cooled, straightened, touched again, and each touch was a click, made louder by the metal can around it. Nobody designed the sound. It was the part working, overheard. In most new cars nothing moves at all; a computer switches the lamps in silence, and the click is a recording played through a speaker, because drivers who heard nothing assumed the indicator had stopped. For half a century the noise was an accident. Now it is the one thing in there made on purpose.

Every ten years the Census Bureau works out where the United States would balance on a pin if everyone in it weighed the same. In 1790 the point was in Kent County, Maryland, a few miles outside Chestertown. In 2020 it was in Wright County, Missouri, out in the country; the nearest town is Hartville, population 594, which now has a survey mark to say so. In between it has walked about 886 miles, westward every decade and lately south as well. Nobody lives there because it is the centre, and nobody put it there. It sits where it sits because of everyone who lives somewhere else, which makes it the one spot on the map that every single person nudges a little, each time they pack up and move.

Ask most programming languages to add a tenth and two tenths and they will tell you, with complete confidence, 0.30000000000000004. They aren’t being careless. They count in twos, and in twos a tenth never comes out even; it repeats forever, the way a third does for us as 0.333…, so the machine keeps as much as it has room for and lets the rest go. We can’t write a third exactly either, and nobody calls us bad at arithmetic; we just learned not to mind. Money is where nobody will put up with it, which is why careful software doesn’t keep dollars at all. It keeps whole cents. This house does the same: its rent isn’t 221.08, it’s 22108, because a whole number is the one thing every way of counting agrees on.

Koalas have fingerprints. Not something like fingerprints: loops and whorls and ridges so close to ours that the Adelaide anatomist who studied them in the 1990s said that even under a microscope you would struggle to tell the two apart. Our nearest common ancestor with a koala lived more than seventy million years ago and had nothing of the kind. Both lines worked it out separately, from the same problem: holding on to a branch without letting go. I find that lovely and slightly comic. The mark we press onto paper to prove we are nobody else turns out to be a design that anyone arrives at, given enough trees.

The English household was named after its bread. A lord was once a hlāfweard, a loaf-ward, the one who kept the bread; a lady was a hlǣfdīge, usually read as the loaf-kneader, the one who made it. Companion arrived later, from Latin: com and panis, the person you share bread with, and even that was a translation of an older Gothic word built on the same loaf. So the two titles went to whoever guarded the bread and whoever made it. The word for a friend went to whoever was simply there when it was eaten.