Futility Closet - 011-A Woolf in Sheikh's Clothing

Episode Date: May 26, 2014

Irish practical joker Horace de Vere Cole orchestrated his masterpiece in 1910: He dressed four friends as Abyssinian princes and inveigled a tour of a British battleship. One of the friends, improbably, was Virginia Woolf disguised in a false beard and turban. We'll describe how the prank was inspired and follow the six through their tension-filled visit to the HMS Dreadnought.We'll also examine the value of whistles to Benjamin Franklin and present the next Futility Closet Challenge.

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com slash closet and enter offer code closet at checkout. A better web starts with your website. Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode 11. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn why Virginia Woolf wore a false beard onto a British battleship in 1910, discover the importance of whistles to Benjamin Franklin,

and present the next Futility Closet challenge. This week we heard from a few more listeners on the subject of how we've been introducing ourselves at the beginning of each episode. I guess overall we kind of got the impression that this really hasn't been a very big deal for people, how we've been introducing ourselves at the beginning of each episode. I guess overall, we kind of got the impression that this really hasn't been a very big deal for people how we were doing it, but that it maybe could seem a little outmoded to some people. So you may have noticed that we did reword the introduction a little bit to take that into account. And thanks to everyone who wrote in to tell us their opinion on that. On the topic of the names that you can hear on our show,

Nick Alden wrote in to ask, Is Doug Ross related to you as well? I love the music of the show. It creates a great ambiance, sort of a contemplative, mysterious quality that fits in with many of the stories on the show. That's a terrific question, Nick. I'm so glad you asked it because it gives us an opportunity to give

a long overdue shout out to Doug. Doug provides all the music for our show and he is Greg's brother. He's a musician who lives out in Los Angeles. And when we were trying to put this podcast together and we're looking for music for it, Doug really stepped up to help us out. Yeah. And there's kind of a fortunate coincidence there. I had been looking out, if you're putting together a podcast, there's a lot of music that's available to use, but we wanted something that had some character to sort of reflect the voice of the website. Yeah, just had some personality. And Doug, as I remember, came up with that tune just coincidentally about the same time we were putting it together and just shared it with me,

and I thought it was perfect, so we stole it. The tune is called Fallen Star because, among other things, Doug collects meteorites. In fact, as we are recording this episode, he's in Nevada right now searching for more of them. If you want to learn more about Doug and his music, he has a website at www.dougross.net, and we always have a link to that in our show notes. And this week, for this episode, we are going to have a video in our show notes of Doug actually playing Fallen Star, in case you want to see him in action or hear the whole song without people talking over it for a change. Our show notes are at blog.futilitycloset.com.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in this week. And if you have any questions or comments for us, send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com or leave a comment in the show notes. I've written occasionally about Horace Devere Cole, who was an inveterate practical joker in England about 100 years ago. He was throughout his life doing constant practical jokes, large and small. My favorite is actually a small one. He would get a long length of string and go into downtown London and find some well-to-do man standing on a sidewalk somewhere

and ask him if he could hold one end of the string for a while. And the man obligingly would say yes. And then Cole would take the other end of the string around the corner and hand it to another well-to-do man and ask him the same thing and then just walk off. I think that's brilliant. But his masterpiece in most people's eyes is something called the Dreadnought Hoax, in which a group of his friends dressed up as Abyssinian princes and arranged to make a tour of the flagship of the British Home Fleet in 1910. This was actually not Cole's idea, although he's the one who carried it out.

At that time, there were constant rivalries and reciprocal jokes being played among the different ships of the fleet. And he had a friend on a battleship called the Hawk who had it in for the crew of the Dreadnought, which was the name of the flagship, and said, you seem to be good at hoaxes. Is there something you could play on the sailors on the Dreadnought? So Cole thought about it. He had been at Cambridge five years earlier with Adrian Stephen, who is Virginia Woolf's brother.

And at the time, one of his early jokes was dressing up as the Sultan of Zanzibar and getting a tour of the college, which they pulled off. So they thought they could do a variation of that here. The timing was actually propitious. They knew that the actual real emperor of Abyssinia was in Europe and had just toured France and was headed to England next. So if they timed it right, it could look plausible that he was asking to tour a battleship. If they timed it right, it could look plausible that he was asking to tour a battleship. And they knew that in November 1909, which is just the previous year, an exotically dressed Chinese naval mission had toured the fleet.

So they knew that it was possible to do this. The Royal Navy liked giving these tours to impress its allies. So they had some idea that they could actually pull this off. So the plan, the cover story, was that they'd impersonate Abyssinian nobility led by a cousin of the emperor of Abyssinia. The story was that they were in England considering Eton as a school for the emperor's children, and while they were there, wanted to see the fleet. Interviewed much, much later, this all happened in 1910, interviewed much later in 1962, one of the hoaxers named Tony Buxton

said that none of them knew a single thing about Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia. They just knew that it was some African country and was vaguely an ally of England. So that was enough to decide them, or at least to decide Cole, who set the date of the hoax for early February of 1910. He settled on February 7th and began preparations.

He had all the costumes made to order using a pattern of his own devising, and he recruited a lot of his friends, but this is the sort of things that your friends say yes to and then begin nervously to back out of pretty quickly because you don't want to hoax the Royal Navy. With just a few days to go, there were five of the men on it, Cole and four of his friends,

and to everyone's surprise, Adrian's sister, who I say is Virginia Woolf, at the time she was Virginia Stevens, she was 28 years old and hadn't published anything yet, but she was still Virginia Woolf, agreed to do it. And there are varying accounts of how hard she was pressing to be involved. She herself said, I had only two days notice of the adventure and I entered into it because I thought I would like the fun, which is probably closest to the truth. The costumer who was working on the costumes and the makeup and everything, Lily Clarkson, said that she actually had pleaded continuously to

join the hoax while watching them practice doing the makeup. So I'm not sure what the truth is there, but it seems at any rate that she wasn't, she didn't have to be dragged into it. I mean, she actively wanted to participate to some extent. So on the fateful day of February 7th, they all met before dawn to be dressed and made up. Of the six, four of them would be dressed in turbans and false beards and colorful flowing robes. No one had any idea what an actual Abyssinian looked like, but they were banking on the fact that the Navy wouldn't know either. The other two, Cole would pose as Mr. Herbert Chumley of the Foreign Office. He actually didn't have that much difficult to do, now that you think about it.

And Adrian Stephen, who I think is the hero in this whole thing, Virginia's brother, posed as their interpreter, the interpreter for these four Abyssinian princes who ostensibly didn't know English at all. So after they were all made up, they had themselves photographed, and then they departed from London by the 1240 train from Paddington for Weymouth, which is where the ship was. So on the train, this is actually the scariest part, they said afterwards. The train trip takes three and a half hours, and they haven't warned anyone that they're coming yet. An hour after they left, a friend of theirs sent a telegram to Admiral Sir William May, the commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet, signed by Charles Harding, who was the actual permanent undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office. The telegram read, 2. CNC Home Fleet Portland.

Prince Macallan of Abyssinia and Sweet arrive 4.20 today, Weymouth. He wishes to see Dreadnought. Kindly arrange meet them on arrival. Regret short notice. Forgot wire. Interpreter accompanies themselves. Harding, Foreign Office. And they arrange the timing of this rather cleverly. The train's already on its way, but the telegram takes a while to arrive there and be transcribed. It's not transcribed until 3.31, and it's not handed to the admiral until 15 minutes later. So at that point, it's about quarter to 4, and it says this delegation is arriving at 4.20. So it doesn't leave anybody time to check it out.

Exactly. Precisely. And it was all planned that way. But they didn't know that aboard the train. They didn't know what they'd be getting into. They could arrive at the station and find out there are police waiting for them or find nothing at all. What they found actually was a flag lieutenant and a detachment of Marines and a red carpet. So they actually made all these preparations. And from that point on, Adrian said that it wasn't ever easy, but at that point everyone so much expected and wanted them to be Abyssinian princes that all they had to do was sort of believe that they were and just do what they were asked to do. They went by cab to the quayside where they boarded a steam launch, which took them out to the ship. The princes sat nervously in the back. Virginia said she was afraid to speak in case my voice, which I made as gruff as I could, should fail me. I found I could easily laugh like a man,

but it was difficult to disguise the speaking voice. And amazingly, if these time estimates are right, they'd had 35 minutes of the fleet to make all these preparations and did an amazingly good job. When they arrived at the ship, the band was playing Yankee Doodle Dandy and then launched into the national anthem of Zanzibar. They couldn't find the anthem in 35 minutes that they had. They didn't find the anthem of Abyssinia, but they had Zanzibar,

which they decided would have to be. Can you just imagine all the people in the Navy scrambling? You have 35 minutes to get together with some group of dignitaries that you've never heard of. Because it would be sort of an embarrassment if they didn't. A national embarrassment, yeah. But the ship was all festooned with flags and chains of lights, and beneath these stood May and his staff.

I should have mentioned the one personal note in this for Adrian and Virginia is that they had a first cousin who was actually an officer on the Dreadnought. That wasn't the reason they were undertaking the hoax, but they knew he would be there, and they both felt he was sort of full of himself, and so it was one more incentive to go ahead with this. And sure enough, he was there. Buxton said,

We nearly came to disaster on boarding the ship. I nearly tripped on coming over the side onto the deck and only just recovered my balance. And Adrian, Virginia's brother, who's playing the interpreter, said on deck, I was conscious of looking most awful outsider and of not knowing in what form to return the admiral's welcome,

whether to take my hat off or shake hands or what. This is the part I can't believe. On top of this, I saw my cousin standing, staring at me from a few yards off. And since I stood six foot five in my socks, I was afraid he might observe me. I don't understand that. He wasn't wearing a turban or any kind of, I mean, they made him up to look like an interpreter.

But he wasn't particularly disguised? No, and his cousin was looking right at him and didn't recognize him. Virginia said, that, I confess, did take my breath away. The first person we should meet when we got on board was our own first cousin. We knew him very well. He often spent his leave with us. So that I can't explain. I mean, they were made up. She was very heavily made cousin. We knew him very well. He often spent his leave with us. So that I can't explain. I mean, they were made up.

She was very heavily made up. Right. But Adrian wasn't and was very tall and distinctive, had a distinctive look to him. Well, anyway, they got away with it. Horace, the leader, made introductions and apologized for the short notice of their visit. And now Adrian begins,

this is why I think he's the hero of the whole thing. The first thing that happened is that the adm Admiral asked him to inspect the Guard of Honor, which is a group of sailors who were wearing various colored blue and red costumes, outfits, uniforms, and explained the distinction between the two colors in some incomprehensible way and then asked him to pass this information on to the Abyssinians. Remember, he's supposed to be an interpreter. Stephen had studied Swahili on the train, so he'd studied all of three and a half hours of Swahili, and said, I'm afraid it would be rather hard to put that into Abyssinian,

sir, however I'll try. And Taki Mahai Kustafani, he got three words in and totally locked up, and then had this, I think, great moment of moment of inspiration as a boy he had been required to memorize passages from the eneid and from homer uh in latin and he'd carry those around in his mind ever since so he started reciting latin trying to mumble and blur his words enough that it wouldn't tip anybody off that that's what he was doing which i don't think none of this had been prepared he just came up with that on the fly out of sheer desperation. And it worked. He said he mispronounced it deliberately to avoid giving it away.

But no one seemed to catch on to the fact that he was reciting Virgil and Homer. So he kept doing that throughout the trip. He said the quotation that I started with, by the way, is from the Ennead book for line 437. So if you want to fool the Royal Navy into thinking you're speaking Swahili, that's the line to start with. Anyway, so the whole party were invited to tea in the wardroom. This is another immediate crisis.

Cole, who's not dressed up as anything and is just pretending to be an official, accepts because he can, but the others have been warned that they mustn't eat or drink anything because their makeup might become disarranged or their mustaches could fall off. They were living in perpetual terror of their mustaches falling off. In fact, Adrian said his main memory of the whole day afterward was just hunger because they couldn't eat or drink anything all day long.

So Cole disappeared to go accept this offer of tea. disappeared to go accept this offer of tea. And Adrian, thinking hastily again, said that the princes couldn't touch food unless it was prepared in a special way, so they'd have to forego the invitation, which again, I think he just came up with on the spot. So at that point, Captain Richmond led the remaining five of them all over the ship, waiting patiently as Adrian translated his comments into fake Latin. This was going okay, but when the wind rose and it began to rain, Adrian watched as Duncan Grant's mustache began to lift off in the breeze. So another episode of quick thinking,

he told Richmond how cold it was compared to Adesina in England, and he took the hint and said, let's go down below deck. And Adrian took that moment to take care of the mustache as quickly and surreptitiously as he could. So they took them all over the ship, these five. They went down long corridors. They saw the sick bay, the mess, the guns. And he said, all these things I duly described in a mixture of Homer and Virgil. He said they admired the guns particularly, and the British offered to demonstrate for them, to fire a volley in honor of their guests. But Adrian, who was already feeling badly, said the real fact was that I understood that firing salutes meant cleaning guns afterwards, and it seemed too much of a shame to cause such unnecessary trouble. So he said it wouldn't be necessary.

He said, besides, it was almost as grand to refuse a salute as to accept one. So at this point, time is almost running out, and they've seen the whole ship. Cole, who's back on deck now, said they wanted to catch the 6 o'clock train back to London. So the band played God Save the King, and the crew gave three cheers, and Willoughby, the flag lieutenant, escorted the princes back to the steam launch. Even then, Cole was still in fine form. They were riding along on the launch going back to the Quay, thanking their stars. When Cole took this bauble that was hanging

around Tony Buxton's neck, I think Guy Ridley said he had taken it from his mother's hat and just hung it around his neck. It was just nothing at all. But Cole called it the Star of Ethiopia and offered it to Willoughby in gratitude for his courtesy. And Willoughby declined, saying he wasn't allowed to accept it. So at this point, they were actually feeling kind of bad about having done all this, because given half an hour's notice, not only did the fleet drop everything to welcome them, but did it with a real honest, open-hearted... Graciousness. Yeah.

Yeah. That just made them feel more ashamed about doing it. Adrian said, As for revenge, if they wanted any, they had already had plenty before the hoax was over. They treated us so delightfully while we were on board that I, for one, felt very uncomfortable at mocking, even in the friendliest spirit, such charming people. Tony Buxton felt the same way. He said he thought the hoaxer should have written a letter of apology

to the admiral. Anyway, Cole bundled them onto the train and they managed to pull down the blinds before a sneeze removed half of Tony Buxton's mustache. And they agreed there on the train, on the way back up, that the officer had been so charming and the

hoax was such a success that they wouldn't give the story to the press. But Cole being Cole couldn't restrain himself. And when he went to the club that evening, he couldn't resist telling the members there and word got immediately right back to the fleet about this. And there was sort of a journalist got wind of it on February 12th, the story broke on the front page of the Express, Sham Abyssinian princes visit the dreadnought. There were a lot of inaccurate reports about this, but it did sort of, you know, for a few days, it sort of made a laughingstock of the Navy.

And there's sort of an incoherent outrage going on, but it never actually came to anything. The Admiral May and Willie Fisher, their cousin who they wanted to sort of twit, were both irate. But as it turned out, the only crime that the party had actually committed was sending a counterfeit telegram. And it just didn't seem worthwhile to prosecute that. Also, Adrian made the excellent point that the whole hoax, the whole idea of hoaxing the dreadnought had come originally from a naval officer. It hadn't been Horace Cole's idea. So in that sense, it was the Navy

playing a hoax on itself, or at least undertaking that idea. But still out of some feeling badly about Horace refused to write anything about it and refused to let anyone else do it. The only accounts of it written by the parties themselves came out after he died later on. Adrian wrote a little book about it. And then Virginia Woolf herself in 1940 gave a talk about it, which came to light only recently. E.M. Forster said it left the audience helpless with laughter. There's a great quote at the end of that from her. She says, there's only one thing to add. About a week or two later, the real emperor of Abyssinia arrived in London.

When he asked the first lord of the admiralty whether he might visit the channel fleet, he was told that it was quite impossible. Oh no! That's the one piece of this. I mean, this is a great hoax, but I think the main reason it's famous today is that Virginia Woolf was involved in it. As I say, she was 28 and hadn't

published anything yet, but I've always wondered to what extent, if at all, it informed her later writing. I'm getting a lot of the details of this from a book called The Sultan of Zanzibar by Martin Downer, and he says there's a little-known 1921 short story that describes how a young woman had dressed herself as an Ethiopian prince and gone aboard one of his majesty's ships. Virginia Woolf had written this story. I haven't been able to find that story, and I don't know if she ever wrote about this anywhere else except for giving this one talk in 1940.

She evidently enjoyed herself, but I don't know beyond that if it had any effect on her writings. If anyone else out there knows anything more about that, I'd love to hear if she wrote any more about it. We'll have a photo of the hoax party fitted out as Abyssinian princes in the show notes. Abyssinian princes in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace,

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a better web starts with your website. The last couple of weeks on Futility Closet, I've been posting some of the lesser-known maxims from Poor Richard's Almanac. And in posting those, it got me thinking again about how wise Ben Franklin was. I know I'm hardly the first person to make that observation, but really those, almost everything he wrote in Poor Richard's Almanac, the maxims, aren't just run-of-the-mill proverbs. They're actually pretty knowing insights into human nature, I've always thought. And it got me thinking about this one story that he wrote that I think is relatively little known and I think deserves to be better known. It concerns an experience he had when he was seven years old, but it appears he never told anyone about this.

It informed, he learned the lessons from it that he applied throughout the rest of his life, but he doesn't appear to have told anyone about it. It's not in his autobiography. We only know about it because at the other end of his life, when he was 73 years old and acting as ambassador to France during the American Revolution, he owed a letter to a friend of his. And just in order to have something to write, he wrote down the story finally of what had happened to him. And I think it's just brilliant. So I'd like to read it on the podcast. He wrote it to, the friend's name is Madame Brion, and he wrote it from Passy in November 10th,

1779. And the section of the letter I want to read goes like this. He says, I approve much of your conclusion that we should draw all the good we can from this world. In my opinion, we might all draw more good from it than we do and suffer less evil if we would take care not to give too much for whistles. For to me, it seems that most of the unhappy people we meet with are become so by neglect of that caution. You ask what I mean. You love stories, and will excuse my telling one of myself. When I was a child of seven years old, my friends, on a holiday, filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children,

and being charmed with the sound of a whistle that I met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for one. I then came home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers and sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, had told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth, put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money, and laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation, and the reflection gave me much more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure. This, however, was afterwards of use to me, the impression continuing on my mind,

so that often when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, don't give too much for the whistle, and I saved my money. As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle. When I saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time and attendance on levies, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, this man gives too much for his whistle. When I saw another, fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in political bustles neglecting his own affairs

and ruining them by that neglect he pays indeed said I too much for his whistle if I knew a miser who gave up every kind of comfortable living all the pleasure of doing good to others all the esteem of his fellow citizens and the joys of benevolent friendship for the sake of accumulating wealth

poor man said I you pay too much for your whistle when I met a man of pleasure sacrificing every laudable improvement of the mind For the sake of accumulating wealth, poor man, said I, you pay too much for your whistle. When I met a man of pleasure, sacrificing every laudable improvement of the mind or of his fortune to mere corporeal sensations and ruining his health in their pursuit, mistaken man, said I, you are providing pain for yourself instead of pleasure, you give too much for your whistle. If I see one fond of appearance or fine clothes, fine houses, fine furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he contracts debts, and ends his career in a prison,

alas, say I, he is paid dear, very dear, for his whistle. And when I see a beautiful, sweet-tempered girl married to an ill-natured brood of a husband, what a pity, say I, that she should pay so much for a whistle. In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of their value of things and by their giving too much for their whistles. I just think that's really smart. You can pursue anything you want in life, but everything has a price tag attached to it. And sometimes even if you attain it, you can find that you've made too great a sacrifice in order to get it and still find yourself unhappy.

What I find fascinating about this is that, you know, I think we're quick to dismiss things that people said hundreds of years ago, the lives of people of hundreds of years ago of how could they be applicable today. Yeah. So much has changed. Societies change. Norms change. Technology has changed. Social structures change. And you think, you know, what could they have to say to me?

But what doesn't change maybe is human nature, where it changes very little, maybe surprisingly little, over the centuries. That's one thing this whole blog has taught me, is exactly that, that if you study history long enough, what you find is that over time we've accumulated knowledge of the world and we've improved our technology. But people as people are just the same as they've ever been. You know, that's why Shakespeare still speaks to us and even Homer. I mean, because people aren't, it's kind of sad and funny at the same time. We're not really learning anything. Yeah, we haven't learned from the mistakes of the previous generations. We have the same foibles and vanities and do the same errors that that they were doing

too yeah but i think franklin's point at least strikes me i wouldn't have seen that because it's easy to say i want something so badly that i'll pay any price to get it i'll do anything to get it and that's he's saying i think unwise because you might actually get it and find that it just costs too much emerson said money sometimes costs too much. So I just think that's, I'm glad that he took the time to write that note out to her, because otherwise we never would have learned that that had happened to him, the lesson that he drew from it. But it also seems to me it's not only that he's saying that you might realize that it costs too much,

but I think he's saying many of these people don't realize the full prices that they've paid. Yeah, well, that's the other thing that I noticed in just reading it over and preparing it now. He was able to recognize this error in other people, but it's harder, I think, to see it in yourself. If I want to be a brain surgeon, there's a lot of sacrifices I'll have to make to reach that goal. But I might be the most fulfilled brain surgeon in the world, and it'll have been worthwhile. It's hard to know in advance what price is appropriate to pay, you know? I don't know what the answer is. Oh, interesting to think about, though. We'll reprint Franklin's letter in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com.

Now for the weekly challenge. Each week we give you a creative challenge, and you can compete for the glory of having your entry read on our show. Last week's challenge asked you to invent some useful collective nouns, such as a frenzy of tweeters or a grasp of bankers. In presenting the challenge last week, Greg had mentioned some collective nouns for some different animals, and at the time I noticed that the two examples of dark-colored birds had negative-sounding terms that went with them. Rick wrote in to say about that,

not an entry to the challenge, but all the collective nouns for the birds in the Corvid family sound quite ominous or fantastical. And then he noted the examples of a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens, a scold of jays, a clattering of jackdaws, and a tiding of magpies. That's really interesting because other animals with these nouns of assemblies don't have that character to them.

He's right. Like a pride of lions is actually a positive sounding thing. Yeah. But a murder of crows is not very positive. But it's interesting that those terms, an unkindness of ravens, was dreamed up before biologists started, I presume, before biologists started classifying birds. So it's odd that all the grouping still works that way. People just didn't like these birds for some reason. I guess not.

This week we got a really nice crop of entries to our challenge. Or as Michael T. suggested more poetically, we had a cloud of entries. So from our cloud of entries of this week, these were our favorites. Steph Smith wrote in, A Stanza of Poets. Nick Alden said, A Blather of Bloggers. From Dave Kay, we chose, A Vanity of Bodybuilders, A Yap of Chihuahuas, and A Splay of Ferns. Michael T. wrote, A Thrust of Pilots and a Grace of Ballerinas Eric sent A Figment of Magicians

and Alicia Garr gave us A Tangle of Tweens and a Curation of Hipsters These are all really clever this week and it's very hard to pick Just one winner All of those that you read are terrific The one that I just find really charming is Eric's entry, A Figment of Magicians, I think, just because it strikes me as especially clever.

So, Eric, if you can send us your mailing address, we'll send you a copy of the Futility Closet book. For this week's challenge, we want to do daffunitions, which are playful reinterpretations of existing words usually based on a pun. The best way to describe these is just to give some examples. Propaganda is a gentlemanly goose. A proper gander. Other examples are avoidable is what a bullfighter tries to do. An oboe is an English tramp. Aperitif is a set of dentures.

And indistinct is where you place dirty dishes. I like that one. Indistinct. Send us your own definitions by Saturday, May 31st. We'll choose our favorites to read on the show, and the winner will receive a copy of the Futility Closet book, where you can learn more about a cat who co-authored a physics paper and learn the difference between a rhododendron and a cold apple

dumpling. We want to thank everyone who's taken the podcast survey so far. If you haven't yet, then you can help support the Futility Closet podcast by taking a short anonymous survey. It'll take no more than five minutes. Your answers will help us match the show with advertisers that best fit our listeners like you and allow us to keep making these podcasts. Listeners who complete the survey will be entered in an ongoing monthly raffle to win a $100 Amazon gift card. We promise not to share or sell your email address, and we won't send you email unless you win the gift card. So use the link in our show notes or go to www.podsurvey.com slash futility. That's www.podsurvey.com slash futility to take our survey and get your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. That's it for this episode.

You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can leave comments or feedback, ask questions, and see the links and images mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, be sure to look for our book on amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 7,000 mental snacks, perfect for filling 5 minutes or 50. If you would like to support Futility Closet, you can take the survey Greg just mentioned, or you can tell your friends about us.

Leave a review of the book or podcast on Amazon or iTunes, or click the donate button on the sidebar of the website. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks, Doug. Futility Closet is a member of the Boing Boing family of podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.