January 2008 Archives

“[N]ow the seal of evening was on the wooded hillsides and on the pastures. The sky broke into bands and whorls of muted color until the entire west was like the marbled endpapers of her journal.”

—Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, 1997.

In the post-modern mash-up tradition of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, it’s the “descent to Jupiter” from 2001 and Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air. I ran into this last night. And I don’t know . . . what would you call it?

Here’s a headline that caught my eye: Printer ink tops $1000 a barrel. The situation is dire. According to UK news source News Biscuit, “In some parts of the world, people are having to print out documents in blue or even green ink, continually having to pause to over-ride the irritating instruction from their bleeping printer to change the black ink cartridge.”

“At seven thirty, her cheeks glowing and her high-piled hair gleaming with a suspicion of brilliantine, Evylyn descended the stairs.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cut-Glass Bowl, from Flappers and Philosophers, 1920.

“Wendesday there was a four-hour wrangle in a conference room crowded with planets and nebulae of cigarette smoke.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Crazy Sunday, from Taps at Reveille, 1935.

“After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and showed its good faith by turning grey. It scaled—huge peelings of very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a mouldy death in the overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the green blinds darkened, then lost all pretence of colour.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Lees of Happiness, from Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922.

“‘Gosh! What a car!’ This ejaculation was provoked by its interior. John saw that the upholstery consisted of a thousand minute and exquisite tapestries of silk, woven with jewels and embroideries, and set upon a background of cloth of gold. The two armchair seats in which the boys luxuriated were covered with stuff that resembled duvetyn, bus seemed woven in numberless colours of the end of ostrich feathers.
    ‘What a car!’ cried John again, in amazement.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, from Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922.

“There was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception of the ultimate prison—ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until, lit with tall violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond human wish or dream.
    Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandered. Sometimes the floor under their feet would flame in brilliant patterns from lighting below, patterns of barbaric clashing colours, of pastel delicacy, of sheer whiteness, or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers of thick crystal he would see blue or green water swirling, inhabited by vivid fish and growths of rainbow foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of every texture and colour or along corridors of palest ivory, unbroken as though carved complete from the gigantic tusks or dinosaurs extinct before the age of man. . . .”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, from Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922. The ellipses are his.

“There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly moustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterwards and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and cases—for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cut-Glass Bowl, from Flappers and Philosophers, 1920.

“You never know how many kinds of music there are in the world until you move to New York and start taking cabs. It’s like, from your apartment to Trader Vic’s you get Cuban music, and then from Trader Vic’s to Canal Bar you’ve got Zorba the Greek music and then Indian ragas from Canal Bar to Nell’s, Scandinavian heavy metal on the way from Nell’s up to Emile’s apartment. After that you start singing the Colombian national anthem.”

—Jay McInerney, Story of My Life, 1988.

“Five hundred years ago, when books were first introduced, they were greeted with the same level of skepticism that digital reading is facing today. Gutenberg’s bibles, as much as we revere them now, were not welcomed with open arms or eager hands.
    ‘Medieval clerics greeted printed books as imposters of illuminated manuscripts—aesthetically inferior, textually unreliable and likely to breed a dangerous diversity of opinion,’ wrote Jacob Weisberg in The New York Times in 2000. ‘The echo of such views is heard today in an equally misguided elite’s hostility toward digital publishing.’”

—Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead; Books in Our Digital Age, 2008.

“In the end, we may be in love with books, but it’s words that have truly won our hearts. It’s words that whisper into our ear and transform us, that make us believe in other worlds or new emotions we didn’t know existed; it’s words that keep us company in . . . planes, on subway trains, or our comfy couches. It is words, not books, paper, papyrus of vellum pages that transform our lives.”

—Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead; Books in Our Digital Age, 2008.

“When William Faulkner finished As I Lay Dying in 1929, he wanted each of the characters to be represented by a different color ink. But the publisher balked, declaring it too expensive. Today, what Faulkner wanted could be easily accomplished in a digital setting.”

—Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead; Books in Our Digital Age, 2008.

“When music reminded me of something which was not music, I supposed it was getting me somewhere. ‘How like Monet!’ I thought when listening to Debussy, and ‘How like Debussy!’ when looking at Monet. I translated sounds into colours, saw the piccolo as apple-green, and the trumpets as scarlet.”

—E.M. Forster, Not Listening to Music, from Two Cheers for Democracy, 1939.

“The clock ticked, the coals blazed higher, and contended with the white radiance that poured in through the windows. Unnoticed, the sun occupied his sky, and the shadows of the tree stems, extraordinarily solid, fell like trenches of purple across the frosted lawn. It was a glorious winter morning. Evie’s fox terrier, who had passed for white, was only a dirty grey dog now, so intense was the purity that surrounded him. He was discredited, but the blackbirds that he was chasing glowed with Arabian darkness, for all the conventional colouring of life had been altered. Inside, the clock struck ten with a rich and confident note.”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.

“Certainly London fascinates. One visualizes it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity.”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.

“London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract.”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.

“He made no friends. His Oxford remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory of a radiance, but the memory of a color scheme.”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.

“[T]here was a long pause—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and eternal shadows.”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.

“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, September 22, 2003.

“[A]t Barzino’s the patron is led to expect white fettuccine and gets it. Here at Fabrizio’s he gets green fettuccine. Why? It all seems so gratuitous. As customers, we are not prepared for the change. Hence, the green noodle does not amuse us. It’s disconcerting in a way unintended by the chef.”

—Woody Allen, Fabrizio’s: Criticism and Response, from The Insanity Defense; The Complete Prose, 2007.

“‘I was doing very well till you came along. I had myrrh and fig trees in abundance and a coat of many colors with two pairs of pants of many colors. Now look.’”

—Job, complaining to God; Woody Allen, The Scrolls, from The Insanity Defense; The Complete Prose, 2007.

“A fine example of a demonstration was the Boston Tea Party, where outraged Americans disguised as Indians dumped British tea into the harbor. Later, Indians disguised as outraged Americans dumped actual British into the harbor. Following that, the British, disguised as tea, dumped each other into the harbor. Finally, German mercenaries clad only in costumes from The Trojan Women leapt into the harbor for no apparent reason.”

—Woody Allen, A Brief, Yet Helpful, Guide to Civil Disobedience, from The Insanity Defense; The Complete Prose, 2007.

“Should I marry W.? Not if she won’t tell me other letters in her name.”

—Woody Allen, Selections from the Allen Notebooks, from The Insanity Defense; The Complete Prose, 2007.

“[I]n 1921, a group of biologists meeting in Hong Kong to buy suits discovered the fake ink blot. It had long been a staple of the Oriental repertoire of diversions, and several of the later dynasties retained power by their brilliant manipulation of what appeared to be a spilled bottle and an ugly ink stain, but was in reality a tin blot.
    The first ink blots, it was learned, were crude, constructed to eleven feet in diameter, and fooled nobody.
    However, with the discovery of the concept of smaller sizes by a Swiss physicist, who proved that an object of a particular size could be reduced in size simply by ‘making it smaller,’ the fake ink blot came into its own.”

—Woody Allen, The Discovery and Use of the Fake Ink Blot, from The Insanity Defense; The Complete Prose, 2007.

“The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. . . .
    I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”

—Willa Cather, My Antonia, 1920.

“All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.”

—Willa Cather, My Antonia, 1920.

“Due to a quirk in the English language, pink and red are sometimes considered two different colors, when in reality red is just a more saturated pink. They are both the same hue. The word ‘pink’ in fact did not enter the English language until the eighteenth century. The color is named after the flower (not the other way around), a relative of the carnation. . . . The color we call pink was previously referred to (if at all) as ‘rose.’”

—Diane Morgan, Fire and Blood; Rubies in Myth, Magic, and History, 2008.

“The magic of any gem is dependent upon the magic of the light that gives it life and fire. Gems are complex things and handle light in complex ways. Light doesn’t just uneventfully flow through windows as it does through glass, or simple bounce back as from a black-hearted mirror. Instead it dances impatiently, refracts and reflects. It comes alive along with the gem. In a weird way, a gem is a crystal cage that traps the light and makes it fight to escape.”

—Diane Morgan, Fire and Blood; Rubies in Myth, Magic, and History, 2008.

“The ancient Romans prized the ruby above the diamond, calling this gem ‘a flower among stones.’ For the Greeks it was the ‘mother of all gems.’ And back in 1560 Benvenuto Cellini declared that the price of ruby was eight times that of diamond. Of course, that was before the brilliant cut was developed for the diamond, which significantly enhanced its looks.
    The ruby has always been, and remains today, the world’s most precious gemstone. . . . A flawless ruby, for instance, is worth more than a flawless diamond of equal weight.”

—Diane Morgan, Fire and Blood; Rubies in Myth, Magic, and History, 2008.

“[F]luorescence is triggered by ultraviolet light. . . . Burmese rubies fluoresce strongly to long wave . . . ultraviolet radiation and less strongly to shortwave radiation. . . .
    Rubies’ fluorescence is apparent in both artificial light and in some cases even in daylight, making the gem appear truly radiant. The fact that many Burmese rubies actually fluoresce to visible light is rather unusual. . . . The ancient Burmese considered this feature supernatural—and in some cases a product of witchcraft. . . .
    At one time it was believed that by looking into the strange, fiery fluorescence of Burmese rubies, one could see dragons and other mystical beasts.”

—Diane Morgan, Fire and Blood; Rubies in Myth, Magic, and History, 2008.

“Rubies have their practical, as well as their beautiful aspects. . . . Primary among these is the use of the ruby for lasers, although I should say that natural rubies are of no use here—the key element chromium must be ‘doped up’ in synthetic rubies to create the laser. . . .
    The ruby laser was the first laser invented in 1960. . . . The key is chromium, that magic element that makes rubies red. Chromium atoms absorb green and blue light and emit or reflect only red light. Chromium is responsible for the ‘lasing’ behavior of the crystal.”

—Diane Morgan, Fire and Blood; Rubies in Myth, Magic, and History, 2008.

“The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing—not over it, taken in to it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.”

—Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup, 2001.

I read a book on bioluminescence a few years ago (it's in the archives, somewhere) and I remember that the author felt that the original researchers in the area, biology I assume, were thought by many of their colleagues to be a little bit ‘silly’ and not as ‘serious’ as other researchers, the importance of color once again casually dismissed by the ‘rational’ mind.
    But when bioluminescent creatures of green, blue and eventually red were discovered by independent researchers around the world, above and below sea level, there was great excitement. Red, green and blue are, of course, the additive primaries of light, the colors that are projected from your computer screen and combined by your eyes and mind to form the illusion of a full range of colors.
    Forget HD DVD and yer Blu-ray, after watching this presentation and considering the gene-splicers who must be working on this, I can’t help but think . . . I want bioluminescent streaming color video pets!

Vinyl Sleeve Heads, from Yadogg.

“Black and white—dot and stroke—to print, to transpose, to transmit, to distribute in images, by the press, by the technique of projections. It is the multipliable work ad lib, which can be recreated at a distance by another.”

—Victor Vasarely, 1957; quoted in Vasarely, by Marcel Joray, 1976.

“Carried by the waves, I flee forward, now toward the atom, now toward the galaxies.”

—Victor Vasarely; quoted in Vasarely, by Marcel Joray, 1976.

“Although at the time of his death Kafka was unknown outside of Prague, over the years his works and fame have spread far and wide. His influence on modern literature is so pervasive that it is nearly impossible to trace – Kafka has become part of the very texture of modern writing, and he practically owns the letter ‘K.’”

—Jeff Nowak & Allen B. Ruch, from The most fortunate and unfortunate of men, an online biography of Franz Kafka, 2004.

“I find the letter K offensive, almost nauseating.”

—Franz Kafka, in his diary; quoted by David Sacks in Letter Perfect, 2003.

“The emblem of the Hell’s Angels, termed ‘colors,’ consists of an embroidered patch of a winged skull wearing a motorcycle helmet. Just below the wings of the emblem are the letters ‘MC.’ Over this is a band bearing the words ‘Hell’s Angels.’. . .
    Another patch worn by some members bears the number ‘13.’ It is reported to represent the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, ‘M,’ which in turn stands for marijuana and indicates the wearer thereof is a user of the drug.”

—Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 1967.

“My wife and I were driving around England once, and we came to a section called ‘Wales,’ which is this linguistically deformed area that apparently is too poor to afford vowels. All the road signs look like this:


    It is a tragic sight indeed to see Welsh parents attempting to sing traditional songs such as ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ to their children and lapsing into heart-rending silence when they get to the part about ‘E-I-E-I-O.’ If any of you in our reading audience have extra vowels that you no longer need, because for example your children have grown up, I urge you to send them (your children) to: Vowels for Wales, c/o Lord Chesterfield, Parliament Luckystrike, the Duke of Earl, Pondwater-on-Gabardine, England.”

—Dave Barry, Europe on Five Vowels a Day, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.

“Although it was constructed in 1536, the New York subway system boasts an annual maintenance budget of nearly $8, currently stolen, and it does a remarkable job of getting New Yorkers from point A to an indeterminate location somewhere in the tunnel leading to point B. It’s also very easy for the ‘out-of-towner’ to use, thanks to the logical, easy-to-understand system of naming trains after famous letters and numbers. For directions, all you have to do is peer up through the steaming gloom at the informative signs, which look like this:


—Dave Barry, Can New York Save Itself?, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.

“This year we, of course, have an entirely new concept. We have been working on it for just months and months now, and we are extremely proud of it, because it is so highly innovative. Are you ready? Here it is:
    Gray.
    Eveybody got that? Better write it down! If we find any ladies out on the street without their gray on, we are going to be very upset. Also we are asking you to purchase certain mandatory accessories in the form of several thousand dollars worth of handbags, shoes, belts, and watch straps made from dead crocodiles. NO, YOU MAY NOT ASK WHY! JUST DO IT!”

—Dave Barry, Revenge of the Pork Person, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.

“The most beautiful lettering in the world is often said to be found in this marble-carved inscription of A.D. 113, which survives, although damaged, on the large pedestal of Trajan’s Column in Rome.”

—David Sacks, Letter Perfect, 2003.

“[T]he medieval i originally had no dot but acquired one because the letter as a hatless stroke was hard to distinguish on a crowded page of handwriting. By about A.D. 1000 the custom had arisen of perhaps topping the minuscule letter with a slanted mark, at the writer’s discretion: ´. With the spread of printing in the late 1400s, the stroke was generally reduced to an economical dot i . . . although the stroke still shows up today in cursive-print wedding invitations and similar. The i’s dot, meanwhile, has become proverbial for any small detail. . . .”

—David Sacks, Letter Perfect, 2003.

“At Jesus’ execution, the Roman letters INRI formed the initials of a sarcastic Latin title: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’. . .
    Julius Caesar was actually named Iulius (Yoolius). The emperor Trajan was Traianus (Trah-yahn-us). . . . Whatever future claim the letter J might have on these words in English, they began in Latin with rather different sounds and spellings. . . .”

—David Sacks, Letter Perfect, 2003.

“Back when Julius Caesar or Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome, U’s shape was sharper, more svelte. In fact U looked exactly like her future daughter V (without V’s sound). Thus, in Roman stone-carved inscriptions, the above-mentioned emperors’ names would appear as IVLIVS CAESAR and MARCVS AVRELIVS.”

—David Sacks, Letter Perfect, 2003.

“A box of . . . Ideal toothpicks from the mid-1960s carries on its bottom this telegraphic legend: ‘The only Toothpick tapered thin—polished—removes food particles from between closely set teeth.’ A flat toothpick bought today is likely to have been stamped out of veneer that has not first been beveled or skived. The result is a thin little stick with blunt ends that hardly deserves the name toothpick. It is typically very ineffective for fine picking, though it may still serve for chewing.”

—Henry Petroski, The Toothpick; Technology and Culture, 2007.

“A box of Diamond Brand ‘double pointed-tapered-flat polished white birch’ toothpicks from abou the 1960s claimed to contain ‘the most perfect toothpick made.’ The toothpick’s quality . . . was touted on every panel, including the bottom, which bragged that the product was ‘made in U.S.A. by American workers of American materials.’ The bottom of the box said also of the Diamond trademark on the top that ‘its use on a package of wood products insures Diamond quality of both materials and workmanship—Every One Perfect.’”

—Henry Petroski, The Toothpick; Technology and Culture, 2007.

“With or without promotions by the industry, adults have developed hobbies, if not obsessions, involving the construction out of toothpicks and glue of replicas of everything from a crucified Christ to the Titanic and other historic steamships. . . . The Christ, which was made up of 65,000 sandwich, flat, square, and round toothpicks, took 2,500 hours of work to glue into place. The rock guitarist Wayne Kusy used 194,000 toothpicks to make a sixteen-foot-long replica of the Lusitania. . . .
    Stephen Backman, who took two and a half years to craft a thirteen-foot replica of the Golden Gate Bridge out of thirty thousand toothpicks, describes himself as an ‘artist working in toothpicks.’. . . Another sculptor, Michael A. Smith, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, produced a fifteen-foot-long, 850-pound alligator by gluing together about three million toothpicks, which took him about three years.”

—Henry Petroski, The Toothpick; Technology and Culture, 2007.

"The invention of paper is credited to Ts'ai Lun, a Chinese, in the early years of the second century. . . .

It took a thousand years for Ts'ai Lun's idea to reach Europe. In the interval paper was produced in Japan, early in the seventeenth century. In the eighth it appeared in Samarkand; the process is though to have been picked up by Arabs from Chinese prisoners. The Moors may have carried paper-making into Europe. The year 1085 is given as the date of a mill for making paper at Jativa, Spain, that produced a rag sheet, chiefly of linen fibers."

--Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.

"One logical and rewarding way [to consider roman type] is to think of the forms as a series of geometrical variations on a theme of square, circle, and triangle, which, when set together, will become a frieze of contracting and expanding spatial interruptions. This breathing quality is the very essence of the inscriptional concept, and is responsible for the liveliness as well as the nobility of the great classic carvings. Almost every letter shape carries its contained space, which in type is called the counter, and which is related, in composition, to the separations between letters. This inner space is not only vital to the color of a form--its black-and-white value--but is also an integral part of it."

--Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.

"A serif is a terminal device, functionally employed to strengthen lines which otherwise would tend to fall away optically. This is especially true of incised lines. By using a chisel in such a way that the finishing cuts were wider, a craftsman produced a strong terminal with a bracketed appearance."

--Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.

"Roman [type] has come to be divided into three categories. Those having calligraphic stress and bracketed serifs are old style. Romain du roi was the forerunner of the types called transitional. The third category, modern, is applied to those alphabets, starting with Bodoni's in 1790, which have lost all relationship to written models."

--Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.

"As early as 1727, William Ged, of Edinburgh, invented a means of pressing a type form into material that could then be used as a matrix to make a casting duplicating the form. Ged's invention was strongly opposed by the printers of his time, but in 1794, Firmin Didot became interested in the machine and experimented with the inventions of Ged and others. It was Didot who gave the process its name: stereotype, the prefix 'stereo' describing the solidity of the printing unit."

--Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.

"I recall Edward Johnston as a serious and courteous man, weary from ill health, but with a startling and delightful clarity of mind. He was a perfectionist. Once, too briefly and inadequately, I said to him that I did not believe in perfection. His immediate response was: 'I believe in the Book of Kells!'"

--Alfred Fairbank; quoted by Warren Chappell in A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.

"Littera scripta manet--'the written word remains.'"

--Horace, his motto; quoted by Warren Chappell in A Short History of the Printed Word, 1970.

"Ever since the invention of alphabetic writing by the Phoenicians (or at least, by a northwestern Semitic people) in the second millennium BCE, letters have been used for numbers. . . .

Given their alphabets, the Greeks, the Jews, the Arabs and many other peoples thought of writing numbers by using letters. The system consits of attributing numerical values from 1 to 9, then in tens from 10 to 90, then in hundreds, etc., to the letters in their original Phoenician order. . . .

In these circumstances, every word acquired a number-value, and conversely, every number was 'loaded' with the symbolic value of one or more words that it spelled. That is why the number 26 is a divine number in Jewish lore, since it is the sum of the number-values of the letters that spell YAHWEH, the name of God."

--Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers; from Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, 2000.

"Everyone can see . . . sets of one, of two, and of three objects . . . and most people can see . . . set[s] of four. . . . Beyond four, quantities are vague, and our eyes alone cannot tell us how many things there are. . . .

The eye is simply not a sufficiently precise measuring tool: its natural number-ability virtually never exceed four. . . .

Perhaps the most obvious confirmation of the basic psychological rule of the 'limit of four' can be found in the almost universal counting-device called (in England) the 'five-barred gate'. It is used by innkeepers keeping a tally or 'slate' of drinks ordered, by card-players totting up scores, by prisoners keeping count of their days in jail. . . ."

--Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.

 

Fig. 24.58. Evolution of Indian numerals 2 and 3

"[T]he superposition of two or three horizontal lines, first transformed into one complete sign by a ligature, gave birth to the same forms as the Indian numerals for 2 and 3, whose palaeographical styles vary considerably according to the era, the region and the habits of the scribe."

--Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.

"The nine numerals (of Indian origin) that we use today . . . are drawn in just one stroke of a pen or pencil. This is one of the characteristics of our numeral system, whose remarkable simplicity we forget because we have been using it all our lives."

--Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.

"[T]he discovery of zero and the place-value system were inventions unique to Indian civilisation. [Just as] the Brahmi notation of the first nine whole numbers . . . was autochthonous and free of any outside influence, there can be no doubt that our decimal place-value system was born in India and was the product of Indian civilisation alone."

--Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.

"[T]he word-symbols that the Sanskrit language used to express the concept of zero conveyed concepts such as the sky, space, the atmosphere or the firmament.

In drawings and pictograms, the canopy of heaven in universally represented either by a semi-circle or by a circular diagram or by a whole circle. The circle has always been regarded as the representation of the sky and of the the Milky Way as it symbolizes both activity and cyclic movments.

Thus the little circle, through a simple transposition and association of ideas, came to symbolise the concept of zero for the Indians.

Another Sanskrit term which came to mean zero was the word bindu, which literally means 'point'.

The point is the most insignificant geometrical figure, constituting as it does the circle reduced to its simplest expression, its centre.

For the Hindus, however, the bindu represents the universe in its non-manifest form, the universe before it was transformed into the world of appearances. According to Indian philosophy, this uncreated universe possessed a creative energy, capable of generating everything and anything: it was the causal point."

 --Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.

"When the Arabs adopted Indian numerals and the zero, they called the latter sifr, meaning 'empty', a plain translation of the Sanskrit shunya. . . .

 When the concept of zero arrived in Eurpoe, the Arabic word was assimilated to a hear-homophone in Latin, zephyrus, meaning 'the west wind' and, by rather convenient extension, a mere breath of wind, a light breeze, or--almost--nothing.In his Liber  Abaci, Fibonacci (Leonard of Pisa) used the term zephirum, and the term remained in use in that form until the fifteenth century. . . .

 [I]t was Fibonacci's term . . . which gave rise to the modern name of zero, by way of the Italian zefiro (zero is just a contraction of zefiro, in Venetian dialect). . . . There is absolutely no doubt that zero owes its spread to French (zero) and Spanish (cero) (and later on to English and other languages) to the enormous prestige that Italian scholarship acquired in the sixteenth century."

 --Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers, 2000.

"The fact that the Roman numerals were so deeply rooted in the customs and affections of the people at first made it exceedingly difficult for the new Indian numerals, the 'figure numbers,' to replace the old familiar Roman numerals. . . . [I]n northern Europe the Indian numerals first began to be used by ordinary people about 1500. This date, the change from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, is the great intellectual watershed of modern history, the time when all the new movements generally came to the fore."

--Karl Menninger, Number Words and Number Symbols; A Cultural History of Numbers, 1969.

"Today we can no longer understand the stubborn reisitance to the new numerals during the early Middle Ages; to us they seem so much easier to work with than the cumbersome Roman numerals. . . . [T]he counting board served medieval Europe as a perhaps slow but essentially equivalent and above all highly visual means of computation. Computations with the new numberals, in contrast, were certainly not as easy to visualize. But most of important of all they embodied an intellectual obstacle that was scarcely overcome during the first few centuries of their presence in the west: the zero!

What kind of crazy symbol is this, which means nothing at all? Is it a digit, or isn't it? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 all stand for numbers one can understand and grasp -- but 0? If it is nothing, then it should be nothing. But sometimes it is nothing, and then at other times it is something: 3 + 0 = 3 and 3 - 0 = 3, so here the zero is nothing, it is not expressed, and when it is placed in front of a number it does not change it: 03 = 3, so the zero is still nothing, nulla figura! But write the zero after a number and it suddenly multiplies the number by ten; 30 = 3 x 10. So now it is something -- something incomprehensible but powerful, if a few 'nothings' can raise a small number to an immeasurably vast magnitude. Who could understand such a thing?"

--Karl Menninger, Number Words and Number Symbols; A Cultural History of Numbers, 1969.

"Man differs from other animals most strikingly in his language, the development of which was essential to the rise of abstract mathematical thinking; yet words expressing numerical ideas were slow in arising. Number signs probably preceded number words, for it is easier to cut notches in a stick than it is to establish a well-modulated phrase to identify a number."

--Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 1968.

"Our numerals often are known as Arabic, despite the fact that they bear little resemblance to those now in use in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Arabia, Iran, and other lands within the Islamic culture. . . . We call our numerals Arabic because the principles in the two systems are the same and because our forms may have been derived from the Arabic. However, the principles behind the Arabic numerals presumably were derived from India; hence it is better to call ours the Hindu or the Hindu-Arabic system."

--Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 1968.