A List
I was cleaning my room when I found this list in a pile of papers:
It’s my handwriting from the last couple years, and it looks faintly familiar, but for the life of me I have no idea what it means or why I wrote it.
… can anyone help figure this one out?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Could it be good words for that Ghost game discussed a few months back?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Definitely plans for a novel.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:15 am
I thought about Ghost, but none of them look like particularly winning or useful words. And plurals like “legends” cannot come up in play. But I think the fact that the first four are alphabetical suggests that I was going through a dictionary output of some kind.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:15 am
You were trying to make a silly scetch a la Montey Python?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Mysterious. Perhaps it’s a warning from your future self, and you have to unravel the code.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:18 am
This requires science: get progressively more drunk and see if your handwriting changes. If it matches this exactly, we ‘ve found the answer.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:21 am
why not passwords for direct entry on a video game level?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:22 am
You tried to play Ghost drunk again, didn’t you?
You shouldn’t do that, someone could lose an ‘I’.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:25 am
All plural words have a ‘n’ near the end: evenings, foxhounds, johns, legends. All of them are on the left column.
All the words on the right column end with a ‘g’.
But I don’t know what “parrot” and “lithographer” are doing there.
What are the symbols at the botton: “?” (alpha) and “x”?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:29 am
“bottom”, I mean, not “botton”
Wordpress didn’t like when I included a alpha symbol in the comment, it seems.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Some game where you had to come up with words to fit categories or rules, like Scattergories or Cranium?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Both symbols seem to be Xs. The top one is hastily done, so the ink connects the lines.
Word lengths:
8 11
9 7
5 3
6
12
7
April 24th, 2008 at 9:32 am
The extra spaces didn’t parse.
Word lengths:
8____11
9____7
5____3
6
12
7
April 24th, 2008 at 9:37 am
These are definitively things you wanted to buy! *G*
April 24th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Typing all the words into Google gives mainly word lists as responses, but also comes up with one “hash test” item. Keywords for database indexing? Ring any bells?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:44 am
A few thoughts:
* You were writing a program that properly stems words, and you gave it a lot of different test cases (bunting stems, leg doesn’t, legends stems, parrot doesn’t)
* You were trying to make a poem with at least two rhyming schemes
* You were making your own list of Shakespearean Insults
* You were playing “say the first thing that comes to mind” with a friend, and your friend got fed up after three rounds.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Counting syllables gives 21
3 __ 4
2 __ 2
1 __ 1
2
4
2
Which… doesn’t help?
I posit simply that it is a list of things that are cool, and that alcohol was involved in its creation.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:50 am
The right column is missing “fish sticks”, “phone” and “sheet”
April 24th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Boggle. The two tick marks at the bottom are probably to take off points for words that someone else had, too.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:54 am
What could “johns” mean?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Several of the words are made up of sequences of shorter valid words:
lit-hog-rap-her
res-up-plying
bun-ting
leg-ends
fox-hounds
but it’s not true of all the words, and it’s not a property unique to these words.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Have you done any hallucinogenic drugs recently? That could easily explain it.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Brian, just saw your comment after posting.
“lithographer” in Boggle?
April 24th, 2008 at 9:57 am
I’ve no idea. I did try and see if there was a title attribute, to shed more light on it though. Then I realised that if you don’t know what they are, you’re not likely to have put that attribute yourself.
Then my train of thougth went on to what Google would do with this in Google Image Search, since it has no description…
April 24th, 2008 at 9:57 am
The night, like so many other evenings before, bore down close upon his shoulders. He heard sirens off in the distance, baying like foxhounds. As he trudged down the gritty streets, shards of glass crunching under his boots, he shrugged off the enticements of the streetwalkers and tried to avoid the eyes of the johns who sought them out – too much emptiness there, like a parrot of his own soul. He turned a corner and walked furtively to the shop of the lithographer; the metal shutter was drawn down but not locked. He reached and drew it up with a screech until it clanged home, then passed through the fortified gate as a knight on horseback rode under the portcullis of his castle in the legends of old. His mission tonight – resupplying the old man with the ink he needed for his work – gave him strength and confidence. He stepped cautiously through the cluttered store, passing a discarded pile of bunting from a forgotten rally thrown by a forgotten politician, easing his way toward the sliver of light emanating from the half-shut workshop door behind the counter. Something brushed past his leg.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Boggle is a 5×5 grid. Maximum word size is 25. Granted, this is EXTREMELY unlikely, but you can go diagonal, and I’ve made some whoppers in my day. :)
April 24th, 2008 at 10:04 am
You can go back to previously used letters in boggle; in theory, word size is unlimited. Lithographer is still highly unlikely.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Short-term memory test? The irony would blow us all apart.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:09 am
@Agehn:
Not if you’re playing by the rules:
http://gamebits.gameroom.com/RULES/103_Boggle_Rules.html
“…But no one cube letter can be used more than once within a single word (see examples)”
That’s neither here nor there no. I think we all agree that the length of lithographer makes this an unlikely boggle list, but it is possible. Further detracting from the Boggle theory is that there are no similar words - however, this could be dependent on the play style. Typically a boggle word list has many similar small words, and larger words with many permutations (way, away, ways, wars, saw, etc). However, perhaps Randall was playing with modified rules for smart folk.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:10 am
@Agehn:
Not if you’re playing by the rules:
gamebits.gameroom.com/RULES/103_Boggle_Rules.html
“…But no one cube letter can be used more than once within a single word (see examples)”
That’s neither here nor there no. I think we all agree that the length of lithographer makes this an unlikely boggle list, but it is possible. Further detracting from the Boggle theory is that there are no similar words - however, this could be dependent on the play style. Typically a boggle word list has many similar small words, and larger words with many permutations (way, away, ways, wars, saw, etc). However, perhaps Randall was playing with modified rules for smart folk.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:12 am
There’s a smear on the “h” in “johns”. Perhaps this is a clue as to what was happening around you while the writing was taking place. For instance, if someone bumped into you while writing “johns”, then we can rule out things like poetry and creative writing, since most people like to do those activities solo. However, if you were maybe crying or sweating and some got on the “h”, then we can rule out other possibilities. Is the paper wrinkled in that spot? We need a 3D scan of the paper.
One more clue that I see: it looks like there is a checkmark underneath “resupplying”. You may have originally been creating a checklist, and “evenings” got a check by it. But then you wrote “resupplying” on top of the check.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:13 am
This is why you should never clean your room.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Plans for xkcd comics
April 24th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Jiggy muppet?
April 24th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I would LOVE to see you make a comic that includes all of those words
April 24th, 2008 at 10:22 am
I guess I’m just a rebel then, and refuse to play by Boggle’s arbitrary rules. Heh. Actually, I’d never heard that before. Anyway, I was impressed by SalsaShark’s interpretation. While I doubt that a noir short was the intended purpose, it’s hella late and I’ve had just enough to drink to give it a try of my own.
The evenings is this town are hellish, he thought to himself as he trudged along the uneven sidewalk. It was hellish all day, but it hit him especially hard in the evening, when he’d been working all day and hadn’t had a drink yet. Not a strong one, at any rate. But he couldn’t afford that luxury tonight; Vick’s men were bound to be on his trail like foxhounds, and he had to stay sharp. With a furtive glance over his shoulder, he made his way toward a group of vagrants. Poor bastards, forced to take shelter under the tracks and use whatever public johns they could find, if they were lucky.
He grabbed a ragged, dirty coat and was about to try to blend in with the bums when he saw it — the parrot. His heart skipped a beat and his hand instinctively moved toward his gun; if Polly was here, the lithographer couldn’t be far away. The legends of Leonidus and Custer flashed through his head, but he shook those thoughts away; now was not the time for his last stand. Vick hadn’t caught him yet, but he couldn’t stay here. He was low on cash, and on bullets. Thinking about where he might next be resupplying, he once more scanned the street for Vick’s soldiers, and kept moving.
It seemed like hours later, but the residual glow of the sun was still visible around the skyscrapers, so it could only have been a few minutes. He rounded a corner, and saw some familiar bunting. At last, a friendly port — Ol’ Petey, with his gaudy storefront and peg leg, would help him out of this jam. Unless Vick had already gotten to him, too.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Is it possible that the “leg” in the right-hand column was going to be “legends,” but then you decided it belonged in the left-hand column mid-word?
My guess is that it has something to do with the ghost thread. Maybe you were testing one of the many suggested variants, like reverse-ghost, where you spell words backwards. But not that, because as others have mentioned, long before getting lithographer you would have gotten “her.” Maybe building from the inside out?
April 24th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Easy. You bought one of those robots like in AI and this is the code to activate it to love you.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:32 am
“what are ‘things I can do without?’”
April 24th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I don’t think Boggle is the right answer. How in the hell are you gonna get “lithographer” in that game?
April 24th, 2008 at 10:33 am
It’s obviously a to-do list.
You were going to be spending some evenings with foxhounds, taking care of John’s parrot, while compiling a list of legendary lithographers.
The there’s another reminder about getting new bunting for your leg.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Take a short word, say “eve”, “fox”, “oh”, “rot”, “hog”, “her”, “up”, “bunt”, and “leg”, and produce the longest word you can that includes that word as a substring.
“Bunt” would be a strange one to pick, though.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Level codes for some obscure game maybe?
April 24th, 2008 at 10:36 am
But “tin” wouldn’t be as strange.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:38 am
And you were playing this with friends, and only won twice, with lithographer and resupplying. You each kept a tally of your own score.
But that you would probably remember.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Really silly ideas for a treasure hunt?
Must be done in evenings, with foxhounds, (wearing long johns?). You need a lithographer to make a map on a stone slab or something, with legend(s). The treasure must be resupplied on every find, obviously. And of course to make it authentic you have to be a pirate with a parrot and a leg made of wood from a bat that was previously used in bunting. X marks the spot, twice I guess.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Maybe you were playing Scrabble? That would explain the “leg” and “legends”.
Also, it’s one of the few games that you can get “lithographer” in.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I demand timestamp - from the past, of course - , that this is not another Nerd Sniping ( http://xkcd.com/356/ ). By the way, how many points linguists worth? :)
What about semantic? Parrots, leg, obvious acessories for a pirate.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:48 am
carbon date it! or do more testing to figure out when it’s from!
April 24th, 2008 at 10:51 am
With the exception of “parrot” it looks like you’re comparing your (very similar) lowercase “s” and “g”. Notice that each is legible in context, but that the two are essentially the same shape.
It’s also possible that you’re searching for anagrams to a phrase, and that “foxhounds” is your best guess for using up the pesky “x”.
As you add terms to Google, searching begins to yield only dictionaries. That’s usually my hint that there’s no connection between the words, but with you I’m wondering if a particular dictionary in the results will prove to be a clue.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Rather than pretend to solve your obscure list puzzle I’m just going to ask you a question:
Do you have a hot new girlfriend or something?
I ask because lately your comic has featured a cute stick girl in every “Issue” as well as alot of couple based jokes. An improvement over the heavy run of science based jokes before that because alot of them were just too much for a poor uneducated country lad like myself.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Obviously, you were attempting to resupply the foxhounds with food, as they wanted to eat the parrots’ legs perched on the bunting at your evening party. There was even a lithographer there to record the event, as it was sure to be legendary. I don’t know where the johns fit in, and I’m not sure I want to speculate.
Interesting riddle, though.
P.S. Thanks for participating in the flying car panel, and we’ll be there at 3Pi-Con as well.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:01 am
[...] i’ve got a list of demands a list from russel munroe [...]
April 24th, 2008 at 11:07 am
I’m going to take a stab in the dark and say you were trying to come up with comic titles and/or premises.
Evenings
Foxhounds
Johns parrot
Lithographer legends
Resupplying
Bunting leg
April 24th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Its the begining of a pirate RPG.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Family Feud. Category: Things you’re afraid of. You have two X’s, chose carefully.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Clearly it’s a list of supplies needed for some very clever sounding doom’s-day device.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:31 am
It seems that it’s a quick and easy way to find English wordlists on Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=evenings%20foxhounds%20johns%20parrot%20lithographer%20legends%20resupplying%20bunting%20leg
April 24th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I think it could be things for a game to make, on the left there are things to be included, on the right you have game concepts to worry about.
So if it would be about pirates (and it is obviously) then you have to think about how the resupplying (on sea ?), the bunting (maybe a capture the flag game mode ?) works…..and whats up with wooden legs…or so
April 24th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Suddenly I have an urge to write random words down and hide the pages away so that I’ll find them years later and wonder.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:47 am
I agree with a suggestion by moink…you may have been playing superghost (also called Lexicant or Llano), the variant of ghost but you can add letters to the beginning or end. I’ve played that game, and you do often get long words with weird prefixes and suffixes, like “foxhounds” and “resupplying”.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Dude.
You wrote a list while asleep. THAT IS A DREAMLIST. You win!
April 24th, 2008 at 11:55 am
You started planning this blag post a couple of years ago, didn’t you?
April 24th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
> Is it possible that the “leg” in the right-hand column was going to be “legends,” but then you decided it belonged in the left-hand column mid-word?
This is totally possible! Although usually I scribble things out.
> My guess is that it has something to do with the ghost thread.
I don’t *think* it’s ghost-related. I think it’s less recent than that.
Here’s my only vague memory (which could be entirely wrong) — I may have been looking for words with a certain property that were also common enough that people would know them, and I had trouble finding them. So whatever this list is, I don’t think it’s just tossing random words out. I think it’s the result of doing a search for a pattern in /usr/share/dict/words (or on onelook.com) and then looking through the results for the least-obscure words.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I agree with the pirate comments. Lithographer, paired with legends, sounds like there has to be a treasure map, leg and parrot are pretty easy, bunting and resupplying could refer to a lawful, say government-owned vessel that gets pirated. The first three may just be describing the interests of the pirate in question, or setting the opening scene.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Win, Lose or Draw.
The stranged damn game of it though…
April 24th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Oh, and to the people asking about the smudge in “johns”, that’s a hole through the paper from where it was sitting on something.
> Perhaps it’s a warning from your future self, and you have to unravel the code.
Man, you’d think FutureRandall would have the courtesy to, you know, chill out a little, have a drink … have a few more drinks … maybe cuddle a little …
April 24th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I think you made a list of random works 5 minutes before you took a picture of it and posted it just to screw with our minds.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
words even.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I’m surprised someone has not caught this yet, the “ing” in resupplying is added on after it was originally written.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I will assume it is a message from God that he wanted you to tell us all, all hail the foxhounds!
April 24th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
This is a AWESOME plan. The variables x and alpha are defined in a trigonometric function which is hidden in the words. The function describes the amount of unhappyness that a given triangle drama creates.
Johns is a attempt to create another function to express the amount of triangle drama created by a given number of people named john.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Maybe you were writing down someone’s PGP fingerprint as they were reading it to you over the phone.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Code names.
Looks like a hit list to me.
April 24th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Freewrite for cromic ideas?
After you wrote your list, you didn’t think the x in ‘foxhound’ looked quiet right, so you wrote a few more to see if that is actually what your handwriting looks like. (?)
I do that all the time…
April 24th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Perhaps you were trying to make a word search puzzle?
Something about half of those words makes me think of pirates and Puzzle Pirates in particular.
Or perhaps you’ve just been picking words out of recaptcha?
April 24th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I say you got really drunk and decided to do the neighbor kids vocabulary homework
April 24th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I found a similarly strange list cleaning out my desk at work. Unfortunately, I think I threw it out, but it was something like:
pi
zombies
touchtone
bjork
It ended up being single words from names of songs that we were using in our media-related work-stuff (all from Songs To Wear Pants To, as they’re nice and short (and funny) and makes testing easier/faster/more enjoyable). I would have scribbled them down to remember their order or something, and really not needed to write the whole names.
The First 50 Digits of Pi
Kill the Zombies by Shooting them in the Head
The Touchtone Genius
I Am Bjork
Could your list also be shortened versions of something? Song names, book names, anything spring to mind?
April 24th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Submit it to Found, they might be able to help, or at least it will confuse other people too.
http://www.foundmagazine.com
April 24th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Well, you’re actually getting close to writing a Haiku poem there. Maybe you gave up.
Evenings, foxhounds, —[ev'en'ings]
Johns parrot - lithographer:
Resupplying bunting leg.
“Legends” didn’t work, so you did the other three.
And ‘cos it’s poetry, it doesn’t have to mean anything!
April 24th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I find this kind of thing all the time. usually I stare at it for five minutes and throw it away, only to regret it a week and a half later, or I put it in a pile of useless but important looking peices of paper (which I eventually thouroughly forget that I have made, or it’s location, only to find it one day and say “what IS all this crap?”)
the only times that I have ever figured out what they were, I had to look at them in context, e.g. try to extrapolate, from how far under other messes it is, -when- it may have been put there, and see what else you were thinking about during that time, or look at other things that it was found with, or other things in other piles at the same depth.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
“the only times that I have ever figured out what they were, I had to look at them in context, e.g. try to extrapolate, from how far under other messes it is, -when- it may have been put there, and see what else you were thinking about during that time, or look at other things that it was found with, or other things in other piles at the same depth.”
So basically you’d have to be an archaeologist.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
This frequently happens to me as well, but usually it turns out that it was a piece of paper sitting next to my keyboard for a few weeks, subsequently getting stuff written on it over the course of my brave adventures through the internet.
I suppose you could extrapolate what they mean by cross-referencing them with your many-month-old internet histories, if you don’t have that, you could ask your ISP for them. Who knows, maybe you’ll find gold? Or the MIB!
April 24th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
These all seem like they would make pretty good words for a game of hangman… with the large number of consonants and not too many ‘t’s or ‘e’s. I used to spend lots of time trying to think up good hangman words when I was little. ‘lynx’ was my favorite.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Something you wrote down for one of those mails who say “Write the first thing that comes to your mind when I say SQUIRRELS!” and after writing those words “the first word means what you feel about your loved one, the second one (…)”.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
And, just like an archaeologist, you never get the pleasure of actually knowing if you’re right or wrong. Damn you for posting this, none of us will ever know the true solution to this mystery.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I would have to agree with Jarmel and say that the note is definitely plans for a novel.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Using http://wordsmith.org/anagram/index.html you can get some interesting anagrams for each word.
Does that Gel with anyone?
April 24th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Using an anagram-maker, you can get some interesting anagrams for each word.
Does that Gel with anyone?
April 24th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Grocery list. Fairly obvious to me.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Each word contains at least one pair of non-consecutive-in-the-word letters which are separated by only one letter in the alphabet. (E.g., LITHOGRAPHER has R and T, and P and R.) Each word, except EVENING and LEG, has at least one pair of letters which are consecutive in the alphabet. (LITHOGRAPHER has GH, HI, and OP.) Each word except JOHNS and, again, LEG has one letter which occurs more than once in the word.
Each word can act as a noun within a sentence.
Each word except JOHNS and as far as I can tell LITHOGRAPHER has a place within the word where it can be split into two word-segments which form words of their own (when anagrammed, in some cases). E.g.: even, sing; fox, hounds; par, rot (or rap, rot); leg, ends (or leg, send); super, plying; bunt, gin.
I suppose if you take “grapher” as a word LITHO can be made into I, loth; hit, lo; hi, lot; &c. Or: lit hog rap (par) her? But the anagrammer I have open right now can’t find any split point forming exactly two anagrammed words, or anything for JOHNS.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Some random thoughts and I came up with Scrabulous (online version of Scrabble). All the words you’ve written can be used in both the SOWPODS and TWL dictionaries. If this makes ZERO sense at all:
http://www.scrabulous.com/scrabulous_dictionary.php
http://web.mit.edu/tivol/OldFiles/Public/sow-twl.txt
April 24th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Some random thoughts and I came up with Scrabulous? All the words you’ve written can be used in both the SOWPODS and TWL dictionaries. If this makes ZERO sense at all:
http://www.scrabulous.com/scrabulous_dictionary.php
http://web.mit.edu/tivol/OldFiles/Public/sow-twl.txt
April 24th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Scrabble perhaps?
April 24th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I know! It’s Scrabble, Boggle, or Ghost. Clearly I must be right and nobody could have previously guessed any of them.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
I thought this was Reddit for a minute, so I was trying to upvote Gwen.
I’ve converted all of the letters to numbers (A=1, B=2, …), and have been playing around with them in Matlab for a while, but I haven’t found anything interesting.
It seems odd to me that if it has to do with the structure of the word, then lithographer must be an extraordinary cases. That puts leg at the opposite end of the spectrum, however - quite the paradox.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Could it have coincided with this post: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/12/1/ ?
April 24th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
The anagram generator doesn’t reveal anything in particular, as ‘johns’ has no English anagrams, ‘evenings’ and ‘bunting’ have no sensical ones, and ‘leg’ has only ‘gel’. Here are the only anagrams that strike me as particularly likely:
foxhounds = unshod fox (your fox needs shoes, perhaps?)
parrot = raptor
legends = send gel
resupplying = nil prep guys (a group of males who shun preparation, I guess)
and my personal favorite:
lithographer = Hitler harp, go!
[/delurk]
April 24th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Here’s what happened.
Two months ago, while slightly wasted, you came up with a list of words to put on the blag at a later date for the purpose of nerd sniping. And then you fell into your own clever, clever trap. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that self-sniping will make you go blind?
OR…
Are they CAPTCHA words?
April 24th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
At the very least it’s a list that seems tailor-made to confound the google labs. No three of these words used on Google Sets (http://labs.google.com/sets) results in a nonzero list. Which is really annoying, by the way.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
you were solving a crossword?
April 24th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
LIKE FLAMING GLOBES!!!
April 24th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Looks like a bizarre to-do list
Evenings re-supplyings
- obvious
Fox-Hounds _h_unting
- ??? this one is the one quite bizarre .. at least to me.
Jonhn’s Leg
- You had to take care of someone’s wounded leg ?
Parrot
- You have/wanted a parrot ? Or did you promise someone
Lithographer
- You gave something to be designed/printed ?
Legends
- Finally come home and watch some TV show ? With the name “Legends” ?
April 24th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
There’s a web game which generates six random words, and you have to think of a categorization which exactly half of them fit into.
The 6 words on the left remind of that, and perhaps the words on the right are somehow categories?
Bit of a stretch, I know…
April 24th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
It was getting to the end of one of THOSE days, the ones that dash by like a fox being chased. Sighing idly to myself, I slipped into my long underwear and stared out the window. There was a sunset, but I wasn’t seeing it. I was only seeing my translucent reflection, watching it mimic my movements as I sipped at my tea.
The phone rang, interrupting my melancholy angst. I picked it up. It was the print shop.
“Hi there, Bob. You get those rough copies I sent you?”
I sighed again, for no particular reason. Home-publishing board games had turned out to be more work than I had thought it would be. “Yeah,” I said, “I did. Very nice.”
“Any mistakes?”
“No, I don’t think so.” I thought for a moment. “No, wait. Some of the maps had misprints. The keys were wrong.”
“Which?”
“12 and 13. Those are important. The players will have to know where their bases are in case they need to send them more food.”
“Oh?” There was a sound of shuffled papers. “Yeah, I see what you mean. Okay, I’ll get that fixed. Anything else?”
I stared out the window again. A small bird landed on a tree branch. It hopped from foot to foot.
“Bob? Are you still there?”
I hung up the phone. It didn’t really matter.
—–
All of the words in order, only without using the actual words.
Yes, this is a short story about a melancholy independent board game publisher named Bob. You gotta problem wi’ dat?
April 24th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Oh I know.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Ah, it’s actually 8 words, not 6. Still can’t remember the website, but here there’s a text file sitting on my desktop which contains the list:
*telegraph pole
*snow-globe
*penguin
*rivet
*cannon
*cucumber
*ten-pound note
*picture frame
Which definitely has the same type of unrelatedness as your list.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Is it possible that someone, a Conchis-type, could have imitated your handwriting in this simply for the purpose of seeing whether it would make the website; or perhaps the number of responses it got? In that case, I’m playing into his/her hands…Damn.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
It’s obviously the notes for a contest for the readers! Submit three sestinas, on the topics in the right column, using the words in the left column. Best poems win. ^_^
April 24th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
A list of words that, if spelled backwards, would make brilliant names for Alien races.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
It would all be so much more obvious if Randall hadn’t removed the final word on the list after scanning:
Garofalo.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
I keep a list of good words to use in crossword puzzle clues and “evening”
is at the top of it, because of the potentially misleading multiple meanings
(time of day and leveling out). Someone else commented that several
of these words are made up of smaller words (like lit-hog-rap-her), which
makes them suitable as crossword answers. So….these were reminders
of good crossword clue/answer combos?
(”Crossword” here means “British style cryptic” of course.)
April 24th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
I think it’s most likely to be selected words from the output of a hastily thrown together bash or perl script filtering the dictionary, as Randall half-remembers above. I often find old programs in my home directory that count certain letters from stdin or something equally banal, where I can’t remember why I wrote the program other than that it must have been to provide a quick answer to some question or other.
Having said that, the only common property I’ve found so far with these words is that their first three letters alternate between consonants and vowels. Quite a lot of words do that - just over half the words in my dictionary file have this property.
If it’s a cryptogram of some kind, I don’t think it can be anything complicated. If you’d devised some complex and subtle code, and it took more than a minute or so to do, wouldn’t you remember doing it?
Is it possible that Randall was watching a television programme or listening to the radio, and, unentertained by the content, played some sort of word game based on the words being spoken in the programme? For example, hear a word, and try to come up with a longer word in a few seconds that has the same first and last letters, something like that.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I agree with Cj its the start up list for your new robot from the movie AI.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I keep a list of good words to use in crossword puzzle clues and “evening”
is at the top of it (because of the potentially misleading dual meanings—
time of day and leveling). Someone else noted that several of these
words are made up of smaller words, like lit-hog-rap-her, which makes
them suitable as crossword puzzle answers. So—this was a list of
reminders of good crossword clue/answer combinations?
(”Crossword” here means “British style cryptic” of course.)
April 24th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Words that look really cool spelled backwards
April 24th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
The checkmark over “resupplying” in conjunction with the two “x” marks at the bottom of the page suggests a selection process (either a game or a program) that makes “resupplying” different from two other unlisted words. The other words on the list are either not different or are different from the two unlisted words (A is or is not B. Duh.) Many of the posts assume that the words on the list are similar in some way. What happens if we assume that “resupplying” is different? I dunno, but thanks for the work distraction…
By the way, the list on the left is composed of words commpnly thought of as nouns and the right is verbs (assuming “leg” doesn’t exist…)
April 24th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Some ideas:
* Is there something about the pronunciation of these words, or perhaps how people might improperly pronounce them?
* Are you doing some character to number conversion, and these words represent a special kind of number?
* Most of these have a common suffix of some sort. “s”, “ing”, and one case of “er”. Why?
* Is it possible that this list includes counterexamples that don’t belong in the group?
April 24th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
To follow up from my previous comment, something’s just struck me - although words that begin with three letters alternating between consonants and vowels make up about 55% of the words in my dictionary, the probability of nine random words *all* having this property is (roughly roughly) 1 in 200, which is small enough to be interesting.
Perhaps this consonant-vowel-consonant (or vowel-consonant-vowel) property is a logical prerequisite for whatever the shared property really is?
Or it could just be coincidence, and I’m not only barking up the wrong tree but in the wrong forest entirely.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I don’t know what ‘Ghost’ is, so perhaps it’s the same, but surely this is a list from a game of Ad Libs? Although usually you’d have more of a mix than almost entirely nouns…
April 24th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Ooh, another possibility: Maybe you went to a web domain that you thought might be available, and you landed on one of those generic generated pages with keyword content, and you found it odd that these keywords were associated with the domain so you wrote them down.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
“The checkmark over “resupplying” in conjunction with the two “x” marks at the bottom of the page suggests a selection process (either a game or a program) that makes “resupplying” different from two other unlisted words. The other words on the list are either not different or are different from the two unlisted words (A is or is not B. Duh.) Many of the posts assume that the words on the list are similar in some way. What happens if we assume that “resupplying” is different? I dunno, but thanks for the work distraction…”
That’s it, it’s a game of word Mastermind.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
“joh” shifted one letter backward is “ing…” “johns” is “ingmt,” which doesn’t make much sense to me, but then I’m not Randall.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Well, you’ve obviously tried to write your own piece of Interactive Fiction:
>evening
(trying to go outside)
You can’t do this. There are too many raptors outside!
>use foxhounds
The foxhounds are of no use against the raptors.
>Johns
The Johns wave at you.
>Parrot
(give parrot to the Johns)
The Johns eat the parrot.
>legends
You are not one.
>lithographer.
(calling for a lithographer)
The Johns are lithographers.
You get a nice picture of a raptor.
(move picture of a raptor to inventory)
>resupplying
There are no parrots or foxhounds left.
>bunting
(removing the picture of a raptor first)
you perform a drag bunt.
>leg
(examining your leg)
Your leg was eaten by a grue.
*** You have died ***
April 24th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
How the hell did you got this list ? This is the passwords for the super top secret new generation nuclear submarines !
The nine passwords for the nine submarines !!
April 24th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Tomb Raider? The stuff listed could conceivably come up in reference to Lara Croft…
April 24th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Its the google game where you enter two recognized words into google and try to come up with only one result
April 24th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Maybe you were experimenting with Trans Consciousness Messaging Protocol
http://xkcd.com/269/
April 24th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
It’s the most obscure and confusing love-letter in the world, with two kisses at the end.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
parrot is an anagram for raptor… not that this helps anything.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I’d definitely guess Scrabble.
Good to know I’m not the only one. I find crap like this lying around in my random piles of junk all the time, heh.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
it’s obvious that you were trying to write poetry while drunk
don’t be ashamed of it, it’s happened to the best of us
April 24th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Munroe still hasn’t denied nerd-baiting.
Or the simple ambition of reaching the top of Google for any combination of these words (once all these comments have propagated to the index)
April 24th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
It can’t be Scrabble. Lithographer is too long.
It was clearly written in haste, or at least not deliberately, which would seem to suggest you didn’t brainstorm them. They’re all linked in my mind; they remind me of words you might find in reference to imperialism, all of them a bit dusty and outdated, which implies they came from one source. Maybe you were reading something and recorded interesting words? Or, as many have suggested, passwords for a game.
Or words you might have to enter in order to prove you are human.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Well my friend decided to make a list of awesome words. you may have been doing the same sort of thing. mind you his list included words like Coccyx and Juxtapose
April 24th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
You were obviously practicing for a spelling test.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
The next XKCD will be a graph of how many readers of the XKCD blag thought which explanation was best.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
It has something to do with MGS. Fox-Hound is a dead giveaway.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Oh, you finally got around to translating the cipher I left on your white board.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
you were dreaming and wrote stuff down.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
List of comic strips\blagposts planned?!
April 24th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
I got it! It’s a collection of words that you planned to post on your blag, with the hopes of goading a bunch of obsessive thinkers to ponder them for several years…
April 24th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
8956127113 does this number mean anything to you ?
April 24th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
I searched each word on xkcd
http://www.ohnorobot.com/index.pl?Search=Search&comic=56&e=0&n=0&b=0&m=0&d=0&t=0
Only “leg” returned more than 0 results.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:11 am
All this is for your research on “Order from Chaos” ?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:13 am
It’s obviously a completely random list of words that would get a large reaction in the blag simply to post the more ridiculous responses in a future comic.
(Panel 1)
Person A- Oh hey, a list!
(Panel 2)
Mob- It must be for ghost/scrabble/nerd-sniping/trans-consciousness messages/etc.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:14 am
I agree with Laurie’s idea that they’re all reminiscent of imperialism. “Dusty and outdated” is good- it reminds me of a group of men sitting in a wood-paneled room with smoking jackets. The ones that stand out are “johns,” “parrot,” and “leg.” Lowercase-j johns to me implies that it is not a proper name (unless you’re in the habit of writing down names in all-lowercase), which leaves me with a john in the sense of a prostitute’s customer. Parrot and leg (wooden?) both sound like piratey words. Perhaps you were reading a story about adventure in the age of British imperialism; prostitution was certainly a hallmark of the Victorian era and I believe pirates existed to some extent. Of course, that doesn’t really explain why you’d write those words down in particular… I usually write words down that I intend to look up later, but that doesn’t seem likely in this case. Perhaps you were trying to remember the plot of a story and those words are key elements to it… that’d be rather ironic.
Of course, I haven’t ruled out nerd bating…
April 25th, 2008 at 12:30 am
The captcha that xkcd’s blag uses had “foxhounds” on its rotation at some point, I’m almost sure of it. Then again, I’ve had memories manufactured before, but that’s beside the point, I remember having “foxhounds” as a captcha. It also explains the first three sets-of-two… possibly you tried to see how many images were on your captcha’s rotation, and wrote down the pairs. You then realized that you would only need to write down the first word, since the second would probably follow. Possibly the Xs were duplicates (though I doubt it — I just reloaded this captcha a bunch of times with no duplicates). Then, after a few more, you gave up, possibly distracted or otherwise pulled from the task by something.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Oh, right. I also went to the Re-Captcha site — they scan old books for their captcha material (everything that can’t be OCR’ed goes into the pool of words). That might explain the archaic terms.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:44 am
I didnt read through all the other comments to be if this has been said, but what about that comic, “random stuff from 5am” or something like that?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:44 am
This just sounds like a a REALLY hard game of pictionary or charades.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:53 am
A government agent planted that document in your room knowing that you would post it. Those words in grouped together triggered the hidden memories of sleeper agents the world over monitoring your blag. You are now partially responsible for the beginning of WWIII.
At least someone here has to post the conspiracy theory arguement.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Yes David Ogilvy is right, it might clearly be a plan to find a logic behind re-captcha or something linked to re-captcha….
April 25th, 2008 at 12:58 am
the only word that you could even use in ghost would be leg.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:02 am
You were memorizing random words in order using visual queues for the sake of memorizing random words in order using visual queues.
By the looks of it, you failed your memorization.
One Bun Evenings
Two Shoe foxhounds
Three tree johns
Four Door Parrot
Five Hive lithographer
Six Sticks Legends
Seven Heaven resupplying
Eight Gate Bunting
Nine Vine Leg
Ten Hen XX
April 25th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Looks like an attempt to write 9 words that have absolutely nothing in common.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:29 am
OMG I know what it means! But I won’t tell you.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:37 am
Could it be for a game of Madlibs?
When I want to reuse the pads, I usually ask people (or myself) to write the nouns/verbs/adjectives on a blank piece of paper.
This could be the aftermath of a madlib.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Maybe you were utterly falling asleep when you wrote that? The little mark in resupplying doesn’t seem as thick as a check would be if you made it deliberately. I sometimes find myself opening my eyes seeing a random mark on the paper in front of me, pen in hand.. during lectures especially. So, if you were that sleepy, those could mean anything and nothing!
Also, clearly that’s an alpha and chi, no doubt in reference to a chi-squared test (you forgot the “squared”) you were about to run on some aspect of those words.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:57 am
You were trying to create a more interesting “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” sentence.
At some point in time you still needed an a and an x.
You might also have been working on words for hangman or a similar wordgame that would be hard to guess because of certain letters that weren’t often guessed.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Long time listener, first time caller.
Having done this a few times over the years, when I needed rather freaky amounts of security, I’ve used a word-based representation of a fingerprint for a public key. Instead of the key showing up in hex “7D53EA53AA” or something equally difficult to say over phone, you’ll get a “wordlist” that represents the string. On the phone, it’s easier to say “sandwich wombat toothbrush” instead of “Seven Dee… No, no sevenTY, seven… yeah… with a D.”
Googling all of the words with “+” operand next to ‘em spits out a bunch of wordlists, and then a VIM syntax file, found at http://jeanluc-picard.de/vim/gerspchk/engspchk.vim
Oh wait… that’s a spellchecker for VIM.
*cough*
ALIENS! It’s aliens!
April 25th, 2008 at 2:16 am
You shouldn’t be talking about this.
It doesn’t concern you at all.
Or your previous NASA experience.
Just ignore it and it will go away.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:38 am
you once wrote something about some game you beat in the plane. I had never heard of the game then so I don’t remember the name of it, but I think that was about half a year ago or so…
April 25th, 2008 at 2:39 am
They are all nouns (or can be aka bunting is a known and verb)… The only thing I know of involving these words and weird relationships would be if you ever did any work or looked into directed-acyclic-word-graphs or the compact version of them… Otherwise I would guess / bet its pictionary / taboo / some other game you were playing…
Good luck on your search for answers
April 25th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Since it hasn’t been denied, I’m going with the nerd sniping option.
And it’s going to haunt me for days. And days. And days…
April 25th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Well, it looks like ‘evenings’ was written first and presumably slower because the ink is darker. Followed possibly by ‘resupplying,’ just because it’s written in a similar fashion.
Johns, parrot, lithographer, and legends seem also to have been written in that order because they are all at similarly oblique. This maybe suggests a word order of evenings, resupplying, foxhounds, bunting, Johns - legends, leg.
Of course, none of that really means anything to me.
Johns being capitalized suggests it is referring to Johns the group of proper nouns instead of johns the group of toilets. Does this give credence to the pirate theme? (long john silver, john rackham et al)
of course, there’s also the painter Jasper Johns, probably the only famous Johns. One can purchase a print made with lithography of his painting of bunting.
Weird list.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Fizz, I hope you’re kidding.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:05 am
Nerd Luring is the best possibility.
Next comes his part of OCD. I have done it with worksheets, collect words that make the maximum number of obscure patterns. I have made probably one every math or science test.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:18 am
It’s a trick, get an ax.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:24 am
Alternately; It is a means of making me lose the game.
Yes. That game.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:43 am
@Laurie: It could be Scrabble. You’re allowed to build upon existing words, so (for example) lithographer could have been built in two turns: “grapher” then “litho” prepended… or even (very unlikely though) “graph” with “litho” and “er” added.
But I don’t think it’s Scrabble.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:53 am
I vote for future self scenario but that might just be because I want Randall to invent time travel so that I can watch him make out with FutureRandall.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:05 am
All these words sound best when voiced with a British Accent.
I suggest you were playing the game “Starship Titanic”. Now, truly, I don’t remember anything in that game that’s on your list but the parrot - but I can totally hear Eric Idle saying “Bunting Foxhounds!” and it being hilarious.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:06 am
This list made me think of a game i used to play called “going to a party.” You would announce that you were going to a party that you were bringing some items (sometimes only one item) and you would say what the item is.
Other people would then declare what they wanted to bring and ask if they could come. The starter would then compare the suggested item to a secret rule he’s got in his head (that his own items follow) and determine if the item is allowed. The point of the game is for the other players to guess the rule based off of their proposed items and the known items of the game starter.
I’m sure many of you have played this, and I never get tired of it. I’ve come up with such rules as “only words with letters that go below the line on a paper” and “only things mentioned in Flying Circus.”
Oh yeah, half the fun of the game is what when you figure out the rule, you obnoxiously get correct items and mock other people that haven’t solved it yet.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Maybe you actually were going to a party.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Well, let’s see.
Human psychology suggests that this is some rule which things like “evening,” “foxhound,” and “resupply” fail, but “evenings”, “foxhounds,” and “resupplying” fit.
So my first thought would be wrong. (My first thought was that perhaps this was a situation where sub-words were important: “leg-ends” and “fox-hounds” and the like.)
You don’t strike me as the type to be into numerology, so that probably isn’t it.
The back of my mind unconsciously does anagrams, and I noticed that “parrot” anagrams to “raptor,” one of your favorite words. Similarly, lithographer anagrams to “hit raptor leg.” But I don’t think anagrams are where it’s at: why would one accept “resupplying” but not “resupply”?
April 25th, 2008 at 5:14 am
Could it be words that would be really hard to get in a game of hangman? would explain your memory of perusing words on onelook.com
April 25th, 2008 at 5:25 am
9 on your list
113,809 in this list - http://www.freeinfosociety.com/computers/programs/cpp/textcompression/words.txt
995,112 words in the english language (according to http://www.languagemonitor.com/wst_page7.html)
Anyone care to expand on this idea?
Short of writing a nifty program to analyse the positions in the list, the letters & similar usages/characteristics/etc, I think this might be a lost cause.
xx
April 25th, 2008 at 6:07 am
@linforcer: Glad to see I’m not the only one who thought of The Quick Brown Fox.
@david: Glad to see I’m not the only one who thought of johns meaning toilets.
“xkcd Says:
Man, you’d think FutureRandall would have the courtesy to, you know, chill out a little, have a drink … have a few more drinks … maybe cuddle a little …”
Brilliant! XD
April 25th, 2008 at 6:26 am
Aside from “bunting” or a “lithographer” all of those things are in the second Metal Gear Solid for Playstation… obviously quite a stretch but might as well throw it in there… although I think the parrot was actually a robotic parrot… yeah…
April 25th, 2008 at 7:50 am
It’s the keytext for the Beale ciphers! It must be. Randall, you’re a genius.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Google resupplying+bunting+leg. First result is a Firefly fanfic.
evenings+foxhounds+johns+parrot+lithographer+legends returns a few results of Animal Farm.
You were trying to find Animal Farm / Firefly crossover slash fiction?
April 25th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Examples of specific types of linquistic oddities? The list has digraphs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_%28orthography%29 (ng, ph, th) and at least one dipthong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipthong) (ou).
Also most of the words require careful pronunciation/enunciation and have internal stops (lith-og-graf-er) (pear-ot)
….or you’re just messing with all of us and wrote these words down randomly from dict and are crowdsourcing an attack on your PRNG.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:11 am
You might have been classifying words. You were about to write legends in the second column.You wrote “leg” and then thought it was wrong there and wrote it in the first column.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:29 am
its a to do list, but you thought people were spying on you so you didn’t want them to be able to figure out what you were up to, do it all the time, you can almost hear the frustration from the shadows.
ingredients/parts for something to take over the world?
the solution to all the worlds problems, yet you’ve forgotten how they go together?
April 25th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Ok, this may seem like a stretch, but I think it could be valid.
Raptors. A few months ago they realized that you were their main threat. They knew they had to take you out, but you had already planned for that (they being crafty enough to know that you are equally as crafty). So they made sure to have a baby raptor (which are not deadly, but stealthy) sneak into your house and deposit that piece of paper using hand writing samples found on the internet. They then waited for the day that you would find the list and begin to figure out its deeper meaning. Now, at your most distracted, they can mount their attack. Beware!
April 25th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Maybe you wrote it after you woke up from a dream and forgot about it.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I am growing more confidant that the letters involved are a phrase or sentence anagram. The letters used are a message. You used “parrot” as an indicator of the topic, from which the remainder of the message should be derivable.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:55 am
How many lines do you keep in your history file? Do you archive it? grep /usr/share/dict/words < history
April 25th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I don’t know what it is, but the real answer couldn’t possibly be as interesting as this discussion.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:20 am
When I first saw the list, I had the same thought as CJ. It seems to be a list of words common enough that everyone know/can pronounce, but that would seldom come up in close proximity in normal speech (specially designed noir aside). My thought is that these words, read in sequence, activate something, be it the love of a robot or a sleeper assassins (I read the list aloud, so I’m not the sleeper).
I have to disagree with Andrew (”you never get the pleasure of actually knowing if you’re right or wrong”). Mr. Munroe, have you considered regression hypnotherapy? This seems like the most reasonable solution to me. On the other hand, I’ve been watching X-Files with every free minute for the past three months, so I may not be objective on the subject. (It worked for Scully!)
April 25th, 2008 at 11:28 am
I thought Madlibs at first, but it’s mostly nouns and a few verbs (gerunds, actually), so that doesn’t seem likely.
I like the Scrabble idea, especially because it makes leg and legends consistent. It also explains why there are so many plural words (extra letters!). However, there is no graph or grapher to build lithographer.
Perhaps a crossword puzzle? But why wouldn’t you write the words into the crossword puzzle? Maybe you only had a pen, and you didn’t want to write down the letters with a pen unless you were sure it didn’t create any problems with future words?
The difference in column length combined with what looks like a checkmark “beside” evenings makes me think you started a second column after the first. It seems weird to write the word overtop of the checkmark, but you didn’t have much room left on the paper. It seems even weirder to write the checkmark over the word, since there’s a big column of open space between the two word columns. I think a second column makes sense because it’s hard to write when your palm isn’t holding the paper still.
I have a hard time believing it’s perl output. Why would you write out in real life what can be stored in a text file more efficiently? Why would you even write down words on a piece of paper unless a computer wasn’t nearby?
The two x’s at the bottom are inextricable. They’re arranged in columns, though, and if you were “counting off” wouldn’t you write them in a row?
April 25th, 2008 at 11:37 am
It looks like either you had a dream about pirates and you wrote down some of the key things hoping that in the morning you would remember the dream better if you looked at your list.
OR column 1 is a list of things you like and column 2 is a list of things you hate.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:45 am
It could be a list of “things to look up on Wikipedia.” I’ve done that before while away from my computer and noticing something I don’t know a whole lot about. Then when I return home, I realize that my shortened version of whatever it was I was intending to look up isn’t enough to remind me of what it was I wanted to look up in the first place.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:51 am
To me, it could look like potential ideas for the comic. Often times when running through ideas we run alphabetically or use words with similar syllables. Those look like various combinations of things you were brainstorming for the comic.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:52 am
The top one looks like an alpha, but I’m not sure.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Looks like things you like on the right and things you don’t on the left.
And then you tested a pen with the Xs on the bottom?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Anyway, how’s this: you’re preparing (resupplying) to decorate your house (bunting) for a dinner (evening) with a neighbor who’s a printer (lithographer) of fairy tales (legends). While you’re in the bathroom (johns), his dog (foxhounds) attacks your bird (parrot) and bites someone (leg).
April 25th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I think it’s Captcha too. I’m certain I’ve seen those in the rotation before at a couple off sites.
And alcohol was more than likely involved. Perhaps drinking more and more till you could no longer pass captcha? An interesting thing indeed.
I one time came across a scribbled note in a note book of mine.
“Should we invite him?”
“I guess so. What harm could come?”
“What if he walks into our room and see’s the cake(coke?)?”
“I dunno. We’ll have to risk it.”
Maybe my future-self has become a drug dealer and is reusing my notebooks in the future but took my notebook by mistake. Jerk.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Seems like a to-do list of sorts. Although I don’t know what it exactly is for.
I remember finding buried treasure from years past myself every room cleaning (which is probably annually). It’s amazing what I forget about (especially if written or noted), and how those memories never come back.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
It’s a message from the Walking Dude…
Randall Flag?
Too obscure?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
If I’m not mistaken, the words on the left all end on an alveolar consonant, and the words on the right all end on a velar consonant.
…too far-fetched, right?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Maybe if your read all the words in reverse you’ll find an easy way to invoke Cthulhu ;)
April 25th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Are you a lefty? because how those Xs are written implies that you are
April 25th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
surely you can achieve some sense of the time frame you must have created it in based on adjacent papers in the stack? or at least when you last looked at it?
April 25th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I write Xs just like that, starting at the top-right, especially if the Xs are alone.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Reverse Mad-Lib.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I would have to agree with Aila and Spartan. I can envision each of those words as the subject of an XKCD comic. “Lithographer” and “foxhounds” particularly stand out because they are not discussed commonly, but still well-known. These two criteria are seen in many, many subjects of XKCD comics.
Furthermore, I think you wrote “Johns” for the purpose of analyzing its relation to its definition of “toilets”. For example, one idea for a comic that you might have had was something to the effect of your own story of why the toilet is called the “john”.
As for the x’s, I write them starting from the top-right, but I’m a lefty. :)
April 25th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
I’m with Ben Barrad. The Googlewhacking game was my first guess, except when I play, I don’t typically use plurals.
Whenever I find a list like this that I’ve written and forgotten about, it tends to be either song, book or movie titles. However, I can think of none of the above that would be abbreviated “Lithographer.”
April 25th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Perchance you were planning to kill someone named john with a sly combination of foxhounds and parrots. While resupplying the lythographers in the evenings. As they researched the legends of legs?
April 25th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
safety words for S&M sex!
April 25th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I’d say a list of things you need to mail.
Mailing evenings is just mailing a more specific package of time.
April 25th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
there are 70 letters on the page.
Divide that by the three whole words on the right side and….
Twenty Three!!! (.3 repeating!!)
It looks like you’re DOOMED.
(…btw what a crappy movie)
April 25th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
There are other games (that I can’t think of the name of, of course) where you get a category or something and you have to name something that fits in it, and try not to have the same word as other players. I used to work in a toy store, so we played the kids version of this a lot. You’d get a category like “fruit” and everyone had to write down a fruit and try not to overlap. Could be something like that?
April 25th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Just throwing this out there; it’s probably not that useful. All words except “parrot” end in voiced consonants, meaning that they get a “z” sound as a plural… Also, all of the words have at least two morphemes except “parrot” and “leg” — that’s two strikes for parrot. If we consider that “leg” was a mistake that was never crossed out, then “parrot” is still the only one.
April 25th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
A while ago I was trying to get cool word combinations from writing down the word at the top of a random page in the dictionary, so it might be that. Or there may be some significance in which page each word is.
April 25th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I’m gonna have to say it’s a list of sex positions.
April 25th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
You’ve made a complex anagram that someone will read hundreds of years from now, following a series of clues leading to the location of a lost religious artifact?
April 25th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
I tend to scatter loose bits of paper like that around when I’m playing adventure games. Maybe those are hints, passwords, puzzle notes, etc?
April 25th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
It’s a treasure map.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
>But I don’t think anagrams are where it’s at: why would one accept “resupplying” but not “resupply”?
Try making the anagram “lying supper” from “resupply”. Go on. I dare you.
What’s funny about all the nerd-sniping accusations is: even if I knew it was nerd-sniping, I *would still try to figure it out*.
Because while it’s undoubtedly cruel to try to get innocent mathematicians and the like run over by traffic while trying to solve a difficult problem, it would be far, far crueller to put up problems that are impossible to solve. And you wouldn’t do that to us, would you?
Would you?
April 25th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
None…
None…
April 25th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
@dckx-
If those are sex positions, I call dibs on the lithographer.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
@Chris Drost-
Your anagram idea is admirable, but errored.
“Lithographer” is one T short of “Hit Raptor Leg”.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Best game of hangman ever.
April 25th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Weird. You write your “s” from the bottom up….
April 25th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
* What could be significance of the tick mark on “resuppling”? (It’s on “esu”)
* We need to look for a property that is possessed by those words, but not by “evening”, “foxhound”, “john”, and “supplying” — because if those simpler (or at least shorter) words had the property, you would have picked “evening” instead of “evenings” etc., presumably?
So it’s either a property of the words that crucially involves the S’s, or it’s something “global”, like the sum of some numbers corresponding to the letters.
Using 1 for a, 2 for b, etc., the words in the left column sum up to 95, 126, 66, 88, 137, 66, and those on the right to 162, 87, 24, but neither is there a consistent pattern to them (there are two 66s and an 88, but the rest aren’t divisible by 11), nor is there any reason you would have chosen this mapping :)
April 25th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
In the second and third line down the words Foxhounds bunting johns leg seem to make some scence to me…….I got nothing to help with this problem
April 26th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Hello, Mr. Munroe.
I mulled this over for a good while, and here are my scourings: I agree with past posts that too much thought couldn’t have put into this list, or you would’ve remembered what it was. It was most likely the product of some game, or the output of some code. It’s worthwhile to note (but prob’ly already scoured) that you didn’t settle for standard verbs and nouns. You had to pluralize your nouns and gerundize your verbs (with the exceptions of leg, parrot, and lithographer [which may have originally been lithograph]. As previous posts have mentioned, these three words “fit in” the least, for a coupla reasons.) This would suggest some kind of game was involved. I think it’s very probable that LEG is not a viable datum, it may have been an aborted LEGENDARY or some other word cut off before its prime due to time constraints or something. Playing with vowel and consonant patterns, I couldn’t find anything Graeme couldn’t (I think the probability he came up with was .004605).
I then tried my hand at some numerical analyses, few of which returned any interesting results. I thought I had found an interesting relationship between the sum of ratios of non-repeating vowels to non-repeating consonants between the two columns (this ratio for EVENINGS would be 2:4), but it turned out to be a miscalculation. It could be noted that the vowel to total letter ratio is 1:3 for four words: FOXHOUNDS, PARROT, LITHOGRAPHER, and LEG.
The letters are probably related by language (in definition or structure) or by math (letter pattern, vowel pattern, etc.). Expanding on the former, my mom once came up with a simple word game for my younger sister’s birthday party: the beginning of a simple phrase was given. (Example: DOG) One girl had to expand the phrase and write the finished phrase on a concealed piece of paper (Example: DOG HOUSE) and the rest of the contestants had to guess what she wrote (DOG FOOD, DOGGY, DOGGONE IT, DOGTAG, DOGMA, DOG DAYS, DOG DOOR, and on). This could be an extremely advanced form of that game. Perhaps you were given EVE, FOX, PAR, LIT, LEG, BUN, (RES? JOH?) and had to end them in as circuitous form as possible? I don’t know. This doesn’t explain why there are two distinct columns (if they weren’t meant to be distinguished, you could’ve wrote it all in one column, there’s enough room, and you wouldn’t have stopped writing LEGENDARY), or why you wouldn’t have sprung for JOHNATHAN, LEGENDARY, or PARAPALEGIAC (maybe there are more rules? No proper names, no adjectives, no serious medical conditions?). But, hey, it’s a theory, ain’t it?
I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. It’s going on midnight and certain portions of my brain are beginning to shut down. This was really fun, though, even if certain nasty rumors are true and it was all staged. I look forward to hearing the answer soon and I enjoy your comic. :)
April 26th, 2008 at 12:34 am
good thinking hams but its from a couple years back and it seems familur so it might be somthing he worked and thought alot on.
I thing its just brainstorming. (it also reminds me of the impossible quiz’s for some reason[who knows why])
April 26th, 2008 at 12:36 am
sorry i ment alex for my name (one above)
April 26th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Maybe it’s just a list you wrote to yourself to try to confuse yourself. Y’know, like a prank through time.
April 26th, 2008 at 2:47 am
Clearly this was paper-based CAPTCHA practice.
April 26th, 2008 at 3:19 am
The best I got so far is that none of them are rhymeable with a noun. Some are rhymeable with a verb (hunting), but only leg seems to be the exception… Or I’ve just woken up and my english skills aren’t quite awake yet…
April 26th, 2008 at 5:58 am
It wasn’t until I started reading the comments that I noticed “leg” and not “les”.
April 26th, 2008 at 7:27 am
I like how you’re calling upon US to tell YOU what YOU were thinking…
-Ken
April 26th, 2008 at 8:26 am
I’m going to put another vote in the “PGP Key Fingerprint” box.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:27 am
I’m with 1/0. A time-delayed self-inflicted practical joke is exactly the kind of thing I would do to myself - surely I’m not the only one?
April 26th, 2008 at 9:12 am
@Ken
Well, it’s only natural. Each of us, at least once while reading the comic, though “Randal, get out of my head!” Now Randall is simply trying to find person in whose head he was when he made the list.
It reminds me on “Being John Malkovich”, only this time it is the other way around. But I too fancy 1/0’s prank-from-the-past idea.
April 26th, 2008 at 9:59 am
It’s a list of all your favourite things in the moment!
The “leg” response means you were obviously
channeling a dog.
April 26th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Howdy, Mr. Munroe.
In my previous post I neglected to mention the inclusion of the two Xs. It’d seem strange to schizophrenically draw two Xs on the paper if they didn’t mean anything. I write random stuff on paper all the time, but they’re usually doodles n’ stuff, nothing ever as stale as two lone Xs. They could’ve been used to get your ink going again, but I usually draw circles or swirls to do that (unless Xs are a habit of yours to get your ink going?). There seems to be nothing artistic about them, so it’s quite possible that they have a meaning. They were obviously written in haste, though. Factoring in the ever-looming possibility that the whole goings-on is adventitious (note: I did not even need a thesaurus for adventitious [it's one of my vocab words]), they could be some type of clue. Seeing as the Xs are on top of each other, perhaps consecutive aligning letters in columns are some part of the mystery?
I decided to investigate this hackneyed theory. Before I go into that, though, it’s most definitely notable to note that the S in EVENINGS and the ING in RESUPPLYING really do seem to have been added on AFTER the initial EVENING and RESUPPLY were written. Both of these words are in the top row.
Right. So, here’s what I did: The only word for which the first letter is not a consonant is EVENINGS (or EVENING). The remaining words all had a vowel for the second letter and a consonant for the third. The only two remaining words for which the fourth letter is not a consonant is LEGENDS and RESUPPLYING (or RESUPPLY). The only remaining word for which the fifth letter is not a vowel is JOHNS. The only remaining word for which the sixth letter is not a consonant is FOXHOUNDS. All of the remaining words had a consonant (or no letter at all) in the seventh position.
The resulting string of words is EVENING LEGENDS RESUPPLY JOHNS FOXHOUNDS, which is actually a coherent, albeit gibberatic, sentence. “Evening legends (that is to say, Legends of the Evening, if-ya-know-what-I-mean) resupply John’s foxhounds.” It could also be read as “Even legends resupply John’s foxhounds.” According to the internet, “Evening Legends” was a 1920 book of Greek poetry. One of your Xs was drawn so sloppily it looks like a lower-case alpha, which is a Greek symbol! :O :O :O :O :O Yes, okay, I’m reaching here. But do you have a friend named John? Perhaps you borrowed his copy of The Fox and the Hou