I wish there were more like books like Littlewood's Miscellany (edited by Bollobas); URL at the end of this message. Here are some of Littlewood's entries from the chapter entitled "Cross-Purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, Etc:"

I once objected to an apparently obscure use of the phrase, "Let us assume for simplicity." It should mean that the writer could do the unsimplified thing, but wishes to let the reader off; it turned out that my pupil meant that he had to simplify before he could do it.

A minute I wrote (about 1917) for the Ballistic Office ended with the sentence "Thus sigma should be made as small as possible." This did not appear in the printed minute. But P. J. Gregg said, "What is that?" A speck in a blank space at the end proved to be

the

tiniest sigma I have ever seen (the printers must have scoured London for it).

The spoken word has its dangers. A famous lecture was unintelligible to most of its audience because "Hárnoo", clearly an important character in the drama, failed to be identified in time as h \nu.

A recent (published) paper had near the beginning the passage "The object of this paper is to prove (something very important)." It transpired with great difficulty, and not till near the end, that the "object" was an unachieved one.

From an excellent book on Astronomy: "Many of the spirals (galaxies), but very few of the ellipsoidals, show bright lines, due, no doubt, to the presence or absence of gaseous nebulae." (This rich complex of horrors repays analysis. Roughly it is an illegitimate combination of the correct 'spirals show bright lines due to the presence...' and the incorrect 'ellipsoidals don't show bright lines due to the absence...').

"We all know that people can sometimes do better things than they have done, but X has done a better thing than he can do." (An actual case, with agreement on the point among experts).

And from the Chapter entitled "People", a note on a meeting between Bertrand Russell and G E Moore:

Moore and Russell (c.1896?) were having a philosophical discussion in Hall. Russell suddenly said: "You don't like me, Moore, do you?" Moore replied, "No." This point disposed of, the discussion proceeded as before.

Littlewood's Miscellany at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/052133702X/qid=1074011666/ Thane Plambeck 650 321 4884 office 650 323 4928 fax http://www.plambeck.org