“When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd
doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll
be ninety.” — Stand-up comic Steven Wright, quoted in “The Age-Old Problem,” Reader’s Digest, December 2015
“The
occupations of A, B, and C are many and varied. In the older arithmetics they
contented themselves with doing ‘a certain piece of work.’ This statement of
the case, however, was found too sly and mysterious, or possibly lacking in
romantic charm. It became the fashion to define the job more clearly and to set
them at walking matches, ditch-digging, regattas, and piling cord wood. At
times, they became commercial and entered into partnership, having with their
old mystery a ‘certain’ capital. Above all they revel in motion. When they tire
of walking-matches--A rides on horseback, or borrows a bicycle and competes with
his weaker-minded associates on foot. Now they race on locomotives; now they
row; or again they become historical and engage stage-coaches; or at times they
are aquatic and swim. If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump
water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one of which
is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one; he also takes the bicycle, and
the best locomotive, and the right of swimming with the current. Whatever they do
they put money on it, being all three sports. A always wins.”—Canadian humorist
Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), “A, B, and C—The Human Element in Mathematics,” Literary Lapses (1910)
