BOOBIES and DEADBEEF

I will never forget the day in 1974 when my father came home from work and said the computer had broken down because it had attempted to subtract the second half of a double-barrelled surname from the first, and I believe I may even have used this as an idea here. Subtraction is, however, far from the only operation which can be performed on variables, and many of us have tapped the number 5318008 into a calculator and turned it upside down. Some of us have later graduated to hexadecimal and used the word DEADBEEF and others to similar ends.

We have a fairly limited vocabulary available to us in this respect. We can, for example, consider the multinational corporation 710.77345 or the 55076051 which separates people who pronounce “bus” with an A-type sound and those who say it with an OO-type sound, but with the best will in the world the number of words we could use would be fairly limited. The same applies to the hex versions of 3735928559 and the like. However, if we also let ourselves apply mathematical and logical operators to these things, the possibilities open up before us.

The most obvious is NOT. If we are to consider NOT- DEADBEEF, we have a word for an animal for which the English language itself lacks: 559038736. Similarly, the sum of 58008 and 577345 is a (mermaid) bra: 635353: “boobs+shells”. New words can be created, for instance to express fossil fuels other than coal we have the word 710 XOR 9A5 =2915 (in decimal). Whole phrases can be reduced to single values. For instance, if there are two people called Bob and Abe who don't like each other we can say “808 NAND 2750” or more succinctly 471, and we will have expressed “Bob is incompatible with Abe” in a single three-figure number. Since there are sixteen possible bivalent logic functions and a large number of arithmetic functions which can be used metaphorically, the rather small number of words which can either be spelt out on a calculator or written using the first six letters of the alphabet can be considerably expanded. The result would be a language which can express surprising things briefly but be completely incapable of expressing certain very common concepts. From the nature of this language, something deep and metaphysical could then be concluded.