Typo Demons

1. The Young Devil

In 1906, Polish writer I. L. Peretz published a story about Chelm, a city in Poland with a large Jewish population.

On consulting his records one lazy day, Satan discovers that the rabbi of Chelm has never sinned, not once in his life, and his life is almost at an end. This is a theological emergency because Ecclesiastes 7:20 says that everyone on Earth sins at least once. The rabbi must sin for the sake of the integrity of the Holy Writ.¹ Satan formally requests permission from the Lord to tempt the rabbi. The Lord agrees, but tells Satan to adhere to the same rules that applied when trying to corrupt Job.

Satan can’t use the same tricks for this one—he’d destroyed Job’s wealth, but the rabbi is already poor. He killed Job’s young children, but the rabbi has no young children to murder. He gave Job a skin condition, but the rabbi already has a nasty skin condition. So he delegates. Any devil who volunteers can go try, using whatever scheme they can come up with. (Satan does use a lottery system to make sure only one scheme is running at a time.)

After various devils fail to tempt the rabbi with money and sex, a young one, with no successes to his name, seizes on the detail that the rabbi likes his snuff. This isn’t a sin in itself, but the rabbi also has a routine where right before Sabbath, he takes a walk by himself that takes him close to the edge of town, but not too close, since he’s not allowed to cross the border during Sabbath.

But one evening, he drops his snuffbox while walking. He tries to pick it up, but the wind blows it just out of reach. He walks over, and the wind blows it away again, and again, and again, until he’s crossed the border without even noticing the start of Sabbath. Nor did he ever notice the devil, who’d disguised himself as a skinny German man so that he could hide behind trees.

The young devil gloats to his admiring peers that humans are on guard against the big, dramatic sins. It’s your quiet little needs that’ll get you in the end. In Victorian times, they called it “the primrose path,” after a line from the flower-obsessed Ophelia in Hamlet:

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.

2. The Golem of Chelm

That last story is a little atypical for folk stories about Chelm. Chelm stories are traditionally about people doing very stupid things, often due to some overly-elaborate reasoning that feels sophisticated to them but leads them off a cliff. This next one has a little of the flavor of both.

Golems show up a few times in Jewish folklore—beings made of clay and brought to life with kabbalah to act as servants. The earliest legend to be attributed to an actual historical person and place is that of the Golem of Chelm.

Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chełm, a wise and holy man, creates a golem and animates it by inscribing the word emet, truth, on its forehead. The golem turns out to be very strong, which is a useful deterrent to pogroms, but it also keeps adding clay to itself, growing bigger and bigger. Fearing that it will grow too large and destroy the world, Elijah tries to deactivate the golem, but it’s already too powerful. It fights him off, scratching his face in the process. Elijah finally manages to erase just one letter, the aleph at the beginning of emet, converting it into met, death. The golem dies instantly.

3. Sporysza

In real life, Chelm at its prime was a multi-cultural hub city, so they had their own traditional stories. In Chelm, they spoke of sporysza, helpful demons who made crops grow and cows give milk. A spor would disguise itself as a small animal and go around making people’s lives a little better.

The word spor, in many Slavic languages, means something like “abundance,” often with the connotation that it’s gained through work, but not too much work. It’s common to wish someone spor in Romanian. Confusingly, though, in many of the same languages, spor also means something like “conflict.” It’s believed that they’re not particularly related; the lost Proto-Slavic language probably just had two very similar-sounding words.

(This is why, in Polish, if you’ve had a lot of disagreements you can say you had sporo sporów.)

That coincidence, if it is one, has occasionally given the spor myth a bit of an edge—you have to fight the spor to get its blessing, some say. It can also be justified by invoking another saying out of Chelm: “a man sins because of bread.” In part of another Peretz Chelm story, a Jewish man comes to a rabbi wailing that a “goyish psycho killer” hit him over the head, stole a big bite of his bread, and walked off. The rabbi reminds the man that there’s no such thing as a goyish psycho killer—God would not permit the world to exist if it contained something so terrible. This man was just hungry. It’s the bread that caused the sin, and the rabbi will pray to God on behalf of it.

Not that Chelm has a monopoly on this sort of collision. The god merger equating the Roman Mars and Greek Ares created a god of both agriculture and war, possibly just because of the low edit distance between Ares and Mars.

4. Taipo

They say taipo (or taepo) are demons who live in the Murihiku region of New Zealand and curse those who displease them with bad luck. If you fish all day and don’t catch anything, it’s because the taipo in charge of fish and the taipo in charge of eels got together and decided to mess with you. When a tree makes a spooky noise rustling in the wind, that means a taipo is near.

They say. But there is some dispute over who, exactly, says that. The English colonizers of New Zealand wrote of it as a Maori superstition. When asked, however, Maori elders said that it was an English word—they had lots of names for spirits, but nothing that sounded like that. They’d just picked it up from white whalers.

Somehow, every culture in New Zealand ended up joking about, or scaring children with, these monsters that no adult actually believed in. Nobody knows why.

5. Primrose’s faeries

Faeries, in the British Isles, are powerful and capricious beings. They might help you, if you’re lucky, but if you break one of their millions of secret rules, they’ll steal your baby, or make you age ten years in one night, or maybe just break one of your dishes, who knows? Faeries turn themselves invisible using a potion made from primroses, so if you want to catch one, you can eat a primrose yourself to gain immunity. Planting primroses is a high-risk, high-reward gamble—it’s sure to attract faeries.

But what about people whose name is Primrose? Their lives, one imagines, must be a bit chaotic, perhaps especially in June, when primrose flowers stop blooming and the faeries turn their eyes elsewhere.

Such was the fate of Frank J. Primrose, a Pennsylvania-based merchant. In June of 1887, he sent a telegram to his employee, William B. Toland, who was in Kansas looking for wool to buy. Telegrams were somewhat expensive, charged by the word, and were not the most secure means of communication, so businesses often used codewords for common phrases, which saved money and made corporate espionage a little harder. Primrose’s message was therefore a little odd-looking:

Despot am exceedingly busy bay all kinds quo perhaps bracken half of it mince moment promptly of purchases.

In their code, Toland was meant to translate this as

Yours of the fifteenth received; am exceedingly busy; I have bought all kinds, five hundred thousand pounds; perhaps we have sold half of it; wire when you do anything; second samples immediately, promptly of purchases.

In other words, don’t buy too much wool, I already bought a lot of all kinds, and it’s not selling all that quickly. If you do buy any, let me know promptly.

But Primrose didn’t pay the extra fee to have the telegram sent back to him after transmission, to check for errors. So he didn’t know, until it was too late, that Western Union had introduced a few little typos. They’d written “Destroy” instead of “Despot,” “buy” instead of “bay,” and they’d left off the last letter: the “s” in purchases.

Primrose’s code design took a common shortcut—words that were close to each other in the dictionary tended to have related meanings, which made things easier to look up. So replacing “Destroy” with “Despot” didn’t make the message nonsense, it just changed “fifteenth” to “seventeenth.” “Bay” was code for “I have bought,” while “buy” had its literal meaning.²

The resulting telegram therefore looked like an urgent instruction to buy as much wool as possible, and so Toland did. Primrose, according to his lawsuit, lost a small fortune as a result. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against Primrose—he hadn’t paid extra for error correction, so all he was entitled to was a refund on the cost of the telegram.

Primrose’s bad luck didn’t end there, I’ve learned from a Pennsylvania Supreme Court case in 1911.³ This case was filed by his widow. In June of 1908, Primrose was in a taxi on a foggy night, and died when the taxi swerved off the road and crashed. His life insurance policy paid out double if he died while a passenger on public transit, so the legal question was whether taxis are more like an unusually small and expensive bus or more like a private car with a disloyal chauffeur. It was a split decision, but the judges ultimately decided a taxi counted as a “common carrier.” The widow Primrose got her double indemnity, with interest.

The taxi had crashed into a telegraph pole.

1. There’s another bit of folk humor with the same premise—a rabbi dies having never once sinned, and Heaven sends him back to Earth for one day only so that he can fix that. The only sin he can bring himself to commit is to have extramarital sex, but alas, his lover has too good a time so it counts as a good deed instead.

2. I took a look at another telegraph codebook, the Westinghouse Code, to see if it’s designed to fail more gracefully than Primrose’s (Westinghouse culture was famously fastidious about safety). This one has a similar structure, but seems to have been carefully constructed to avoid cases like bay→buy. It uses words chosen from various languages, but selectively: they have “rabbi” (“for details, see…”) but not “rabbit,” for example. But they’re still vulnerable to little semantic errors like changing “despot” to “destroy.” In the Westinghouse Code, Predecay Kabbala painterly Korhite means “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But if you change Kabbala to Kabbalist, it means “I advise you not to abandon hope, ye who enter here.” Or if you change Korhite to Korah, it means “Abandon all hope, ye who have not yet entered here.”

3. This part is original research. I confirmed from the 1900 Pennsylvania Census that the Frank J. Primrose married to an Annie E. had his occupation listed as “wool buyer,” so these are almost certainly the same person. Unless demons are messing with me, of course.