Crossword-Solution: LAPUTANS 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 10

Swift, the description of these flappers, and the use they were of to your friends the Laputans; whose minds (Gulliver says) are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external traction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those people who are able to afford it, always keep a flapper in their family, as one of their domestics; nor ever walk about, or make visits without him.

Had Gulliver narrated of the Laputans that the men vied with each other in learning how best to rear the offspring of other creatures, and were careless of learning how best to rear their own offspring, he would have paralleled any of the other absurdities he ascribes to them.

For a long time it was supposed that Mars had no moons, and when Dean Swift wrote 'Gulliver's Travels' he wanted to make the Laputans do something very clever, so he described their discovery of two moons attending Mars, and to make it quite absurd he said that when they observed these moons they found that one of them went round the planet in about ten hours.

Swift, the description of these flappers, and the use they were of to your friends the Laputans; whose minds (Gulliver says) are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those people who are able to afford it, always keep a flapper in their family, as one of their domestics, nor ever walk about, or make visits, without him.

Their houses were built according to such refined instructions as caused their workmen to make perpetual mistakes; their clothes were cut (and often incorrectly) by mathematical calculation; the very viands on their tables were carved into rhomboids, cycloids, cones, parallelograms, and other mathematical figures! To most Englishmen of that time any attempt to apply science to shipbuilding must have appeared as far-fetched and grotesque as these practices of the Laputans.