A familiar nursery rhyme rewritten to omit the letter s:
Mary had a little lamb,
With fleece a pale white hue,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb kept in her view;
To academe he went with her,
Illegal, and quite rare;
It made the children laugh and play
To view a lamb in there.
— A. Ross Eckler
The mutiny on the Bounty is a landmark of sea law, but it also has a curious linguistic sequel. After setting Captain Bligh adrift, Fletcher Christian fled to Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. With him were eight other crewmen, six Tahitian men, and 11 women. In order to understand each other, they developed a creole mix of English and Tahitian known as “Pitcairnese”:
| English | Pitkern |
| How are you? | Whata way ye? |
| Where are you going? | About ye gwen? |
| Are you going to cook dinner? | You gwen whihi up suppa? |
| Would you like some food? | Ye like-a sum whettles? |
| I don’t think so | I nor believe |
| It doesn’t matter | Do’ mine |
The mutineers were a diverse lot, with origins from Scotland to the West Indies, so the mix is a linguistic hodgepodge. For instance, “whettles,” above, meaning food, is a throwback to the Old English victuals.
The Guinness Book of Records is in The Guinness Book of Records.
It’s the world’s best-selling copyrighted book.
“With drunkenness, gambling, and dancing, theater-going dates from the beginning of history, and with these it is not only questionable in morals, but it is positively bad. Every one who knows any thing about the institution of the theater, as such, knows that it always has been corrupting in its influence. Not only those who attend the theater pronounce it bad, as a whole, but it is frowned upon by play-writers, and by actors and actresses themselves.”
— J.M. Judy, Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes, 1904
The couch used by Sigmund Freud during psychoanalytic sessions. “I have found little that is good about human beings,” he wrote. “In my experience most of them are trash.”
Winona Ryder and Uma Thurman have the same godfather.
Timothy Leary.
Here’s one explanation for crop circles:
This English woodcut pamphlet was published in 1678. It tells of a farmer who swore he would rather have the devil mow his field than pay the high price demanded by a laborer.
According to the pamphlet, that night his field appeared to be in flames, and the next morning it was found to be mowed to supernatural perfection.
Maybe so, but if that’s what causes these things, the devil’s been getting awfully fancy lately:
“The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.” — Aristotle
Number of years of formal education required to understand selected magazines, according to the Gunning-Fog readability index:
tomomania
n. irrational predilection for performing surgery
