New York florist Max Schling once placed an ad in the New York Times that was written entirely in shorthand.
Hundreds of curious businessmen passed the ad on to their secretaries, requesting a translation.
The secretaries read: “When getting flowers for the boss’s wife, remember Schling’s Florist.”
One day — said Mr. Lincoln — when I first came here, I got into a fit of musing in my room and stood resting my elbows on the bureau. Looking into the glass it struck me what an awfully ugly man I was. The fact grew on me and I made up my mind that I must be the ugliest man in the world. It so maddened me that I resolved, should I ever see an uglier, I would shoot him on sight. Not long after this, Andy — naming a lawyer present — came to town and the first time I saw him I said to myself, ‘There’s the man.’ I went home, took down my gun and prowled around the streets waiting for him. He soon came along. ‘Halt, Andy,’ said I, pointing the gun at him; ‘say your prayers, for I am going to shoot you.’ ‘Why, Mr. Lincoln, what’s the matter? What have I done?’ ‘Well, I made an oath that if I ever saw an uglier man than I am I’d shoot him on the spot. You are uglier; sure; so make ready to die.’ ‘Mr. Lincoln, do you really think that I am uglier than you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, Mr. Lincoln,’ said Andy deliberately and looking me squarely in the face, ‘if I am any uglier, fire away.’
— Harper’s Magazine, October 1877, quoted in Charles Anthony Shriner, Wit, Wisdom and Foibles of the Great, 1918
Relativism either applies to itself or it doesn’t.
If it does, then it’s only relatively true.
If it doesn’t, then there’s an absolute truth.
We know when Henry Jenkins died: Dec. 9, 1670. What we don’t know is when he was born. The Bolton laborer claimed to remember driving a cartload of arrows to North Allerton as a boy at the Battle of Flodden Field. That would mean he had been born in 1501 and was 169 years old at his death. Whether that’s true is anyone’s guess, but that’s the age that’s engraved on his tombstone.
If it is true, one author reckons, he certainly led an eventful life:
In his time the Invincible Armada was destroyed; the republic of Holland formed; three queens beheaded, Anne Boleyn, Catharine Howard, and Mary Queen of Scots; a king of Spain seated upon the throne of England; a king of Scotland crowned king of England at Westminster, and his son beheaded before his own palace, his family being proscribed as traitors; and, last of all, the great fire in London, which happened in 1666, toward the close of his wonderful life.
Indeed, to be a dutiful subject of the crown, he’d have had to change his religion eight times:
((From The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Oct. 17, 1829.)
When the 18-year-old Ethel Barrymore informed her father that she was engaged, he wired:
CONGRATULATIONS LOVE FATHER
When she informed him she’d broken it off, he wrote:
CONGRATULATIONS LOVE FATHER
A puzzle by Isaac Asimov:
What word in the English language changes its pronunciation when it is capitalized?
If the moon orbits the earth, always presenting the same face to us, does it rotate on its own axis?
It seems a simple question, but its appearance in the London Times in April 1856 set off a war among the English intelligentsia:
The answer, as William James would note in his parable of the squirrel, is that “which party is right depends on what you practically mean” by the term in question. Today we’d say that the moon rotates about its axis in the same time it takes to orbit the earth.
Incidentally, Lewis Carroll submitted two letters, but the Times didn’t print them. Perhaps it’s just as well — he was far ahead of everyone else: “I noticed for the first time the fact that though [the moon] only goes 13 times round the earth in the course of the year, it makes 14 revolutions round its own axis, the extra one being due to its motion round the sun.”
A Frenchman, who spoke very broken English, having some Words with his Wife, endeavour’d to call her Bitch, but could not recollect the Name. At last he thought he had done it, by saying, Begar, mine Dear, but you be one vile Dog’s Wife. Aye, that’s true enough, answer’d the Woman, the more is my Misfortune.
— The Jester’s Magazine, February 1766
Loud brayed an ass. Quoth Kate, ‘My dear,
(To spouse, with scornful carriage,)
One of your relatives I hear.’
‘Yes, love,’ said he, ‘by marriage.’
— I.J. Reeve, The Wild Garland; or, Curiosities of Poetry, 1866
artolater
n. a worshiper of bread
