For stewardess Violet Jessop, bad luck came in threes. In 1911 she was working on the RMS Olympic when it collided with a British warship off the Isle of Wight.

A few months later she took a position on the Titanic, which sank famously in the North Atlantic in 1912. Her lifeboat was picked up by the Carpathia.

And in 1916 she was working as a nurse on the hospital ship Britannic when it struck a mine in the Aegean Sea and went down.

By this time she was philosophical. Though the Britannic sank in less than 50 minutes, she took care to rescue her toothbrush, “because there had always been much fun at my expense after the Titanic, when I complained of my inability to get a toothbrush on the Carpathia. I recalled [my brother’s] joking advice: ‘Never undertake another disaster without first making sure of your toothbrush.'”

After that her bad luck ceased. She lived without incident for another 55 years and died of heart failure in 1971.

“I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.”

That’s Warren G. Harding, and God knows what he meant. Harding’s utterances were so impenetrable that they developed a sort of fascinated following. “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered,” wrote H.L. Mencken, who dubbed it Gamalielese. “It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

When Harding succumbed to a stroke in 1923, E.E. Cummings wrote, “The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”

04/08/2021 UPDATE: This example isn’t really fair to Harding — Mencken misrepresented the quote, changing a semicolon after mitigate to a comma. (Thanks, @nacreousnereid.)

In 1943, authorities at a German POW camp in Poland discovered that three prisoners were missing. A considerable space separated the prisoners’ huts from the perimeter fence, so at first it wasn’t clear how they’d escaped.

But the three inmates had something in common — all three had exercised during the day on a vaulting horse in the yard. On investigating, the Germans discovered a 100-foot tunnel leading from that spot to an opening beyond the fence.

The truth became clear. Each day, the prisoners had carried the horse to the same spot with a man hidden inside. While they exercised, the hidden man had used a bowl to lengthen the tunnel, then hid again in the horse as it was carried back inside. The Germans had used siesmographs to detect tunneling, but the prisoners’ vaulting had masked the sounds of their digging.

All three escapees — Eric Williams, Michael Codner, and Oliver Philpot — reached neutral Sweden and were reunited with their families.