Said a logical linguist named Rolles,
“As we always call Polish folk Poles,
For better precision
(I am a logician)
We ought to call Dutch people Holes.”
Humor
Literary
For a story on library cutbacks in a certain Essex town, the Telegraph chose the headline BOOK LACK IN ONGAR.
(Apparently apocryphal, but entertaining.)
The Social Whirl
In a 1962 nightmare, writer Thomas Meehan imagined having to introduce Uta Hagen to Yma Sumac, Ava Gardner, Abba Eban, Oona O’Neill, Ugo Betti, Ona Munson, Ida Lupino, the Aga Khan, Ira Wolfert, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Eva Gabor at a Greenwich Village cocktail party:
“Uta, Yma; Uta, Ava; Uta, Oona; Uta, Ona; Uta, Ida; Uta, Ugo; Uta, Abba; Uta, Ilya; Uta, Ira; Uta, Aga; Uta, Eva.”
Then Polish concert pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski turns up. “‘Come in, Mieczyslaw!’ I cry, with tears in my eyes. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life!'”
Guardrails
The programming language SIMPLE “was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it.”
The language has only three commands, STOP, BEGIN, and END. “No matter how you arrange the statements, you can’t make a syntax error.”
The name stands for Sheer Idiots Monopurpose Programming Linguistic Environment.
“The Worst of All Puns”
At Nuremburg a wolf’s tooth was shown to travellers … on which an Abbé is represented lying dead in a meadow, with three lilies growing out of his posteriors. This is not only the worst pun that ever was carved upon a wolf’s tooth, but the worst that ever was or will be made. The Abbé is designed to express the Latin word Habe. He is lying dead in a meadow, … mort en pré; this is for mortem præ; and the three lilies in his posteriors are to be read oculis, … au cu lis. Thus, according to the annexed explanation, the whole pun, rebus, or hieroglyphic, is Habe mortem præ oculis.
— Robert Southey, Omniana, 1812
In other words, the French phrase Abbé mort en pré au cul lys (“Abbot died in a meadow with lilies in his rump”) sounds like the Latin phrase Habe mortem præ oculis (“Keep death before your eyes”). This joke appears to be referenced in Hieronymus Bosch’s 1504 triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights:
Second Coming
Lord Dudley was one of the most absent men I think I ever met in society. One day he met me in the street, and invited me to meet myself. ‘Dine with me to-day; dine with me, and I will get Sydney Smith to meet you.’ I admitted the temptation he held out to me, but said I was engaged to meet him elsewhere.
— Wit and Wisdom of Sydney Smith, 1856
Succinct
Travelling to England with his wife and daughter in the Norwegian freighter Halibut, which ran into rough seas, [Sir Robert Menzies] sent this cable to relatives:
At sea off Perth: Exodus X, 23.
In the Bible they found these words:
They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days.
— Ray Robinson, ed., The Wit of Sir Robert Menzies, 1966
Register
Excerpts from the index of Together, Norman Douglas’ 1923 account of his travels in Calabria:
Anna, the old nurse, her passion for idiots and corpses, 39-40, for wolf-stories, 210; gets it hot, 91; shakes chocolate from a tree, 209; not old at all, 210
Ants, unreliable workmen, 120
Beds, local, their discomforts, 3; double, their uses, 218
Brunnenmacher (father) mountaineer, presumably hirsute, 25; (son) mountaineer, indubitably hirsute, 25; his smile and his blasphemies, 25, 26; takes author in hand, 28, 124
Cement, an abomination, 75, 128, 225
Cocoa, an abomination, 10
Cows, explode from over-eating, 204
Dachshund, lady-dog, sets a bad example, 4
Elephant-trap, a disused, 113
Erratic blocks, 176, 185, 186, 230
Falling in love, with a mountain, 30
Grand-aunts, the delight of childhood, 41, 47, 92, 214
Grandfather, maternal, a feudal monster, always spick-and-span, 196; excavates in imagination the Akropolis of Athens, 197; tells Prince Consort how to handle Queen Victoria, 198; sometimes mistaken for an angel, 199; dominates his harem, 200; vicious to the last, 201
Hare, how to shoot, 123; how not to cook, 203
Moralists, their limitations, 84
Ovid, blunders in botany, 83
Poets, should avoid towns, 82; generally born naked, 165; talk nonsense about pomegranates, 202
Theocritus, seldom caught napping, 83
Weisses Kreuz, hotel, its manager worth making love to, 203
Douglas had a penchant for droll indexes. His index for Some Limericks (1928) contains the entry “Spain, project for fertilizing arid tracts of, its ruler disinclined for tête-à-tête diversions”.
Variant
A “Home Counties version” of the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Farnham which art in Hendon, Harrow be thy Name. Thy Kingston come. Thy Wimbledon in Erith, as it is in Heston. Give us this day our Leatherhead. And forgive us our Westminsters, as we forgive them that Westminster against us. And lead us not into Thames Ditton, but deliver us from Ealing. For thine is the Kingston, the Purley, and the Crawley, for Iver and Iver. Crouch End.
I don’t think anyone knows who wrote it. See The Author’s Tale.
An Unbounded Stomach
“Have you ever noticed … that all hot-water bottles look like Henry the Eighth?” — Max Beerbohm