I just found this in a 1950 issue of Pi Mu Epsilon Journal:
Question: How many legs has a horse?
Answer: Twelve; two in front, two behind, two on each side, and one in each corner.
Later in the same volume, Marlow Sholander shows that in fact every horse has an infinite number of legs.
That’s to say nothing of color. And see Chasing Leo.
Excerpts from letters received by the British pensions office, quoted in George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002:
A gentleman walked up to another gentleman, who was standing before the fire in a Coffee Room, and immediately said, ‘I beg your pardon, Sir, but may I ask your name?’ ‘I am not in the habit, Sir,’ said the other man, ‘of giving my name to strangers, but, as you are so pertinacious, Sir, my name is Thompson, Sir.’ ‘Then, Mr. Thompson, Sir,’ said the first speaker, ‘now I know your name, I beg, Sir, to inform you that your coat tails are on fire.’
— Frederick Locker-Lampson, Patchwork, 1879
Reponse of a 10-year-old child invited to write an essay about a bird and a beast:
The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.
I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.
The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.
— Ernest Gowers and Sir Bruce Fraser, The Complete Plain Words, 1973
“The Great Matrimonial Admonisher and Pacificator,” a reversible lithograph published in Baltimore in 1861.
Via the Library of Congress.
In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines:
[… and eas’d the putting off
These troublesome disguises which wee wear,]
Yet pretermitted not the strait Command,
Eternal, indispensable, to off-cleanse
From their white elephantin Teeth the stains
Left by those tastie Pulps that late they chewd
At supper. First from a salubrious Fount
Our general Mother, stooping, the pure Lymph
Insorb’d, which, mingl’d with tart juices prest
From pungent Herbs, on sprigs of Myrtle smeard,
(Then were not Brushes) scrub’d gumms more impearl’d
Than when young Telephus with Lydia strove
In mutual bite of Shoulder and ruddy Lip.
This done (by Adam too no less) the pair
[Straight side by side were laid …]
Marsh called this “the cleverest thing I ever did.” “The mordacious Telephus and Lydia are ‘of course,’ as the gossip-writers would say, from Horace, Odes, I, xiii. Martin Armstrong, who had set the competition, gave me the first prize, and was good enough to express the hope that future editors of Milton would put my lines in the appropriate place.”
(From Marsh’s 1939 memoir A Number of People.)
Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual:
Charles Causley: “Playing the piano with expression.”
John Faulkner: “Intricacies and wildernesses.”
John Fowles: “Mainly Sabine.”
Bevis Hillier: “Awarding marks out of ten for suburban front gardens.”
James Kirkup: “Standing in shafts of sunlight.” (In old age he changed this to “Standing in shafts of moonlight.”)
Edward Lucie-Smith: “Walking the dog; malice.”
Frederic Raphael: “Painting things white.”
Constant Hendrick de Waal: “Remaining (so far as possible) unaware of current events.”
Keith Waterhouse: “Lunch.”
Roy Worskett: “Looking and listening in disbelief.”
In 1897 George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as “cycling and showing off.” In 1980 Sir Harold Hobson listed “Bridge; recollecting in regretful tranquillity the magical things and people I may never see again — the Grand Véfour, Lasserre, Beaumanière; Proust’s Grand Hotel at Balbec (Cabourg); Sunday afternoon teas at the Ritz; the theatrical bookshop in St Germain-des-Prés; the Prado; Edwige Feuillère, Madeleine Renauld, Jean-Louis Barrault, François Perier; collecting from ephemera of the Belle Epoque the cartoons of Steinlen; and always and inexhaustibly talking to my wife.”
(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)
02/05/2025 UPDATE: John Cleese lists his as “gluttony and sloth.” (Thanks, Bryan.)
I heard the story — but I cannot verify it — that Marshall Lyautey (1854-1934) owned a parrot which incorporated these words in its vocabulary: What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening! and often repeated them in earnest.
Now one day the renowned soldier, on returning home, was greeted by the same interjection which seemed so in keeping with the fine evening. But what was his astonishment when he found himself before the spectacle presented by his bird. The parrot, which had spent the evening alone with a monkey, had been entirely defeathered by his everyday household companion. ‘What a beautiful evening! What a beautiful evening!’, in that context, took on a droll and ironic meaning.
— Elian Finbert, Les Perroquets Vous Parlent, 1975, quoted in George Gardner Herrick, Winter Rules, 1997
Apocryphal but entertaining: Allegedly a Paris (or Genoese?) opera company provided this synopsis of Carmen to its English-speaking patrons:
Act 1. Carmen is a cigar-makeress from a tabago factory who loves with Don José of the mounting guard. Carmen takes a flower from her corsets and lances it to Don José (Duet: ‘Talk me of my mother’). There is a noise inside the tabago factory and the revolting cigar-makeresses burst into the stage. Carmen is arrested and Don José is ordered to mounting guard her but Carmen subduces him and he lets her escape.
Act 2. The Tavern. Carmen, Frasquita, Mercedes, Zuniga, Morales. Carmen’s aria (‘The sistrums are tinkling’). Enter Escamillio, a balls-fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: ‘We have in mind a business’) but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated her from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: ‘Slop, here who comes!’) but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them (final chorus: ‘Opening sky wandering life’).
Act 3. A roky landscape, the smuglers shelter. Carmen sees her death in cards and Don José makes a date with Carmen for the next balls fight.
Act 4, A place in Seville. Procession of balls-fighters, the roaring of the balls heard in the arena. Escamillio enters, (Aria and chorus: ‘Toreador, toreador, all hail the balls of a Toreador’). Enter Don José (Aria: ‘I do not threaten, I besooch you.’) but Carmen repels himwants to join with Escamillio now chaired by the crowd. Don José stabbs her (Aria: ‘Oh rupture, rupture, you may arrest me, I did kill der’) he sings ‘Oh my beautiful Carmen, my subductive Carmen …’
From what I can tell, the earliest date claimed for the opera performance is 1928, and this excerpt didn’t appear until 1966. No one anywhere makes any confident claim as to the writer.
Sign posted on Primero Street in New Cuyama, California:
