A Statesman who attended a meeting of a Chamber of Commerce rose to speak, but was objected to on the ground that he had nothing to do with commerce.
‘Mr. Chairman,’ said an Aged Member, rising, ‘I conceive that the objection is not well taken; the gentleman’s connection with commerce is close and intimate. He is a commodity.’
— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899
calophantic
adj. pretending or making a show of excellence
velleity
n. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it
fode
v. to lead on with delusive expectations
magnoperate
v. to magnify the greatness of
Roman diplomat Sidonius Apollinaris describes the hunting skill of Visigoth king Theodoric II:
If the chase is the order of the day, he joins it, but never carries his bow at his side, considering this derogatory to royal state. … He will ask you beforehand what you would like him to transfix; you choose, and he hits. If there is a miss … your vision will mostly be at fault, and not the archer’s skill.
(Quoted in Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms, 2012.)
Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.
‘I should think not,’ he said; ‘he took himself along with him.’
— Montaigne, Essays
Unusual personal names collected in Oklahoma by onomastician Thomas Pyles in the 1940s:
Ima Foster and Ura Foster, possibly twin sisters, both received master’s degrees in education at the University of Oklahoma in 1943. “It has been suggested to me that most of the bearers of jocular names come of families in which infant baptism is not practiced, inasmuch as (it is to be hoped) few clergymen would consent to make a travesty of the sacrament of baptism by bestowing such names in christening.”
(Thomas Pyles, “Onomastic Individualism in Oklahoma,” American Speech 22:4 [December 1947], 257-264.)
08/15/2024 UPDATE: It appears Safety First became a cardiologist. “My dad gave me this troublesome title. We already had a junior in the family, so dad named me after the popular motto that had just been created.” (Thanks, Charlotte.)
Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor’s, Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.’ I thought this not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in shaving; — holding the razor more or less perpendicular; — drawing long or short strokes; — beginning at the upper part of the face, or the under; — at the right side or the left side. Indeed, when one considers what variety of sounds can be uttered by the windpipe, in the compass of a very small aperture, we may be convinced how many degrees of difference there may be in the application of a razor.
— James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
Venice’s Museo Correr exhibits a pair of wooden implements whose use isn’t immediately clear — they’re chopines, a type of platform shoe popular in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Worn under a woman’s skirt they could add up to 20 inches to her height, giving her an impressive eminence but an uncertain gait. Shakespeare mocked the trend in Hamlet’s greeting to a visiting player:
“By’r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last, by the altitude of a chopine.”
08/15/2024 UPDATE: Reader Peter Kidd notes this even more impressive pair, now at the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna:
(Thanks, Peter.)
Proposed cabinet of Dizzy Gillespie, who ran for president in 1964:
He said his running mate would be Phyllis Diller. When asked why he was running for president, he said, “Because we need one.”
Cannibalism shocks us terribly. Yet I remember talking to an old cannibal who from missionary and administrator had heard news of the Great War raging then in Europe. What he was most curious to know was how we Europeans managed to eat such enormous quantities of human flesh, as the casualties of a battle seemed to imply. When I told him indignantly that Europeans do not eat their slain foes, he looked at me with real horror and asked me what sort of barbarians we were to kill without any real object.
— Bronisław Malinowski, “Anthropology Is the Science of the Sense of Humour,” 1937
In his Reflections, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg mentions a friend who divided human endeavor into four classes:
quisquous
adj. difficult to deal with or settle
quillet
n. a verbal nicety, a subtle distinction
aggiornamento
n. the act of bringing something up to date to meet current needs
irenic
adj. fitted or designed to promote peace
The survivors of the Titanic were picked up by the English passenger steamship Carpathia, which conveyed them to New York. This presented a delicate problem to the Social Register. “In those days the ship that people travelled on was an important yardstick in measuring their standing, and the Register dutifully kept track,” notes Walter Lord in A Night to Remember (1955). “To say that listed families crossed on the Titanic gave them their social due, but it wasn’t true. To say they arrived on the plodding Carpathia was true, but socially misleading. How to handle this dilemma? In the case of those lost, the Register dodged the problem — after their names it simply noted the words, ‘died at sea, 15 April 1912’. In the case of those living, the Register carefully ran the phrase, ‘Arrived Titan-Carpath, 18 April 1912’. The hyphen represented history’s greatest sea disaster.”
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