Too Right
Two months before the outbreak of World War I, Arthur Conan Doyle published a curious short story in The Strand. “Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius” told of a fleet of enemy submarines attacking England’s food imports, starving the nation and winning a war:
Of course, England will not be caught napping in such a fashion again! Her foolish blindness is partly explained by her delusion that her enemy would not torpedo merchant vessels. Common sense should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best — that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it first and talk about it afterwards.
In a commentary published with the story, Adm. Penrose Fitzgerald wrote, “I do not myself think that any civilized nation will torpedo unarmed and defenceless merchant ships.” Adm. Sir Compton Domvile felt “compelled to say that I think it most improbable, and more like one of Jules Verne’s stories than any other author I know.” Adm. William Hannam Henderson agreed: “No nation would permit it, and the officer who did it would be shot.”
But within months the U-boats’ depredations had begun, and by February 1915 Doyle was being accused of suggesting the idea to the Germans. “I need hardly say that it is very painful to me to think that anything I have written should be turned against my own country,” he told a reporter. “The object of the story was to warn the public of a possible danger which I saw overhanging this country and to show it how to avoid that danger.”
Heavenly Inspiration
“Oh, isn’t it a lovely sunset?” a young woman asked Robert Frost.
He said, “I never discuss business after dinner.”
This Sceptred Isle
There was a young fellow named Cholmondeley,
Who always at dinner sat dolmondeley.
His fair partner said,
As he crumbled his bread,
“Dear me! You behave very rolmondeley!”
Said a man to his spouse in east Sydenham:
“My best trousers! Now where have you hydenham?
It is perfectly true
They were not very new,
But I foolishly left half a quydenham.”
A young Englishwoman named St John
Met a red-skinned American It John
Who made her his bride
And gave her, beside,
A dress with a gaudy bead Frt John.
There was a young vicar from Salisbury
Whose manners were quite halisbury-scalisbury.
He went around Hampshire
Without any pampshire
Till his bishop compelled him to walisbury.
(Thanks, Gavin.)
“Singular Discovery”
A very singular discovery of an inscription was made some time since at Coxwold, near Thirsk in Yorkshire. … An ash was … felled and split for firewood. Upon being riven asunder, the outer part of the tree was cleft in two like a case, leaving the inner portion of the trunk entire, and the following rude inscription was discovered, distinctly legible, both upon the inner part of the trunk, and with the letters inverted, upon the outer casing. The inscription can, without difficulty, be thus read:–
There is no date to the inscription, but … it would … appear that the tree has been cut down nearly a hundred years. Also, by the number of rings in the wood, each indicating a year’s growth, the tree appears to have been about fifty-five years old when the inscription was made, and to have subsequently grown for nearly two hundred years. The closeness of the rings under the circumference prevents this estimation of the date from being regarded as more than an approximation; but all the circumstances render it highly probable that the inscription was made about three centuries ago.
– Kazlitt Arvine, Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes of Literature and the Fine Arts, 1856
A Boston Accent
Harvard anthropologist Terrence Deacon was walking past the New England Aquarium one day in 1984 when a voice yelled, “Hey! Hey! Get outta there!”
He stopped, but saw no one. Again the voice said, “Hey! Hey you!” Eventually he traced it to an enclosure of harbor seals, and to one in particular that seemed to be speaking English:
On investigating, Deacon learned that “Hoover” (named for his appetite) had been discovered as a pup by a Maine fisherman and donated to the aquarium, where he became a star attraction.
Deacon studied the seal for a year. Regarding the vocalizing, he notes that some birds seem to learn their parents’ songs in early life but sing them only later. “Though we will never know for sure,” he writes, “the image of Hoover guzzling the food in the cupboard and the old fisherman yelling, ‘Hey! Hey! Hoover! Hey you! Get outta there!’ has a persuasive feel, or twisted irony.”
Too Late
After François Ravillac assassinated Henry IV of France in 1610, it was discovered that
HENRICUS IV GALLIARUM REX (“Henry IV, King of the Gauls”)
can be rearranged to spell
IN HERUM EXURGIS RAVILLAC (“From these Ravillac rises up”)
His predecessor, Henry III, was also assassinated–his killer’s name, Frère Jacques Clement, can be anagrammed to spell C’est l’enfer qui m’a créé — “hell created me.”
Punctual
‘Mind your stops’ is a good rule in writing as well as in riding. So in public speaking, it is a great thing to know when to stop and where to stop. The third edition of a treatise on English Punctuation has been recently published, with all needful rules for writers, but none for speakers. The author furnishes the following example of the unintelligible, produced by the want of pauses in the right places:
Every lady in this land
Hath twenty nails upon each hand;
Five and twenty on hands and feet.
And this is true, without deceit.If the present points be removed, and others inserted, the true meaning of the passage will at once appear:
Every lady in this land
Hath twenty nails: upon each hand
Five; and twenty on hands and feet.
And this is true without deceit.
– Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1855
“Palindromic Conversation Between Two Owls”
“Too hot to hoot!”
“Too hot to woo!”
“Too wot?”
“Too hot to hoot!”
“To woo!”
“Too wot?”
“To hoot! Too hot to hoot!”
– George Marvill, New Statesman weekend competition, May 5, 1967
In a Word
accismus
n. feigned disinterest in a desired object