The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
from The Road to Charleston, by John Buchanan
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Comedian Danny Thomas titillates his audience with the story of the Australian soldier who dashed up to the English soldier in battle and said, “I came here to die. What about you?”
Replied the Englishman, “I came here yesterdie.”
from Pikes Peek or Bust, by Earl Wilson
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[Lou] Brock had been born in El Dorado, Arkansas (Arkansas, Brock liked to say later, billed itself in those days as the land of opportunity, and at the very first opportunity he had gotten the heck out of there).
from October, 1964, by David Halberstam
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Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it into a fruit salad.
seen online
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[I’m including this piece because I’ve often read about Vallandingham in various Civil War histories, and because we spent a night at the Golden Lamb in Lebanon, Ohio and then returned a few years later to eat breakfast there. Oddly, while in Lebanon, I heard nothing about Vallandingham. He seems a more likely candidate for a ghost than Sarah Stubbs who supposedly haunts the place.]
Clement L. Vallandigham, born 1820 in New Lisbon, Ohio, was exiled by President Lincoln to the Confederacy for his “treasonous” statments. Southern leaders didn’t receive him with open arms, so he fled to Canada for sanctuary. He returned to Ohio in June, 1864 and played a major role in framing the National Democratic Party’s peace plank that helped bring about the Democrat’s defeat in the November presidential election. After the war, he practiced law, In June, 1871, he was counsel for a Butler County (Ohio) man who, charged with murder, had obtained a change of venue to Warren County (Ohio). His case hinged on the theory that the victim could have killed himself. In his room at the Golden Lamb (known then as the Lebanon House), Vallandigham was preparing his final address that he would make to the jury the next day. Demonstrating his theory, he pulled his pistol from his trouser pocket, and in a freak accident, the gun fired a bullet into his abdomen. Mortally wounded, he died the next morning. The defendant, in a new trial, was acquitted.
from The Longest Raid of the Civil War, by Lester V. Horwitz
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The present system of punctuation, which divides language into sections by means of various signs and points, grew out of a system developed by Aldus Manutius, Italian scholar and printer, who printed Greek classics on his press at Venice in the latter part of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth…. It should not be supposed, however, that Manutius was the sole inventor of punctuation, no one man being entitled to that honor, although the main features of our modern system are due chiefly to his ingenuity and that of the Greek scholars employed by him at Venice. … During the Middle Ages and up to the time of Manutius it was customary to write letters together in lines without breaks or pause marks for either words or sentences. It was only by degrees that words were divided from one another by spacing in the lines. Then came a haphazard division of words into sentences by means of signs and points, borrowed chiefly from the dots [once used] by Greek grammarians.
from A Book About a Thousand Things, by George Stimpson
[I now understand why so few people could read. Here’s just one sentence of the above paragraph with no spaces between words.
Duringthemiddleagesanduptothetimeofmanutiusitwascustomarytowriteletterstogetherinli neswithoutbreaksorpausemarksforeitherwordsorsentences
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Hello as a conventional form of greeting and salutation is believed to have evolved from various early words or sounds used to attract the attention of a person at a distance. … These calls were widely used in Elizabethan times by huntsmen. By the middle of the nineteenth century hullo was the popular form of the salutation. The spelling hello does not occur in literature until after 1880, when the word became the common salutation over the telephone in the United States. When the first experimental telephone switchboard and exchange was installed in 1878 at New Haven, Connecticut, the signal and salutation used was Ahoy! Ahoy! This nautical hail is said to have been originally the war cry of the Vikings. For a year or two persons answered the telephone by saying “Are you ready to talk?” or “Are you there?” … Thomas A. Edison is believed to have been the first person to use Hello on the telephone.
from A Book About a Thousand Things, by George Stimpson
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A lot of people don’t realize you can usually go the day after a marathon and just drive the route. Very similar experience but way easier.
seen online, from J. Drake
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When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
from One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
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There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
from One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
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Europe in tatters [in 1940] is something that ought to occupy an honest man’s attention, but lately it has seemed too big for me. I prefer to curl up in a comfortable chair with The Rural New Yorker and read: “I have a three-year-old colt that about once a month or so will throw out her stifle joint.” That is a catastrophe I can enter into. And I like the editor’s cryptic reply: “With rest and occasional application of a Spanish-fly blister the colt may tend to outgrow the ailment.” An item like Spanish-fly blister on a stifle joint can occupy my thoughts the better part of a whole evening.
Here is a letter from a subscriber (a Mrs. M.M.) giving a straightforward account of a tame hen that willfully tore a chick to pieces and then, crazed with remorse, went down cellar and committed suicide by eating moth balls. “The reason for writing about this,” Mrs. M.M. adds with inspired irrelevance, “is to show how easily eggs can be tainted by bad food.”
from One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
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There was a scene in the “Hunchback of Notre Dame” showing the King of France taking his annual bath. One of his attendants urges him to take two baths a year instead of only one. And right there my attention wavered from the picture and I began brooding about the problem of personal cleanliness in the 15th Century and realized that if the King, enjoying all the advantages of wealth and position, took only one bath, then the gypsy girl Esmeralda, who lived among beggars and with no facilities whatsoever, probably took none. In spite of the apparent daintiness of Miss Maureen O’Hara, who managed to come out of every brawl looking lovely and sweet, the picture was spoiled for me, and I reflected that there was hardly a heroine in fiction prior to the present century whom I would feel attracted to at close range, so spoiled is the modern male by the clean girls that are found everywhere today.
from One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
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I believe it also is true that a government committed to the policy of improving the nation by improving the condition of some of the individuals will eventually run into trouble in attempting to distinguish between a national good and a chocolate sundae. …
I think that one hazard of the “benefit” form of government is the likelihood that there will be an indefinite extension of benefits, each new one establishing an easy precedent for the next.
Another hazard is that by placing large numbers of people under obligation to their government there will develop a self-perpetuating party capable of supplying itself with a safe majority.
from One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
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“Do you know,” [my wife] said after a while, “that the fox sparrow can easily be mistaken for the hermit thrush? They are about the same size, and they both have a red tail in flight.”
“They don’t if you look the other way, ” I replied, wittily. But she was not comforted. She thumbed restlessly through A Field Guide (she carries it with her from room to room at this season) and settled down among the grosbeaks, finches, sparrows, and buntings while I went back among the smoked bacon, blackberry jam, toast, and coffee.
“My real trouble is,” she continued, “that I learn the birds pretty well one year, but then the next year comes and I have to learn them all again. I think probably the only way really to learn them is to go out with a bird person. That would be the only way.”
“You wouldn’t like a bird person,” I replied.
“I mean a sympathetic bird person.”
“You don’t know a sympathetic bird person.”
“I knew a Mr. Knollenberg once,” said my wife wistfully, “who was always looking for a difficult finch.”
She admitted, however, that the problem of the birds was virtually insoluble. Even the chickadee, it turns out, plays a dirty trick on us all. Everyone knows a chickadee, and in winter the chickadees are our constant companions. For nine months of the year the chickadee announces himself plainly, so that any simpleton can tell him; but in spring the fraudulent little devil gives a phony name. In spring, when love hits him, he goes around introducing himself as Phoebe. According to the author of the Field Guide he whistles the name Phoebe, whereas the Phoebe doesn’t whistle it but simply says it. Still, its a dishonest trick, and I resent it when I’m busy.
Mr. Peterson, the author of the Guide, has made a manly attempt to enable us to identify birds, but the attempt (in my case) is pitiful. He says of the Eastern Winter Wren: it “frequents mossy tangles, ravines, brushpiles.” That, I don’t doubt, is true of the Eastern Winter Wren; but it is also true of practically every bird here except the chimney swift and the herring gull. Our whole country is just one big mossy tangle. Any bird you meet is suspect, but they can’t all be Eastern Winter Wrens.
from One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
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There has been more talk about the weather around here [the coast of Maine] this year than common, but there has been more weather to talk about. For about a month now we have had solid cold—firm business-like cold that stalked in a took charge of the countryside as a brisk housewife might take charge of someone else’s kitchen in an emergency.
from One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White
