Sound Over Sense

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warren_G_Harding_portrait_as_senator_June_1920.jpg

“I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.”

That’s Warren G. Harding, and God knows what he meant. Harding’s utterances were so impenetrable that they developed a sort of fascinated following. “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered,” wrote H.L. Mencken, who dubbed it Gamalielese. “It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

When Harding succumbed to a stroke in 1923, E.E. Cummings wrote, “The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”

04/08/2021 UPDATE: This example isn’t really fair to Harding — Mencken misrepresented the quote, changing a semicolon after mitigate to a comma. (Thanks, @nacreousnereid.)

Senselessness Squared

The armistice that ended World War I went into effect at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11 (“the 11th of the 11th of the 11th”) in 1918.

Gordon Brook-Shepherd writes: “[A]ny firing still going on ended on the last second of the tenth hour, sometimes with droll little ceremonies — as on the British front near Mons, where [a] German machine-gunner blazed off his last belt of ammunition during the last minute of the war and then, as the hour struck, stood up on his parapet, removed his steel helmet, bowed politely to what was now the ex-enemy opposite, and disappeared.”

The last casualties were not so droll. At 10:45 a.m., French soldier Augustin Trébuchon was running to tell his friends that hot soup would be served after the ceasefire when he was shot and killed.

And in the Forest of Argonne, American private Henry Gunther charged a German position just before 11:00 and was shot down. He died 60 seconds before the end of the war.

Feedback

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln received this letter from a Pete Muggins in Fillmore, La.:

God damn your god damned old Hellfired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family’s god dammed hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell god damn their god damned souls to damnation.

“Quarrel not at all,” Lincoln wrote on another occasion. “No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.”

The Wooden Horse

In 1943, authorities at a German POW camp in Poland discovered that three prisoners were missing. A considerable space separated the prisoners’ huts from the perimeter fence, so at first it wasn’t clear how they’d escaped.

But the three inmates had something in common — all three had exercised during the day on a vaulting horse in the yard. On investigating, the Germans discovered a 100-foot tunnel leading from that spot to an opening beyond the fence.

The truth became clear. Each day, the prisoners had carried the horse to the same spot with a man hidden inside. While they exercised, the hidden man had used a bowl to lengthen the tunnel, then hid again in the horse as it was carried back inside. The Germans had used siesmographs to detect tunneling, but the prisoners’ vaulting had masked the sounds of their digging.

All three escapees — Eric Williams, Michael Codner, and Oliver Philpot — reached neutral Sweden and were reunited with their families.

Fool Me Twice

Wyoming may be the Cowboy State, but it has an Eastern pedigree: It was named by an Ohio congressman after a valley in Pennsylvania.

Rep. J.M. Ashley named the territory after the Wyoming Valley, whose name means “at the big river flat.”

Still, that’s more authentic than Idaho.

History Confounded

In 1620 the Duke of Buckingham dug a hole at the center of Stonehenge.

John Aubrey, who interviewed local residents about it in 1666, reports that “something was found, but what it was Mrs. Mary Trotman … hath forgot.”

Fan Club

Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford admired one another. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler told the Detroit News in 1931, explaining why kept a portrait of Ford next to his desk.

Four months after Hitler invaded Austria, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal the Nazis bestowed on foreigners.

Ford elsewhere said, “History is more or less bunk.”

Mirror, Mirror

The following curious effect of the combination of figures has been sent to us by a friend in Paris, who states that it has been extensively circulated in that capital. We have not yet seen it in print here.

The votes upon the Presidency of Louis Napoleon were,–

http://books.google.com/books?id=aqZTuzkSntYC&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#PPA40,M1

Place the above in front of a mirror, so that the reflection of it may be visible:

http://books.google.com/books?id=aqZTuzkSntYC&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#PPA40,M1

This reflection will read, ‘III Empereur‘–Third Emperor. Louis Napoleon affects hereditary superstition, and it is stated that this singular coincidence confirmed him in the belief which he has always entertained of the exalted destiny for which Providence reserved him.

Harper’s Magazine, 1857, quoted in Appleton Morgan, Macaronic Poetry, 1872

One Foot in the Grave

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Henry_William_Paget00a.jpg

When a surgeon took off Lord Uxbridge’s leg after the Battle of Waterloo, a local resident asked permission to bury the limb in his garden in a sort of shrine. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned gruesomely bathetic: Visitors were shown the bloody chair on which Uxbridge had sat during the amputation, the boot he had worn, and finally a tombstone that read “Here lies the Leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge … who, by his heroism, assisted in the triumph of the cause of mankind, gloriously decided by the resounding victory [in 1815].”

By 1862 the grave was being mocked openly; a poem by Thomas Gaspey included this verse:

A leg and foot to speak more plain
Lie here, of one commanding;
Who, though his wits he might retain,
Lost half his understanding.

Get it? Things went downhill from there. A steady stream of paying customers visited the tomb, including the king of Prussia and the Prince of Orange, but in 1878 Uxbridge’s son discovered that the family were displaying only the naked bones, which had been exposed in a storm. Rather than rebury them as ordered, the proprietors merely hid them, and in 1934 a widow finally burned them ignominiously in her furnace. C’est la guerre.