“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” — Voltaire
“It has been said that this Minister [the Lord Privy Seal] is neither a Lord, nor a privy, nor a seal.” — Sydney D. Bailey
“Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” — Ernie Kovacs
After the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was constantly asked to describe his adventures on that day. Eventually he insisted that all his stories had been told, but during a visit to the Marchioness of Downshire, he said, “Well, I’ll tell you one that has not been printed.”
In the middle of the battle of Waterloo he saw a man in plain clothes riding about on a cob in the thickest fire. During a temporary lull the Duke beckoned him, and he rode over. He asked him who he was, and what business he had there. He replied he was an Englishman accidentally at Brussels, that he had never seen a fight and wanted to see one. The Duke told him he was in instant danger of his life; he said ‘Not more than your Grace,’ and they parted.
But every now and then he saw the Cob-man riding about in the smoke, and at last having nobody to send to a regiment, he again beckoned to this little fellow, and told him to go up to that regiment and order them to charge, giving him some mark of authority the colonel would recognise. Away he galloped, and in a few minutes the Duke saw his order obeyed. The Duke asked him for his card, and found in the evening, when the card fell out of his sash, that he lived at Birmingham, and was a button manufacturer!
“When at Birmingham the Duke inquired of the firm and found he was their traveller and then in Ireland. When he returned, at the Duke’s request he called on him in London. The Duke was happy to see him and said he had a vacancy in the Mint of 800l. a-year, where accounts were wanted. The little Cob-man said it would be exactly the thing and the Duke installed him.”
(Attributed to John Edward Carew in The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1853.)
From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I:
Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
In 2003, the Journal of Political Economy reprinted this paragraph with the title “Optimal Risk Sharing in the Trenches.”
From Wikimedia user Cmglee: If the history of the universe were recounted backward in a 138-page book, with 100 lines on each page and 100 letters in each line, written human history would occupy half a letter. Everything involving humans would lie on the first line; the dinosaurs would die out on the first page; and by page 10 the most complex lifeforms would be green algae.
For comparison, if the universe had begun in 4004 B.C., at this scale its history would occupy six-tenths of a letter.
renitence
n. unwillingness, resistance to persuasion
subdolous
adj. cunning, crafty, sly
autoschediasm
n. something done on the spur of the moment or without preparation
legerity
n. physical or mental quickness
FDR’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was famously unforthcoming, concealing his plans and emotions with the skill of a poker player.
When Hull was a legislator in Tennessee, one of his friends bet that he could get a direct answer out of him. He stopped him in the capitol and asked him the time.
Hull took out his timepiece, looked at it, and said, “What does your watch say?”
A phonetic mnemonic for the first 32 U.S. presidents, by Edwin C. Silvey:
I don’t know where this first appeared, but every source I can find faithfully credits the composer.
I take delight in history, even its most prosaic details, because they become poetical as they recede into the past. The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are to-day, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like a ghost at cock-crow. This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry round the dustiest record that Dryasdust can bring to light.
— G.M. Trevelyan, Autobiography and Other Essays, 1949
In 1999, archaeologists made a stunning find near the summit of a stratovolcano on the Argentina–Chile border. Three Inca children, sacrificed in a religious ritual 500 years earlier, had been preserved immaculately in the small chamber in which they had been left to die. Due to the dryness and low temperature of the mountainside, the bodies had frozen before they could dehydrate, making them “the best-preserved Inca mummies ever found.” Even the hairs on their arms were intact; one of the hearts still contained frozen blood.
Known as the Children of Llullaillaco, they’re on display today at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Salta.
crastin
n. the day after, the morrow
festinate
adj. hurried
hammajang
adj. in a disorderly or chaotic state
disceptation
n. disputation, debate, discussion
What time did various incidents happen? Everyone agrees that the Titanic hit the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. and sank at 2:20 a.m. — but there’s disagreement on nearly everything that happened in between. … There was simply too much pressure. Mrs. Louis M. Ogden, passenger on the Carpathia, offers a good example. At one point, while helping some survivors get settled, she paused long enough to ask her husband the time. Mr. Ogden’s watch had stopped, but he guessed it was 4:30 p.m. Actually, it was only 9:30 in the morning. They were both so engrossed, they had lost all track of time.
— Walter Lord, A Night to Remember, 1955
Sydney Smith suggested this inscription for William Pitt’s statue in Hanover Square:
To the Right Honourable William Pitt
Whose errors in foreign policy
And lavish expenditure of our Resources at home
Have laid the foundation of National Bankruptcy
And scattered the seeds of Revolution,
This Monument was erected
By many weak men, who mistook his eloquence for wisdom
And his insolence for magnanimity,
By many unworthy men whom he had ennobled,
And by many base men, whom he had enriched at the Public Expense.
But for Englishmen
This Statue raised from such motives
Has not been erected in vain.
They learn from it those dreadful abuses
Which exist under the mockery
Of a free Representation,
And feel the deep necessity
Of a great and efficient Reform.
“He was one of the most luminous, eloquent blunderers with which any people was ever afflicted,” Smith wrote. “God send us a stammerer; a tongueless man.”
