Register

Excerpts from the index of Together, Norman Douglas’ 1923 account of his travels in Calabria:

Anna, the old nurse, her passion for idiots and corpses, 39-40, for wolf-stories, 210; gets it hot, 91; shakes chocolate from a tree, 209; not old at all, 210
Ants, unreliable workmen, 120
Beds, local, their discomforts, 3; double, their uses, 218
Brunnenmacher (father) mountaineer, presumably hirsute, 25; (son) mountaineer, indubitably hirsute, 25; his smile and his blasphemies, 25, 26; takes author in hand, 28, 124
Cement, an abomination, 75, 128, 225
Cocoa, an abomination, 10
Cows, explode from over-eating, 204
Dachshund, lady-dog, sets a bad example, 4
Elephant-trap, a disused, 113
Erratic blocks, 176, 185, 186, 230
Falling in love, with a mountain, 30
Grand-aunts, the delight of childhood, 41, 47, 92, 214
Grandfather, maternal, a feudal monster, always spick-and-span, 196; excavates in imagination the Akropolis of Athens, 197; tells Prince Consort how to handle Queen Victoria, 198; sometimes mistaken for an angel, 199; dominates his harem, 200; vicious to the last, 201
Hare, how to shoot, 123; how not to cook, 203
Moralists, their limitations, 84
Ovid, blunders in botany, 83
Poets, should avoid towns, 82; generally born naked, 165; talk nonsense about pomegranates, 202
Theocritus, seldom caught napping, 83
Weisses Kreuz, hotel, its manager worth making love to, 203

Douglas had a penchant for droll indexes. His index for Some Limericks (1928) contains the entry “Spain, project for fertilizing arid tracts of, its ruler disinclined for tête-à-tête diversions”.

| Humor · Literature

Variant

A “Home Counties version” of the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Farnham which art in Hendon, Harrow be thy Name. Thy Kingston come. Thy Wimbledon in Erith, as it is in Heston. Give us this day our Leatherhead. And forgive us our Westminsters, as we forgive them that Westminster against us. And lead us not into Thames Ditton, but deliver us from Ealing. For thine is the Kingston, the Purley, and the Crawley, for Iver and Iver. Crouch End.

I don’t think anyone knows who wrote it. See The Author’s Tale.

| Humor · Language

“A Waste of Time”

A little boy spent his first day at school. ‘What did you learn?’ was his aunt’s question. ‘Didn’t learn nothing.’ ‘Well, what did you do?’ ‘Didn’t do nothing. There was a woman wanting to know how to spell “cat,” and I told her.’

— John Scott, The Puzzle King, 1899

The 12-year-old Winston Churchill found examinations “a great trial”: “I would have liked to have been examined in history, poetry and writing essays. … I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know.”

| Humor · Society

Personae

In a 1920 letter, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The stock joke of the London stage is a fabulous stage direction ‘Sir Henry turns his back to the audience and conveys that he has a son at Harrow.'”

This is perhaps beaten by J.M. Barrie, who allegedly told a young actor in one of his plays, “I should like you to convey when you are acting it that the man you portray has a brother in Shropshire who drinks port.”

| Humor · Literature

Syllabus

I must go back to my charming occupation of hearing students give lessons. Here is my programme for this afternoon: Avalanches — The Steam Engine — The Thames — India Rubber — Bricks — The Battle of Poictiers — Subtraction — The Reindeer — The Gunpowder Plot — The Jordan. Alluring, is it not? Twenty minutes each, and the days of one’s life are only threescore years and ten.

— Matthew Arnold, letter to Lady Louisa de Rothschild, Oct. 14, 1864

| Humor

Anthropology

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pink_bathroom_Second_Life.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

— Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” American Anthropologist, June 1956

(It’s satire. What’s Nacirema spelled backward?)

| Humor

Advice

In his 1986 commonplace book Hodgepodge, J. Bryan lists this as one of his favorite typographical errors:

‘Carolyn B—-, who spoke on ‘Looking Ahead,’ said that the three qualities necessary for success are faith, determination and Charles McFee.

“I can’t classify it or explain it at all. I can only quote it.” I haven’t been able to find the original source.

09/17/2025 UPDATE: Reader Adam Mellion found it — it’s from the Richmond Times-Dispatch of June 12, 1954:

hodgepodge typo

Not that striking when you see it in context. (Thanks, Adam.)

| Humor

Second Senses

Entries from the Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary:

beehive: what Australian teachers tell you to do
blistering: someone you enjoy calling on the phone
cannelloni: Scots refusal to give one an overdraft
cherish: rather like a chair
colliery: sort of like a collie but even more so
emboss: to promote to the top
female: chemical name for Iron Man
flatulence: an emergency vehicle that picks you up after you have been run over by a steamroller
Icelander: to tell lies about Apple
ivy: the Roman for four
lamb shank: Sean Connery’s sheep has drowned
laundress: grass skirt
pastrami: the art of meat folding
quick: noise made by a New Zealand duck
splint: to run very fast with a broken leg
Venezuela: a gondola with a harpoon
wisteria: a nostalgic form of panic
xylophone: the Greek goddess of Scrabble

A foible is “something coughed up by a New York cat.”

| Humor · Language