nod-crafty
adj. nodding to give an air of wisdom

From a September 1909 Baseball Magazine account of a Giants-Pirates game:

With the third inning faded into the dim and forgotten past, the fourth spasm in the afternoon’s matinee of Dementia Baseballitis hopped into the glare of the calcium glim. It was the Giants’ turn to paddle the pellet, Murderous Michael Donlin taking his turn beside the glad glum. Mike biffed the bulb on the proboscis and sent it gleefully gliding to the distant shrubbery. … Bresnahan managed to get next to the seamy side of a floater and the Toledo kid sent the denizens of Coogan’s Bluff into Seventh Heaven of Gleefullness by starting the pulsating pill on a line for the extreme backyard. But they reckoned without the mighty Wagner. The Carnegie Dutchman extended a monster paw, the near-two bagger was cleverly captured by a dainty dab of his lunch hook and before you could bat an eye he had whipped the globule over to Abby, who made an earnest effort to put Donlin down and out but missed by a fraction of an inch.

Baseball historian Douglas Wallop translates: “In the New York half of the fourth inning, Mike Donlin singled and catcher Roger Bresnahan lined out to Wagner, who almost doubled up Donlin at first base.”

Now how long before the translation becomes incomprehensible?

‘My dearest Maria,’ wrote a recently-married husband to his wife. She wrote back, ‘Dearest, let me correct either your grammar or your morals. You address me, “My dearest Maria.” Am I to suppose you have other dear Marias?’

— The Illinois Farmer, June 1863

When the San Diego Wild Animal Park opened in 1972, it featured a monorail that visitors could ride around the park’s perimeter. The railway was called the Wgasa Bush Line, a suitably exotic name that many visitors assumed was African.

In fact the name arose in a planning meeting. When chief designer Chuck Faust couldn’t think of a name, he wrote WGASA on the plans. “Everybody laughed because they knew what it stood for, but they loved it because it sounded African,” zoo founder Charles Schroeder wrote later. “We thought WGASA would blow over, but it actually stuck.”

It stands for “Who gives a shit anyway?”

smellfeast
n. “one who is quick at finding and frequenting good tables”; a parasite

“Mr. Speaker, I said the honorable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honorable member may place the punctuation where he pleases.”

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan, when asked to apologize to another member of Parliament

The New York Times ran a bewildering headline on May 6, 1965:

“Albany Kills Bill to Repeal Law Against Birth Control”

… a triple (quadruple?) negative.

“As you leave the town of Franklin, Pennsylvania, you encounter a sign: END BRAKE RETARDER PROHIBITION,” notes Edward Wolpow in the May 2011 issue of Word Ways. “For those for whom this is relevant, they are, presumably, able to follow the instructions quite quickly, since it is, after all, a road sign. But I still can’t figure it.”

In a 1975 interview with Business Week, Henry Kissinger said, “I am not saying that there’s no circumstances where we would not use force” against Saudi Arabia. Is this what he meant to say?

At a New York conference of linguistic philosophers in the 1950s, Oxford professor J.L. Austin noted that while a double negative often expresses a positive — as in “not unattractive” — there is no example in English of a double positive expressing a negative.

Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, who was in the audience, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, yeah …”