opsimath
n. one who studies late in life
Language
“Fatal Double Meaning”
Count Valavoir, a general in the French service under Turenne, while encamped before the enemy, attempted one night to pass a sentinel. The sentinel challenged him, and the count answered ‘Va-la-voir,’ which literally signifies ‘Go and see.’ The soldier, who took the words in this sense, indignantly repeated the challenge, and was answered in the same manner, when he fired; and the unfortunate Count fell dead upon the spot,–a victim to the whimsicality of his surname.
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
O I C
I’m in a 10der mood to-day
& feel poetic, 2;
4 fun I’ll just — off a line
& send it off 2 U.
I’m sorry you’ve been 6 O long;
Don’t B disconsol8;
But bear your ills with 42de,
& they won’t seem so gr8.
— Anonymous
To and Fro
I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, “Perdition!
Up from out of under there.”
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, “What should he come
Up from out of under for?”
— Morris Bishop
Rhyming the Unrhymable
I have tried a hundred times, I guess,
To find a rhyme for month;
I have failed a hundred times, I know,
But succeeded the hundred and one-th.
There were two men a training went.
It was in December month;
One had his bayonet thrown away,
The other had his gun th-
rown away.
— Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, August 1894
In a Word
phobophobia
n. fear of phobias
A Devil’s Distinction
Terror and horror, from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Ann Radcliffe wrote: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”
Or, in Devendra Varma’s words, “The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference … between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.”
“I Say”
A gentleman who was in the habit of interlarding his discourse with the expression ‘I say,’ having been informed by a friend that a certain individual had made some ill-natured remarks upon this peculiarity, took the opportunity of addressing him in the following amusing style of rebuke:–‘I say, sir, I hear say you say I say “I say” at every word I say. Now, sir, although I know I say “I say” at every word I say, still I say, sir, it is not for you to say I say “I say” at every word I say.’
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
R.I.P.
Epitaph in the churchyard of Llangerrig, Montgomeryshire:
— Charles Bombaugh, Facts and Fancies for the Curious From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1860
“Rhyming Words Wanted”
A whimsical letter written by W. S. Gilbert notes ‘a great want’ among poets. ‘I should like to suggest,’ he says, ‘that any inventor who is in need of a name for his invention, would confer a boon on the rhymsters, and at the same time insure himself many gratuitous advertisements, if he would select a word that rhymes to one of the many words in common use, which have but few rhymes or none at all. A few more words rhyming with ‘love’ are greatly wanted; ‘revenge’ and ‘avenge’ have no rhyming word, except ‘Penge’ and ‘Stonehenge’; ‘coif’ has no rhyme at all; ‘starve’ has no rhyme except (oh, irony!) ‘carve’; ‘scarf’ has no rhyme, though I fully expect to be told that ‘laugh,’ ‘calf,’ and ‘half’ are admissible, which they certainly are not.’
— Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, March 1894