Thomas Jefferson coined the word pedicure (at least in the sense “a person responsible for pedicure”).
His memorandum book for February 7, 1785, reads “P[ai]d La Forest, pedicure 12f.”
(Thanks, Joseph.)
Language
The Perfect Infinitive
“Let us take a typical case. A gentleman and his wife, calling on friends, find them not at home. The gentleman decides to leave a note of regret couched in a few well-chosen words, and the first thing he knows he is involved in this:
We would have liked to have found you in.
“Reading it over, the gentleman is assailed by the suspicion that he has too many ‘haves,’ and that the whole business has somehow been put too far into the past. … He takes an envelope out of his pocket and grimly makes a list of all the possible combinations, thus getting:”
- We would have liked to have found
- We would have liked to find
- We would like to have found
- We would like to find
- We had hoped to have been able to have found
“If he has married the right kind of woman, she will hastily scratch a brief word on a calling card, shove it under the door, and drag her husband away.”
— James Thurber, “Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to Modern English Usage,” 1931
And They’re Off
Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996:
- Bates Motel
- Disco Inferno
- Up Your Assets
- Race Horse
- Crashing Bore
- English Muffin
- Leo Pity Me
- Cold Shower
- T.V. Doubletalk
- Ranikaboo
- Holy Cats
- Hadn’t Orter
- Strong Strong
- Honeybunny Boo
After the Jockey Club rejected several names for one filly in the 1960s, the exasperated owner wrote “You Name It” on the application form. “We did,” said registrar Alfred Garcia. “We approved the name You Name It, and I think she turned out to be a winner, too.”
This race, run at Monmouth Park in 2010, seems to take on a deeper significance near the end:
Cover Letters
Is this typeface, by artist and calligrapher Dmitry Lamonov, uppercase or lowercase? It’s both!
He’s done the same thing in Cyrillic.
In a Word
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scattergood
n. a person who spends money wastefully
Built in the 16th century to flaunt its owner’s wealth, Hardwick Hall, in Derbyshire, boasted large windows when glass was a luxury. Children called it “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.”
Unfortunately, writes Stephen Eskilson in The Age of Glass (2018), “a cold day saw the chimneys of Hardwick Hall drawing cold air through the drafty windows and circulating it again to the outside,” “a sui generis example of thermal inefficiency.”
Family Plan
Given names of the 11 children of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Russell of Vinton, Ohio, 1972:
- Noel Leon
- Novel Levon
- Norwood Doowron
- Nerol Loren
- Leron Norel
- Noble Elbon
- Lledo Odell
- Laur Rual
- Loneva Avenol
- Lebanna Annabel
- Leah Hael
“Mother did it, but I don’t know why,” Laur told UPI. “She would take names from the Bible and other books and compare them until they came out that way.”
Bonus palindrome item: Volume 1, Issue 5 of Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, titled “Fearful Symmetry,” is a deliberately contrived visual palindrome, not just in structure but often within individual panels (designed by artist Dave Gibbons). Pedro Ribeiro shows the correspondences here.
Inspiration
Anna Rabinowitz’s 80-page poem Darkling is an acrostic of Thomas Hardy’s 1900 poem “The Darkling Thrush” — taking the first letter of each line in Rabinowitz’s poem spells out Hardy’s.
“I found myself … haunted by ‘The Darkling Thrush,'” she said, “by its tone of millennial mourning, by its note of hope in the thrush’s song, and most especially by its opening line which situates the poet at he meditates on the passing century: ‘I leant upon a coppice gate.'”
An American in Paris
A note sent by Mark Twain’s American traveling companion to his French landlord, 1867:
PARIS, le 7 Juillet. Monsieur le Landlord — Sir: Pourquoi don’t you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers? Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it? La nuit passee you charged me pour deux chandelles when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice. Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je l’aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble. You hear me. Allons. BLUCHER.
“I remonstrated against the sending of this note, because it was so mixed up that the landlord would never be able to make head or tail of it; but Blucher said he guessed the old man could read the French of it and average the rest.”
(From The Innocents Abroad.)
First Things First
George Orwell’s six rules of writing, from “Politics and the English Language,” 1946:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
But “one could keep all of them and still write bad English.”
Winifred’s Bloomers
English novelist Winifred Ashton had a disastrous gift for inadvertent double entendre. From Cole Lesley’s biography of Noël Coward:
The first I can remember was when poor Gladys was made by Noël to explain to Winifred that she simply could not say in her latest novel, ‘He stretched out and grasped the other’s gnarled, stumpy tool.’ The Bloomers poured innocently from her like an ever-rolling stream: ‘Olwen’s got crabs!’ she cried as you arrived for dinner, or ‘We’re having roast cock tonight!’ At the Old Vic, in the crowded foyer, she argued in ringing tones, ‘But Joyce, it’s well known that Shakespeare sucked Bacon dry.’ It was Joyce too who anxiously inquired after some goldfish last seen in a pool in the blazing sun and was reassured, ‘Oh, they’re all right now! They’ve got a vast erection covered with everlasting pea!’ ‘Oh the pleasure of waking up to see a row of tits outside your window,’ she said to Binkie during a weekend at Knott’s Fosse. Schoolgirl slang sometimes came into it, for she was in fact the original from whom Noël created Madame Arcati: ‘Do you remember the night we all had Dick on toast?’ she inquired in front of the Governor of Jamaica and Lady Foot. Then there was her ghost story : ‘Night after night for weeks she tried to make him come …’
“Why could she not have used the word ‘materialise’?” wrote Lesley, who was Coward’s secretary. “But then if she had we should never have had the fun.” See Shocking!