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Earwitness

Mike and Tobye Madison of Baytown, Texas, had two odd experiences in January 1984: Their house was burglarized, and Baby, their exotic talking bird, began saying “Come here, Robert. Come here, Ronnie.”

“When the lady told me about it I almost broke up,” Baytown police detective Reggie Harper told the Associated Press. “I almost didn’t write it down.”

Apparently Baby, a female yellow-headed Amazon, was repeating the words of the intruders. This helped police identify two men and a 16-year-old boy and charge them with a series of house burglaries involving the loss of $50,000 in property.

Forty years earlier, the same thing had happened in New York.

| Crime

“A Unique Will”

At a dinner for law alumni of New York University in 1907, Walter Lloyd Smith of the New York Supreme Court read “the most remarkable document that ever came into his possession” — the will of an inmate of the Cook County Insane Asylum at Dunning, Ill.:

I, Charles Lounsbury, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make and publish this, my last will and testament, in order as justly as may be to distribute my interest in the world among succeeding men.

That part of my interest which is known in law and recognized in the sheep-bound volumes as my property, being inconsiderable and of no account, I make no disposal of in this my will.

My right to live, being but a life estate, is not at my disposal, but these things excepted all else in the world I now proceed to devise and bequeath.

Item: I give to good fathers and mothers, in trust for their children, all good little words of praise and encouragement, and all quaint pet names and endearments, and I charge said parents to use them justly and generously, as the needs of their children may require.

Item: I leave to children inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, all and every, the flowers of the fields, and the blossoms of the woods, with the right to play among them freely according to the customs of children, warning them at the same time against thistles and thorns. And I devise to children the banks of the brooks, and the golden sands beneath the waters thereof, and the odors of the willows that dip therein, and the white clouds that float high over the giant trees. And I leave the children the long, long days to be merry in, in a thousand ways, and the night and the moon and the train of the Milky Way to wonder at, but subject nevertheless to the rights hereinafter given to lovers.

Item: I devise to boys jointly all the useful idle fields and commons where ball may be played; all pleasant waters where one may swim; all snowclad hills where one may coast, and all streams and ponds where one may fish, or where, when grim Winter comes, one may skate; to have and to hold the same for the period of their boyhood. And all meadows with the clover blossoms and butterflies thereof, the woods and their appurtenances, the squirrels and the birds, and echoes and strange noises, and all distant places which may be visited, together with the adventures there found. And I give to said boys each his own place at the fireside at night, with all pictures that may be seen in the burning wood, to enjoy without let or hindrance and without any incumbrance of care.

Item: To lovers I devise their imaginary world with whatever they may need; as the stars of the sky; the red roses by the wall; the bloom of the hawthorn; the sweet strains of music, and aught else by which they may desire to figure to each others the lastingness and beauty of their love.

Item: To young men jointly, I devise and bequeath all boisterous, inspiring sports of rivalry, and I give to them the disdain of weakness and undaunted confidence in their own strength, though they are rude; I give them the power to make lasting friendships, and of possessing companions, and to them exclusively I give all merry songs and brave choruses, to sing with lusty voices.

Item: And to those who are no longer children or youths or lovers, I leave memory, and I bequeath to them the volumes of the poems of Burns and Shakespeare and of other poets, if there be others, to the end that they may live over the old days again, freely and fully, without tithe or diminution.

Item: To our loved ones with snowy crowns I bequeath the happiness of old age, the love and gratitude of their children until they fall asleep.

The original, it turns out, was written by Williston Fish in 1897 and published in Harper’s Weekly the following year. He had intended it as a poetic trifle, but newspapers around the country had picked it up and run it as fact, often embellishing the language, until, Fish wrote in 1908, “this one of my pieces has been translated into all the idiot tongues of English.” Charles Lounsbury was the name of an old relative of his — “a big, strong all-around good kind of man,” but not, evidently, insane.

| Oddities

“Spaghettibird Headdress”

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Fors oar in shaving ear she goes, awful fodders broad fart hunter dish consonant hay noon action, corn sieved inebriety and addict hated tutor preposition dot omen or crated inkwell.

Non wiring caged integrate cymbal wart, tasting wither damnation, our runny gnashing, socking seed end sod defecated ken logging door. Worm head honor grape batter veal doff fat whore. Wave counter defecator potion audit felled azure vinyl roasting piece fort hose hoe hair gater wives tit tat gnashing mike leaf. Assault her gutter footing in pepper dot weigh shoe duties.

Budding awl archer since, weaken opt defecate, weekend not concentrate, working ought hello disk round. Depravement, livid indeed, hue straggle deer, heft cancer traded hit, pharaoh buff harp burp hours tatter distract. Twirled wheel ladle node orlon ram umber wad wheeze hay year, buttock an if veer fork add catered hairdo done finest walk witch day hoof otter heft dust floor show nobody at fenced. I doze rudder forest tubing hair debtor catered tuba grape tusk rim onion beef harass — dot form tease own whored did, wheat aching greased dim notion tutor cows far wish dig rave do lustful miss shore add dive ocean; dewy her holly dissolve daddies dad shell nut heft tiding feign; end it grubby men, other pimple, brother pimple, father pimple, shell nut pair rich fern dirt.

— “Labour Ham Winking” (Jim Anderson, Jeffrey Brown, and John Spencer), quoted in Willard R. Espy, The Best of an Almanac of Words at Play, 1999

| Language

Death Mundane

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Uninspired last words:

  • “Peter, take good care of my horse.” — Winfield Scott
  • “Have you brought the checkbook, Alfred?” — Samuel Butler
  • “Take away those pillows — I shall need them no more.” — Lewis Carroll
  • “You heard me, Mike.” — John Barrymore
  • “I haven’t drunk champagne for a long time.” — Chekhov
  • “I can’t sleep.” — James M. Barrie
  • “Moose. Indian.” — Thoreau
  • “I’ve never felt better.” — Douglas Fairbanks
  • “The nourishment is palatable.” — Millard Fillmore

Told jokingly that he had drunk a dose of ink by mistake, Sydney Smith said, “Then bring me all the blotting paper there is in the house.”

| Death

The Right Moment

The second Earl of Leicester sat in Parliament for 67 years without saying a word.

His son, the third earl, was silent for 32 years.

His grandson, the fourth earl, said nothing for 23 years.

His great-grandson, the fifth earl, Thomas William Edward Coke, kept his silence for 22 years, then in 1972 rose and said, “I hope we shall use safer chemicals in place of those which have devastated the countryside.”

“My record of silence is not all that remarkable because I know that my family have not been overtalkative in this house,” he said later.

| Society

Missed Spellings

Mr. Smith returns to his office to find a message asking him to call Mr. Wryquick. He doesn’t know a Wryquick, so he does nothing. The next day his attorney, Dawcy, Esq., arrives in a snit and asks why Smith didn’t return the call. What’s going on?

In leaving the message, Dawcy had spelled his name “D as in double-u, A as in are, W as in why, C as in cue, Y as in you, E as in eye, S as in sea, Q as in quay.”

That’s from Benjamin L. Schwartz, in Word Ways, August 1972. In Verbatim, Summer 1985, Anna and Taffy Holland point out that a woman named Sue Washhouse, if provoked, might spell her name “S as in see, U as in queue, E as in are, W as in ewe, A as in pea, S as in sea, H as in oh, H as in why, O as in you, U as in eau, S as in see, E as in yew.”

| Language

Twainspotting

“Certain rules to discover married couples in large societies or in public,” from The Meteor; or, General Censor, 1814:

  1. If you see a gentleman and lady disagree upon trifling occasions, or correcting each other in company, you may be assured they have tied the matrimonial noose.
  2. If you see a silent pair in a hackney or any other coach, lolling carelessly one at each window, without seeming to know they have a companion, the sign is infallible.
  3. If you see a lady drop her glove, and a gentleman by the side of her kindly telling her to pick it up, you need not hesitate in forming your opinion; or,
  4. If you see a lady presenting a gentleman with anything carelessly, her head inclined another way, and speaking to him with indifference; or,
  5. If you meet a couple in the fields, the gentleman twenty yards in advance of the lady, who perhaps is getting over a stile in difficulty, or picking her way through a muddy path; or,
  6. If you see a lady whose beauty and accomplishments attract the attention of every gentleman in the room but one, you can have no difficulty in determining their relationship to each other–the one is her husband.
  7. If you see a gentleman particularly courteous, obliging, and good-natured, relaxing into smiles, saying smart things, and toying with every pretty woman in the room excepting one, to whom he appears particularly reserved, cold, and formal, and is unreasonably cross–who that one is nobody can be at a loss to discover; or,
  8. If you see a young or an old couple jarring, checking, and thwarting each other, differing in opinion before the opinion is expressed; eternally anticipating and breaking the thread of each other’s discourse, yet using kind words, like honey-bubbles floating on vinegar, which soon are overwhelmed by the preponderance of the fluid; they are, to all intents, man and wife! it is impossible to be mistaken.

“The rules above quoted are laid down as infallible in just interpretation; they may be resorted to with confidence; they are upon unerring principles, and reduced from every day’s experience.”

| Society

Salad Bar

In his 1968 novel Enderby Outside, Anthony Burgess contrived to use the word onions four times in a row:

Then, instead of expensive mouthwash, he had breathed on Hogg-Enderby, bafflingly (for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions. ‘Onions,’ said Hogg.

Burgess could take playfulness to excess — the first volume of the Enderby quartet got him into a bit of trouble.

| Literature

Presentable

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For their investiture as poet laureate, Wordsworth and Tennyson both borrowed the same suit from Samuel Rogers.

Unfortunately, Rogers was a small man. When Tennyson had trouble fitting into the suit, he asked a servant how Wordsworth had fared. “They had great difficulty in getting him into them,” the man replied.

| Literature

Between the Lines

Read the first letter of each sentence of the preface of Transport Phenomena, a 1960 chemical engineering textbook by Robert Bird, Warren Stewart, and Edwin Lightfoot, and you’ll discover the message THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO O.A. HOUGEN.

In the second edition, the initial letters of successive paragraphs spell the word WELCOME.

In the afterword, they spell ON WISCONSIN.

| Language · Literature