Readers of the Madison, Wis., Capital-Times had a scare on April 1, 1933 — a front-page photo showed that the state capitol had collapsed.
The words “April Fool” appeared in small type both in the caption and at the end of the accompanying article, but readers were not amused.
“There is such a thing as carrying a joke too far,” wrote one, “and this one was not only tactless and void of humor as well, but also a hideous jest.”
A puzzle by Isaac Asimov:
What word in the English language changes its pronunciation when it is capitalized?
A Frenchman, who spoke very broken English, having some Words with his Wife, endeavour’d to call her Bitch, but could not recollect the Name. At last he thought he had done it, by saying, Begar, mine Dear, but you be one vile Dog’s Wife. Aye, that’s true enough, answer’d the Woman, the more is my Misfortune.
— The Jester’s Magazine, February 1766
Loud brayed an ass. Quoth Kate, ‘My dear,
(To spouse, with scornful carriage,)
One of your relatives I hear.’
‘Yes, love,’ said he, ‘by marriage.’
— I.J. Reeve, The Wild Garland; or, Curiosities of Poetry, 1866
Breaking both wings of an army is almost certain to make it fly; a general may win the day in a battle fought at night; a lawyer may convey a house, and yet be unable to lift a hundred pounds; a room may be full of married men, and not have a single man in it; a traveler who is detained an hour or two may recover most of the time by making a minute of it; a man killed in a duel has at least one second to live after he is dead; a fire goes out, and does not leave the room; a lady may wear a suit out the first day she gets it, and put it away at night in as good a condition as ever; a schoolmaster with no scholar may yet have a pupil in his eye; the bluntest man in business is generally the sharpest one; Ananias, it is said, told a lie, and yet he was borne out by the by-standers; caterpillars turn over a new leaf without much moral improvement; oxen can only eat corn with the mouth, yet you may give it to them in the ear; food bolted down is not the most likely to remain on the stomach; soft water is often caught when it rains hard; high words between men are frequently low words; steamboat officers are very pleasant company, and yet we are always glad to have them give us a wide berth; a nervous man is trembling, faint, weak, while a nervous style and a man of nerve is strong, firm, and vigorous.
— John Walker Vilant Macbeth, The Might and Mirth of Literature, 1876
Spiritualist Ludwig von Guldenstubbe had a no-nonsense approach to communicating with the dead — he left paper and pencil for them in Paris churches and cemeteries.
He got only a few scrawls at first, but apparently word spread through the underworld, and soon more illustrious correspondents turned up. In August 1856 von Guldenstubbe produced the signatures of the emperor Augustus and of Julius Caesar, collected at their statues in the Louvre:
He also received writings from Abélard, who wrote in bad Latin, and Héloïse, in modern French — evidently she’s been taking correspondence courses since the 12th century.
Sadly, it appears that death spoils one’s penmanship — here are writing samples from Louise de La Vallière, the repentant mistress of Louis XIV, before (top) and after dying:
Perhaps that’s understandable, given the circumstances.
In the 10 months between August 1856 and June 1857, von Guldenstubbe says he got more than 500 specimens this way, in the company of more than 50 witnesses — but somehow no one has ever duplicated his results.
Harold Ross personally edited every issue of the New Yorker between 1925 and 1951. Unfortunately, he was a fiend for commas, peppering every sentence until all possible ambiguity was removed. An example from 1948:
“When I read, the other day, in the suburban-news section of a Boston newspaper, of the death of Mrs. Abigail Richardson Sawyer (as I shall call her), I was, for the moment, incredulous, for I had always thought of her as one of nature’s indestructibles.”
His writers hated this. James Thurber revised Wordsworth:
She lived, alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be,
But, she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference, to me.
And E.B White wrote, “Commas in the New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”
But Ross was immovable. “We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here,” he acknowledged to H.L. Mencken, “probably to a point approaching the ultimate. I don’t know how to get it under control.”
So on it went. A correspondent once asked Thurber why Ross had added the comma to the sentence “After dinner, the men went into the living-room.” Thurber responded, “This particular comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”
Karl Selim Lemström worked a quiet miracle in 1882: He strung conducting wire over the summit of a Lapland mountain and watched it draw down a shaft of light from the night sky — poetic proof that the aurora borealis is an electrical discharge from the upper atmosphere.
See Charged Words.
It’s said that when Christopher Wren completed St. Paul’s cathedral in 1708, Queen Anne told him his work was “awful, artificial, and amusing.”
He took this as a compliment — in those days these words meant awe-inspiring, artistic, and amazing.
For more than a century, people have been hearing strange sounds in the sky over the lakes of Yellowstone National Park:
Evidently the sound is very difficult to describe in words — one of Linton’s party called it “a twisting sort of yow-yow vibration.” Forbes calls it “really bewitching,” and Linton’s guide, Elwood Hofer, called it “the most mysterious sound heard among the mountains.”
Possibly it’s produced by the surrounding mountains under seismic stress, or it could be standing sound waves produced by the wind. No one knows.
Laid up in the hospital, James Thurber passed the time doing crossword puzzles.
One day he asked a nurse, “What seven-letter word has three u’s in it?”
She said, “I don’t know, but it must be unusual.”