Ruination & Despair

Oswald: What dost thou know me for?

Earl of Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stockinged knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition.

  —  William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act II, Scene 2.

“No dancing, clamouring, quarrelling, fisticuffings or indulging in excessive drinking and creating disturbances in public places for the sake of keeping a peaceful and comfortable environment. Guests are not permitted to bring pets and poultry into the hotel.”

 — Notice posted in a hotel room in Beijing, China, as reported in Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See (1990), p. 140.

In Act II, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago entertains Desdemona and Emilia with a teasing rant against the fair sex, in the course of which he asserts that “You are … / … / Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.” Unfortunately the pun is lost on a modern audience, since housewife no longer has the secondary meaning of “hussy” it once did (the evidence of ABC’s popular Desperate Housewives notwithstanding). What Iago is alleging is that women are idle in their housekeeping and sluts in the bedroom. This sort of thing qualifies as fairly standard Elizabethan banter between the sexes. Desdemona, with her “O, fie upon thee, slanderer!”, only pretends to be offended, and Iago replies by improvising a couplet: “Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk, / You rise to play, and go to bed to work.” (Continue reading . . .)

“Of course there is some truth in advertising. There’s yeast in bread, but you can’t make bread with yeast alone.”

 — Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933).

“May contain . . . peanuts.”

 — Allergy warning for Emerald® Dry Roasted Peanuts.

Some years ago, a non-native speaker asked me about the English suffix ‑ling, as in gosling or hireling. Her inquiry inspired a brief but enjoyable quest to compile a list of examples of this rather peculiar form, which has after all given us such fine words as princeling, hatchling, and earthling. The better to amuse myself, I have now reconstructed that list, expanded it, and researched the matter properly through Archelaus’s office copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). (Continue reading . . .)

“Our present civilization has broken out with the hives.”

 — Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur (Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of the Interior), 1932

In 1564 the first printing press to be set up in Moscow was burned down by a mob that considered it the work of the devil.

Source: Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, introduction to The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible, ed. and trans. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 19.

Sedigitus (Lat. sex, six; digitus, finger, toe): having six fingers or toes.

Source: Max Hohnerlein, Neues Namenbüchlein: Ableitung und Erklärung von 4200 Vornamen (Stuttgart, n.d. [1927]), 50.

By eating cinnamon and toads’ brains for seven years, the fourth-century Daoist alchemist Baopuzi reportedly was able not only to avoid aging and death, but also to walk on water.

Source: J. A. G. Roberts, China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West (London, 2002), 18.