The learned professor may disagree with my theories, but in flinging bricks through my specially aluminum-framed orchid house he was taking matters too far.
Hampton is now safe in the Aldeburgh Home for the Mentally Dispossessed. I hear he gets an egg for breakfast and chicken for dinner. So that should satisfy his view of the order of things at least.
prof. brook, EASt Suffolk
¦
It is not seemly for professors to argue in this way in front of the public. You should make up with Henry and look at why you were really arguing in the first place. Perhaps because you are a little too interested in each other? Since Digby and I got over our differences and learned to type next to each other in bed without bickering, life has never been so sweet. And the sex is great.
profS. D. DumblE & h. h. unSElf
¦
What does it all mean?
deSMond TuTu, rePuBlic of SouTh africa
According to the Venerable Bede:
The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.
This image of man’s life—the flight of a sparrow through the warmth and light of a great hall and back out into the blizzard—has troubled thinkers for centuries. What depresses me is that in the Naughties, the cozy cheer of a banqueting hall has been replaced by the local Home Depot, where I spend most of my Sundays buying bathroom fittings for my rent-to-own; and all of the local sparrows have died out. In fact, the only wildlife in Brooklyn is the rats. So here’s your updated Bede analogy: life is basically a rat running through the wallpaper aisle of Home Depot, and back out into the rain.
tErESA bEnthAm, SoCIEty for thE poIntlESS promotIon of pESSImISm
¦
“It all” is a fairly straightforward construction which I would expect to be comprehensible to even the most basic English speaker. But, with standards of grammar slipping ever lower, one should never be surprised at what people need to have explained. “It” is the singular form of the noun indicating an asjkjcklllllllllllllllllllllllllllll SIr pEtEr froWnloW, hAStInGS
¦
I duly submit the last words of my father, who was found slumped at his desk, over the keyboard of his faithful old typewriter. He would have wanted me to send it in—he loved writing letters to periodicals, even if they were about the topic of grammar, which he taught for forty years and which thoroughly, utterly bored him. In all other respects he was in good health. The coroner said he seemed to suffer a sudden, unexplained cardiac arrest, almost as if he spontaneously willed it.
bEAtrICE froWnloW, hAStInGS
¦
[ed note: haha! So it iS possible to bore someone to death. i knew it. and there i was about to force you to read the Evening Standard to test my theory, you poor wretch, Penny. Take the afternoon off, i feel victorious. Maybe a jaunt down to Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard—can you check, has my restraining order expired yet, o angel of the office?]
Who comes up with all those marketing sayings, e.g. “thinking outside of the box”?
garTh MelTing, ShreWSBury
Many such common phrases, from “low-hanging fruit”
to “ducks in a row,” have evolved quite naturally from the simple act of putting groups of gel-haired advertising bastards in an office and closing the door. This particular phrase derives from a common office “joke”
of the late 1980s in which work-experience juniors were blindfolded, locked up inside small metal boxes, and pushed down the stairs. Only those on the “outside of the box” could be taken seriously as fee-earning high-flyers, while office juniors bumped and bruised by years
“inside the box” could only dream of the light and air of Executive Life. “Thinking outside of the box,” then, was all about being creative, successful, free. Somewhat darker was the famous sexual harassment case of 1988, where one of the bosses of marketing firm Sandham and Grey reportedly told his secretary that he had been
“thinking inside of her box.” He never worked again.
Guy ShInGlES, WhItStAblE, kEnt
¦
So many of the glib, irritating phrases that bombard us from the billboards and commercial breaks have, in fact, come from some of our supposedly greatest minds. Salman Rushdie, for instance, came up with the
“got milk?” slogan, and we have no lesser mortal than Sigmund Freud to thank for another. As he submitted to the effects of gas anesthetic before an operation on his mouth in 1934, he raved, “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!”
One of the surgeons is said to have raised his eyebrows and, once the father of psychoanalysis was comatose, remarked, “That was some Freudian slip!”
The phrase “thinking outside of the box” in advertising terms may originate in office bullying tactics from the 1980s, but it was first used much, much earlier, during the worst days of the emasculation cult of frightful Chinese Jin Dynasty ruler Lam Su (whose assembled from the quivering flesh of a dozen weeping men. During these great purges she amassed an almost limitless wealth as no male army would fight her hordes of women carrying Chinese xiudong (literally, “crotch weapon”—it resembles a modern potato peeler). Her linguistic bequest comes to us from the legend of her death, when, challenged by an itinerant soothsayer to prove she was invincible, she had a human coffin made and was buried alive in it, proclaiming, “I, Lam Su, am
eternal! I shall THINK myself out of the box!” But the soothsayer was in fact an exiled prince who, conspiring with her ladies-in- waiting, had arranged that the box be made out of men who had not been castrated. She was duly lowered into the ground and fucked to death.
AvEry GolDmInE, mInnESotA