In 1930 one million copies of a school textbook
containing a poem by Nekrasov with the word
Bog in it were printed by the Soviet government.
Then someone discovered, to the horror of the
Kremlin, that Bog was spelled with a capital letter throughout the poem.
Reducing Bog to bog required resetting type
in sixteen pages of each of the million books
printed, but the change was made, despite the
expense, so that "the books reached the Soviet
children uncontaminated."
According to Mencken, "There are people who
read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some
who are constantly drunk on books, as other
men are drunk on whisky or religion. They
wander through this most diverting and
stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing
and hearing nothing." Two out of three ain't
bad.
When the Marquis de Sade's Justine,
or the Misfortunes of Virtue was
published in 1791, it became popular for a time
among mothers misled by the title who purchased
it for their daughters to read "as an object
lesson."
Guiy Patin, dean of Paris's Faculte de Medicine,
writing in the sixteenth century: "As to our
publishers - I can hope for nothing from them.
They print nothing at their own expense but
sex novels."
Mark Twain was once told by an editor to never
state anything as fact he couldn't verify by
personal knowledge. After covering a gala
social event, he turned in the following
story: "A women giving the name of Mrs. James
Jones, who is reported to be one of the society
leaders of the city, is said to have given what
purported to be a party yesterday to a number
of alleged ladies. The hostess claims to be the wife of a reputed attorney."
There's actually a word for that really, really
annoying habit of athletes, politicians and
other notorieties of referring to themselves in
the third person. Coleridge invented a nonce
word "illeism" to describe this habit that
should be punishable with at least a caning.
The worst tongue twister in English is
"the sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick."
A very nasty pronunciation test is: "The
old man with the flaccid face and dour expression grimaced when asked if he were conversant with zoology, mineralogy, or the
culinary arts. 'Not to be secretive,' he
said, 'I may tell you that I'd given precedence
to the study of geneaology. But since by
father's demise, it has been my vagary to
remain incognito because of an inexplicable,
lamentable, and irreparable family schism.
It resulted from a heinous crime, committed
at the domicile by an impious scoundrel. To
err is human ... but this affair was so
grievous that only my inherent acumen and
consummate tact saved me." Test your pronunciation of the 25 more or less obvious
tricky words against the preferred ones in
a dictionary.
The British statesman Sir John Bowring (1791-1867) was a linguist and translator who
could read 200 languages and speak 100 fluently,
probably the most accomplished linguist in
history. As British governor to Hong Kong,
however, he wasn't as proficient; he precipitated a war with China by ordering
the bombardment of Canton during a dispute.
The publisher is apparently very low or out
of stock with this one, but take cheer in the
fact that there are millions of copies of
that which Tom Clancy's pinched off in print.
