Mistake

This tiny story by Fredric Brown proves that a work of fiction doesn't need to be substantial to pack a whole lot of substance.  Anthony Boucher, editor of the 1964 anthology Best Detective Stories of the Year, which includes this tale, describes it as "the shorted murder story in history - and one of the most pointed."  It may be only five sentences, but I knew the moment I finished reading it that I would never forget it.  It's as if you could summarize Crime and Punishment in a single paragraph without losing the emotional wallop.

Standish gave himself up to the police.  "I killed a man," he said.  "I thought it was a perfect crime, but I made a mistake."  They asked what his mistake had been.  "I killed a man," he said.

Sonnet 29

This has always been one of my favorites among Shakespeare's sonnets, along with Sonnet 94 ("They that have power to hurt and will do none").  Having been a downtrodden and unlovely outcast for so many years of my life - be it as the crybaby kid getting picked on at recess or the sad-eyed mental patient locked away and forgotten - I find in this sonnet a sympathetic reflection of my own experiences and, ultimately, hope.  I post it here in tribute to the man I love.

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Flower in the Crannied Wall

This poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, may be short, and, like the flower of which the poet speaks, deceptively simple, yet there is a world of truth in it.  An unusually metaphysical poem for the nineteenth century, it is possessed of a timeless impact.  It has long been one of my favorites.  I hope it inspires you.

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

The Egregious Excerpts: Truth Reads Lemony Snicket (So You Don't Have To)

First off, let me make it clear that I in no way mean to discourage anyone from reading A Series of Unfortunate Events.  I shall offer my very free disclosure that I had no desire whatsoever at first to dive into a long and reportedly ridiculous children's series, but I finally decided that I had better read the first two books, at least, since my mothers' students have sometimes chosen them for a Language Arts assignment, and I have taken it upon myself this year to read all the books that they have to choose from, as I have often found myself in the position of grading their papers and it's much easier to do if I really know what I'm reading about.  (It's not always necessary, however.  When, for example, a student states that the climax of The Bad Beginning is when the Baudelaire orphans learn how to make pasta with puttanesca sauce, I don't have to have read the book to feel reasonably confident giving a very low grade.)

I give fair warning to any reader who might deem it suitable to follow my example: Lemony Snicket can be addicting, particularly if you have a passion for wordplay, metafiction, and underdog stories.  If you have the time to read thirteen increasingly lengthy books, comprising 170 chapters in total (not counting two non-chapters and one moment of déjà vu), there are certainly worse ways you could spend it.  There is more to this series than the very frivolous diversion it may at first appear to be.  However, I recognize that many of you have better things to do with your time, or believe you do at any rate, and it would be most unfortunate if for this reason you were to be deprived of the wit, wisdom, and violently funny diatribes of Lemony Snicket.  The moments that have made me laugh out loud are too numerous to reproduce here, and many of them would lose something out of context, anyway.  But there are a few passages scattered throughout the series that are so brilliant they simply take my breath away, and it is these that I have felt it necessary to share with the readers of this blog.  Enjoy this moment of vicarious fiction discovery.

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one.  We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up.  And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know.  It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is.  Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things. (from The Reptile Room)

There is a way of looking at life called "keeping things in perspective."  This simply means "making yourself feel better by comparing the things that are happening to you right now against other things that have happened at a different time, or to different people."  For instance, if you were upset about an ugly pimple on the end of your nose, you might try to feel better by keeping your pimple in perspective.  You might compare your pimple situation to that of someone who was being eaten by a bear, and when you looked in the mirror at your ugly pimple, you could say to yourself, "Well, at least I'm not being eaten by a bear."  You can see at once why keeping things in perspective rarely works very well, because it is hard to concentrate on somebody else being eaten by a bear when you are staring at your own ugly pimple.  (from The Wide Window)

If you have ever had a miserable experience, then you have probably had it said to you that you would feel better in the morning.  This, of course, is utter nonsense, because a miserable experience remains a miserable experience even on the loveliest of mornings.  For instance, if it were your birthday, and a wart-removal cream was the only present you received, someone might tell you to get a good night's sleep and wait until morning, but in the morning the tube of wart-removal cream would still be sitting there next to your uneaten birthday cake, and you would feel as miserable as ever. (from The Miserable Mill)

It is true, of course, that there is no way of knowing for sure whether or not you can trust someone, for the simple reason that circumstances change all of the time.  You might know someone for several years, for instance, and trust him completely as your friend, but circumstances could change and he could become very hungry, and before you knew it you could be boiling in a soup pot, because there is no way of knowing for sure. (from The Vile Village)

Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do.  If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well.  If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you.  But if you refuse to entertain a notion - which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea - you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.  (from The Vile Village)

You might think that being humiliated, like riding a bicycle or decoding a secret message, would get easier after you had done it a few times, but the Baudelaires had been laughed at more than a few times and it didn't make their experience in the House of Freaks easier at all.  The Baudelaire orphans knew that they weren't really a two-headed person and a wolf baby, but as they sat with their coworkers in the freaks' caravan afterward, they felt so humiliated that it was as if they were as freakish as everyone thought. (from The Carnivorous Carnival)

Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.  With the Baudelaire orphans, it was as if their grief were a very heavy object that they each took turns carrying so that they would not all be crying at once, but sometimes the object was too heavy for one of them to move without weeping, so Violet and Sunny stood next to Klaus, reminding him that this was something they could all carry together until at last they found a safe place to lay it down. (from The Carnivorous Carnival)

It is hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you. (from The Carnivorous Carnival)

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like. (from The Slippery Slope)

It is always tedious when someone says that if you don't stop crying, they will give you something to cry about, because if you are crying then you already have something to cry about, and so there is no additional reason for them to give you anything additional to cry about, thank you very much. (from The Slippery Slope)

Deciding on the right thing to do in a situation is a bit like deciding on the right thing to wear to a party.  It is easy to decide on what is wrong to wear to a party, such as deep-sea diving equipment or a pair of large pillows, but deciding what is right is much trickier. (from The Slippery Slope)

If everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke. (from The Slippery Slope)

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting. (from The Grim Grotto)

If you are considering a life of villainy - and I certainly hope that you are not - there are a few things that appear to be necessary to every villain's success.  One thing is a villainous disregard for other people, so that a villain may talk to his or her victims impolitely, ignore their pleas for mercy, and even behave violently toward them if the villain is in the mood for that sort of thing.  Another thing villains require is a villainous imagination, so that they might spend their free time dreaming up treacherous schemes in order to further their villainous careers.  Villains require a small group of villainous cohorts, who can be persuaded to serve the villain in a henchpersonal capacity.  And villains need to develop a villainous laugh, so that they may simultaneously celebrate their villainous deeds and frighten whatever nonvillainous people happen to be nearby.  A successful villain should have all of these things at his or her villainous fingertips, or else give up villainy altogether and try to lead a life of decency, integrity, and kindness, which is much more challenging and noble, if not always quite as exciting. (from The Grim Grotto)

The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world.  If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire.  You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black.  You may find that happy things are tainted with sadness, the way smoke leaves its ashen colors and scents on everything it touches.  And you may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down. (from The Grim Grotto)

People aren't either wicked or noble.  They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict. (from The Grim Grotto)

Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree, because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch, or you might simply get covered in sap, and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors, where it is harder to get a splinter. (from The Penultimate Peril)

One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. (from The Penultimate Peril)

Dewey was wrong when he said that being noble enough is all we can ask for in this world, because we can ask for much more than that.  We can ask for a second helping of pound cake, even though someone has made it quite clear that we will not get any.  We can ask for a new watercolor set, even though it will be pointed out that we never used the old one, and that all the paints dried into a crumbly mess.  We can ask for Japanese fighting fish, to keep us company in our bedroom, and we can ask for a special camera that will allow us to take photographs even in the dark, for obvious reasons, and we can ask for an extra sugar cube in our coffees in the morning and an extra pillow in our beds at night.  We can ask for justice, and we can ask for a handkerchief, and we can ask for cupcakes, and we can ask for all the soldiers in the world to lay down their weapons and join us in a rousing chorus of "Cry Me a River," if that happens to be our favorite song.  But we can also ask for something we are much more likely to get, and that is to find a person or two, somewhere in our travels, who will tell us that we are noble enough, whether it is true or not.  We can ask for someone who will say, "You are noble enough," and remind us of our good qualities when we have forgotten them, or cast them into doubt. (from The Penultimate Peril)

There are some who say that you should forgive everyone, even the people who have disappointed you immeasurably.  There are others who say you should never forgive anyone, and should stomp off in a huff no matter how many times they apologize.  Of these two philosophies, the second one is of course much more fun, but it can also grow exhausting to stomp off in a huff every time someone has disappointed you, as everyone disappoints everyone eventually, and one can't stomp off in a huff every minute of the day. (from The Penultimate Peril)

It is very difficult to make one's way in this world without being wicked at one time or another, when the world's way is so wicked to begin with. (from The Penultimate Peril)

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work.  When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all the labor that went into its words and sentences. (from The Penultimate Peril)

If you live among people, whether they are people in your family, in your school, or in your secret organization, then every moment of your life is an incident of peer pressure, and you cannot avoid it any more than a boat at sea can avoid a surrounding storm.  All day long, everyone in the world is succumbing to peer pressure, whether it is the pressure of their fourth grade peers to play dodge ball during recess or the pressure of their fellow circus performers to balance rubber balls on their noses, and if you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable.  This is a difficult trick, and most people never master it, and end up dead or uncomfortable at least once during their lives. (from The End)

Sooner or later, everyone's story has an unfortunate event or two - a schism or a death, a fire or a mutiny, the loss of a home or the destruction of a tea set. (from The End)

There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don't know and even the people you don't want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face. (from The End)

It is likely your own eyes were closed when you were born, so that you left the safe place of your mother's womb - or, if you are a seahorse, your father's yolk sac - and joined the treachery of the world without seeing exactly where you were going.  You did not yet know the people who were helping you make your way here, or the people who would shelter you as your life began, when you were even smaller and more delicate and demanding than you are now.  It seems strange that you would do such a thing, and leave yourself in the care of strangers for so long, only gradually opening your eyes to see what all the fuss was about, and yet this is the way nearly everyone comes into the world.  Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women. (from The End)

The world, no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, has never been known to succumb entirely. (from The End)

To Althea, from Prison

Seventeenth-century English poet Richard Lovelace wrote this in 1642, after he was imprisoned by order of Parliament for his support of King Charles I and the Church of England.  It is a favorite poem of mine, one which has sustained me through many difficult times when I was limited by unfavorable circumstances.

When love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fetter'd to her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swifly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free -
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.

When, like committed linnets, I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlargèd winds, that curl the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Redefining Failure

This article by Julia Baird appeared in the September 20, 2010, issue of Newsweek.  I don't particularly care for Newsweek and I don't generally post the recently-composed works of others to my blog, but Baird's thoughts on failure thrilled me, perhaps because they (and the framework in which she expresses them) provide an interesting comparison to my own.

We've spent more than 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, the character artfully sketched by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman.  Willy is, perhaps, America's consummate loser, a failure to his family.  But if you can bear with me for one moment, imagine he lived in current times, not amid the postwar prosperity of 1949.  Sure, his career was ebbing, but Willy kept a job for 38 years, he owned his house - he had just made the last mortgage payment - and had a wife and two children.  Today he'd be a survivor.

Has our view of failure softened since Willy Loman's day?  Ina a country with a level of unemployment so high that it is likely to determine the outcome of the midterm elections, and where promotions, bonuses, and retirement savings seem like relics, failure is something many of us are wrestling with right now.  But if we begin to accept that success is not a simple, upward career trajectory, this economic crisis may not just reduce the stigma of being sacked but transform the way we think of failing.  Shocking as it sounds, failure can be a good thing.

It's true, recessions can wreck self-esteem.  In a nation built on success and a gloriously entrepreneurial spirit, the prospect of failure can make people fearful - and shameful - even when it is not their fault.  "There is a crash in every generation," wrote Arthur Miller in 2005, just before he died, "sufficient to mark us with a kind of congenital fear of failure."  Miller was commenting on a wonderful book by historian Scott Sandage called Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.  Sandage believes Willy Loman was a success.  But the message of the play, he says, is that "if you are not continuing upwards, if you level off, you have to give up.  You might as well not live."

We did not always believe this.  In his book, Sandage argues that America's ideas about failure were formed between 1819 and 1893, as busts followed a series of speculative booms.  Before then, failure was not associated with individual identity.  It just happened to you.  Bankruptcy was thought to come from overreach - living excessively - not from lack of ambition.  By the end of the 19th century, says Sandage, failure had gone from being a professional mishap to "a name for a deficient self, an identity in the red."  Ralph Waldo Emerson encapsulated this in his journal in 1842: "Nobody fails who ought not to fail.  There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune."  By the middle of the last century, at the time Willy Loman was hawking his wares, Americans could not face "the possibility of defeat in one's personal life or one's work without being morally destroyed," according to sociologist David Riesman.  (Which may be one reason why the suicide rate in the Great Depression was remarkably high.)

This foolish, dangerous idea is under assault right now.  Should financial success really be a moral imperative?  Why do we think that an ordinary kind of life is of lesser worth?  Studies have found that our most potent emotional experiences come from our relationships, not careers.  Those who work in palliative care report that, on their deathbeds, most people don't regret not having clambered a rung higher, but having worked too hard, and having lost touch with friends.

And history shows that it is only when the economy is in the mud that Americans feel free to do what they want to do.  As the author J.K. Rowling said so succinctly in her 2008 address to Harvard graduates, failure can mean a "stripping away of the inessential."  When she was an impoverished single mother, she started to write her magical tales: "I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.  You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity."  This doesn't mean it is an uplifting experience to be unemployed, of course.  But it may mean we ease up on some of the judgment that springs from the false idea that a person without a job has not just hit bad luck or a poor economy - but is a failure.  Having a job is hardly the only, or best, measure of a life.

It may also mean we can accept plateaus, understand that a life has troughs we can climb out of, and that a long view is the wisest one.  A recession is a great reminder that all of us need to learn, as Samuel Beckett said, to "fail better."  Which means rethinking what we really want to do with our lives, who we want beside us, and how we measure worth.  Think of poor Willy Loman.  Today his grandchildren might be proud.

How to Bark Abroad

When I was in elementary school, a teacher informed my class one day that in France, the sound a dog makes is written as "oua-oua."  One of my classmates raised her hand to ask: If a French dog came to the United States, would it learn to bark like an American dog?  Our teacher looked straight at the poor girl and sputtered, "Are you serious?"  Oh, the joys of onomatopoeia.

The only reference I could find online to this funny piece by Leslie Lieber and Charles D. Rice, which was first published in This Week Magazine in 1953, was a claim that it had been "widely anthologized."  Perhaps it has been, but I've only ever found it once, in one of my mother's old textbooks.  I reproduce it here for your enjoyment.

Leafing through a book in the Italian language the other day, we were suddenly brought up short by the following passage: "The little dog ran through the streets of Naples barking boo-boo, boo-boo, boo-boo at all the passers-by."

We expected the next sentence to announce that this dog who spouted boo-boo had been whisked away to the nearest canine psycho ward for observation.  But when the author failed to comment on this pooch's peculiar behavior, a disconcerting thought dawned on us.

Could it be that all the world doesn't see eye-to-eye on the fact that dogs say either bow-bow or woof-woof?  Could it be that roosters cock-a-doodle-do in one country and cock-a-doodle-don't in another?  We had always taken it for granted that even though the world was divided on many issues, at least everybody agreed that cows go moo and ducks say quack-quack.

Deciding that these questions merited a survey, we immediately phoned the Italian Embassy in Washington.  Our question as to how dogs bark on the Italian peninsula caused a flurry of embarrassment at the other end of the line.  A chargé d'affaires refused point-blank to bark over the telephone.  Finally, however, an underling agreed to bark.  It came through sharp and unmistakable: boo-boo, boo-boo (spelled in Italian bu-bu).

The news that 45,000,000 Italians are convinced that their dogs bark like Bing Crosby was provocative enough to warrant a full-scale investigation of the whole international barnyard.  So for the next few days, the telephone wires between us and foreign embassies, consulates, and U.N. delegations buzzed while diplomats alternately barked, neighed, mooed, roared, and meowed into the telephone.

We must admit that our hopes for world unity have not been greatly heartened by our findings.  Take the cow, for instance.  Here's a simple-minded galoot who has gone around for centuries uttering one measly word.  If you think people see eye-to-eye on what that word is, you're sadly mistaken.  Moo is American.  The French have the piquant notion that Bossy gives out with a nasal meuh (pronounced as "mur" in demur).

To give meuh a fair test, the writers eavesdropped on a shipment of Normandy cattle being unloaded from a transatlantic freighter.  All we can say is that these cows may have been saying meuh when they left Cherbourg, but they certainly were moo-ing like mad by the time they reached Hoboken, New Jersey.

In India, a country where cows are sacred, they never say moo.  Ganges cows say moe (rhymes with "schmoe").  This is pretty hard to believe.  In fact, if America had cows who said moe, we'd probably worship them, too.

Frankly, we don't know what to make of the rooster situation.  Maybe Americans are too sleepy at four o'clock in the morning to give a hoot what these squawky alarm clocks are shouting.  But we'll tell you one thing: The rest of the world is sharply opposed to us in the cock-a-doodle-doo department.  In fact, Europe presents a more united front on roosters than on any issue since Charlemagne.  Germany, Spain, and Italy are all agreed that what this brid is trying to say is kikiriki (kee-kee-ree-kee), quiquiriqui (kee-kee-ree-kee), and chicchiricchi (keek-kee-reek-kee), respectively.  In Spanish-speaking countries, young roosters say quiquiriqui, but the old ones go quiquiriqoooo.  France deviates slightly in favor of cocorico; Japan votes for kokekkoko - all far cries from cock-a-doodle-doo.

Most of the Western world goes along with the U.S. conviction that ducks quack.  But you can't argue a Chinese out of the certainty that Cantonese ducks say ap-ap.  Ducks in Japan go around spouting ga-ga; Arabic ones - bat-bat; Rumanian - mac-mac.  If you should ever go duck hunting in Germany and hear a quack-quack, don't be too quick to shoot.  In Germany, ducks go quack-quack all right - but so do frogs.

The cats of the world present a fairly solid front.  Should you, on a trip around the globe, be suddenly awakened in the middle of the night by a miaow, it would be pretty safe to throw a shoe at the back fence.  You would hit a cat.  This holds true everywhere except in Arabic-speaking countries and Japan.  A diplomat from The Land of the Rising Sun insisted that Nipponese cats say nyah-nyah.  In Arab territory. felines express themselves under ordinary circumstances with nau-nau.

The dog is supposed to be man's best friend.  That's why it's so flabbergasting how people have managed to garble this message this poor animal has been trying to convey all these years.  Spanish dogs, for instance, seem to have some kinship with American Indians.  In their native habitat, Spanish cockers say how-how (jau-jau written in Castilian).  French poodles in Alsace sit on the banks of the Rhine barking oua-oua (wa-wa).

As one goes progressively eastward, the ways of the dog become more and more inscrutable.  The Turks are under the impression that their hounds say hov-hov, hov-hov.  Nor is there any arguing with the Russians.  Wolfhounds invented barking.  And believe it or not, dogs in Moscow gather around the Kremlin at night and bay vas-vas, vas-vas at the moon.

It is in China, however, that the canine kingdom goes completely berserk.  We checked and double-checked our information.  In short, the people of China will swear on Confucius' name that their dogs say wang-wang, wang-wang.  Personally, the vision of settling down in any easy chair after dinner with a pipe, slippers, and a dog at our feet who looks up and says wang-wang does not appeal to our sense of domesticity.

We wouldn't want to conclude without mentioning one encouraging sign on the horizon.  The Nutka Indians of Vancouver Island claim that whales say hux under normal conditions, and peu-wu when excited.  Surprisingly enough, the Russian Eskimos living on the Siberian side of the Bering Strait are in perfect accord with the capitalistic Nutka tribe on this point.

From the mouth of a whale, then, comes our brightest promise of world accord.  The whale's hux is the only fact on earth regarding animal sounds which observers accept without a quibble.  If someday we could all attune our ears to accept hux as belonging to a whale - and not to the otter, the sloth, or the Afghanistan loon - it might be the rallying point for a glorious era of peace on earth and good will between men and all the animals in the zoos the world over.

Are You a Skid-Talker?

This article by Corey Ford appeared in 1954 in Reader's Digest.  I couldn't find it online anywhere, but it deserves to be available to a new generation of readers.  Enjoy.

"You can't blame me for making a mistake," my friend Bunny said the other day.  "After all, none of us are human."  I was trying to figure that one out when she added thoughtfully, "I may be wrong but I'm not far from it."

Bunny is a skid-talker.  Skid-talk is more than a slip of the tongue.  It's a slip of the whole mind.  In effect, it puts one idea on top of another, producing a sort of mental double exposure - and my friend Bunny is a master of the art.  When her husband, a prominent Hollywood director, completed a screen epic recently she told him loyally, "I hope it goes over with a crash."  She was very enthusiastic after the preview.  "It's a great picture," she assured everyone.  "Don't miss it if you can."

That's the insidious thing about skid-talk - you're never quite sure you've heard it.  Skid-language is like a time bomb; it ticks away quietly in your subconscious, and suddenly, a few minutes later, your mind explodes with the abrupt realization that something about the remark you just heard was a trifle askew.

"If George Washington were alive today," Bunny told me once, "he'd turn over in his grave."  On another occasion she opened a debate with this challenging sentence: "For your information, let me ask you a question."

The simplest kind of skid-talk consists of mixing words.  For example:

"Too many cooks in the soup."

"From time immoral."

"There I was, left holding the jackpot."

"It was so dark you couldn't see your face in front of you."

"I want some hot-water juice and a lemon."

A devoted mother added another gem to my collection: "I'm going to have a bust made of my daughter's head."  And a stranger whom I discovered feeding pigeons in Central Park explained to me with quiet dignity: "I believe in being dumb to kind animals."

Sometimes a skid-talker will turn an entire sentence inside out so effectively that the listener can't possibly set it straight again.  I keep wondering about a statement I overheard the other day at the station: "He tells me something one morning and out the other."  And I have yet to discover what's wrong with Bunny's advice to a young married couple: "Two can live as cheaply as one, but it costs them twice as much."

Bunny is a natural skid-zophrenic.  "I'm a split personality all in one," she describes herself happily.  She lives in a handsome country place of which she says dreamily, "Isn't it pretty?  The lake comes right up to the shore."  "I went to a wonderful party," she said of a recent celebrity-studded banquet.  "Everybody in the room was there."  She made sure to thank the hostess as she departed.  "Darling, that was the best dinner I ever put in my whole mouth."

Bunny's insults are equally bewildering.  "I never liked you, and I always will," she told a prominent screen star frankly.  And a perennially young starlet is still trying to decipher Bunny's candid appraisal, "You're old enough to be my daughter."

The best skid-talk fuses two thoughts together, creating a new short cut which speeds up the language.  I remember a New Year's Eve party when Bunny became fearful that the sounds of midnight revelry might disturb the neighbors.  "Don't make so much noise," she told the celebrants.  "Remember, this isn't the only house we're in."

I had an affectionate note from Bunny recently.  "Come see us again soon," she wrote.  "We miss you almost as much as if you were here."