Friday, April 25, 2008

Friday Funnies: Mark Twain

Is it Friday again already? I Googled "Twain on writing" and found all manner of delights, including a book I now want to own:

Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing.

I also found a whole alphabetized website that is a great little adventure for an afternoon:

www.twainquotes.com .

I thought to look up "British" and found a page on "Englishmen":

Wherever they can stick a name so that it shall glorify anything pertaining to England, there they stick it. You never hear of an Englishman speak of the Hawaiian Islands--no, he calls them the Sandwich Islands; Cook discovered them second-hand, by following a Spanish chart three hundred years old, which is still in the British Museum, and named them for some one-horse Earl of Sandwich, that nobody had heard of before, and hasn't since--a man that probably never achieved any work that was really gorgeous during his earthly mission, excepting his invention for confining a slice of ham between two slices of bread in such a manner as to enable even the least gifted of our race to eat bread and meat at the same time, without being bewildered by too elaborate a conjunction of ideas.

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