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Quicksilver Moments (Pat Conroy)

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

—Pat Conroy
—from The Prince of Tides

Wellerism

Inside cover of Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster

Wellerism /WEL-ər-izm/. noun. An expression combining an obvious statement—usually a well-known cliche, quotation or proverb—followed by a facetious addition. A canonical example: “I see, said the blind man,” which exists in myriad forms. Named after Sam Weller, a comic character in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, prone to making this kind of statement, for example, “There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’.” Unlike the “sarcastic interrogatives”explored here last week, Wellerisms have been clearly documented in other languages, such as in the Dutch, “Alles met mate, zei de kleermaker en hij sloeg zijn vrouw met de el,” which translates into English as, “everything should be done measuredly, said the tailor and he hit his wife with a ruler.”
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Links: July 23, 2017

  1. This is personal: Please Stop Calling Suicide Victims “Selfish” or “Weak”. || See also: Artificial intelligence can now predict suicide with remarkable accuracy.

  2. Is the death of reading threatening the soul in a “quiet war?”

  3. Does (counter-intuitively to me) announcing your plans make you less motivated to accomplish them? Yes and no. || See also, the original study (PDF).

  4. Whoa! Dan Harmon is bringing Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens Of Titan to TV. In case you don’t know who Dan Harmon is, he created Community and co-created Adult Swim and Rick and Morty. If you don’t know who Kurt Vonnegut is—

  5. On Swintec’s clear typewriters, the only kind allowed in many prisons, and their role in prison life.

  6. No one could see the colour blue until modern times? || Embedded within that story, a fascinating Radiolab story: Why Isn’t the Sky Blue? || And within that: Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language. I dare you not to think of the the dress.

  7. Take a moment to savor the amazing winners of the BigPicture Photography Competition, a gallery bookended by two of my favorite wildlife pictures ever. [Thanks, Reader B.!]

  8. Find those elusive songs from TV and movies using Tunefind.

  9. Following up on a story noted here a few weeks ago: Salvador Dalí’s Remains Exhumed, Revealing A Perfectly Arranged Mustache.

  10. Today in 1829, William Austin Burt is granted U.S. patent No. 5581X for his “typographer”, called therein, “the first practical typewriting machine.” This wasn’t really true…Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri had invented one nearly 30 years before for his blind lover the Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, of which some typewritten pages survived.

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