Desultor

Sometimes I read about featherless bipeds and such on a Chinese news site called xinhuanet, or China View, or Xinhua Online.

I tried pronouncing “Xinhua” with my best Chinese accent and it sounded like a Frenchman saying “Chinois”. Is this a coincidence, or an etymology? Does anyone know?

I read today that West Virginia believes in “God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Robert C. Byrd”

This clears up an old mystery, which I haven’t thought of in years. My mother’s mother used to use a phrase, “He has more [x] than Carter had liver pills”. An example: my gramma had more old-time phrases in her vocabulary than Carter had liver pills.

I was always kinda like, “Huh! Who knew Jimmy Carter had liver problems! Old people sure do know some stuff!” But over the years I heard no other reference to this malady of his.

Today I’ve found out that the pills were actually a sort of patent medicine. They were sold from before her birth until, apparently, the 1960s.

She lived in different times. I miss her.

A man left his bicycle locked to a post on the sidewalk, and his helmet clipped to the handlebars.

He carefully put up a sign: “Please do not spit in this helmet.”

Returning, he found the helmet all bespitten.

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

More Johnsonian O’Brian:

‘My dear sir, I believe you have been led astray by the words master and master and commander — illogical terms, I must confess. The first is subordinate to the second. You must allow me to explain our naval ranks some time. But in any case you will never be flogged — no, no; you shall not be flogged,’ he added gazing with pure affection, and with something like awe, at so magnificent a prodigy, at an ignorance so very far beyond anything that even his wide-ranging mind had yet conceived.

(Master & Commander, p. 122)