CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
Printed collections of Forgotten Wisdom diagrams are available: Volume I from Lulu and Volumes II, III and IV from Amazon. Selected posters are also available via Zazzle.
"There ought to be a book written and put in the hands of every child, enjoining the kind treatment of animals." —Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal and Western Lancet, 1859, p. 111
* A manual for typographers published in 1917 acknowledged that there are many beautiful forms of the ampersand, yet it forbade their use in "ordinary book work." Extraordinary books are another matter. Our lavishly illustrated Ampersand opus explores the history and pictography of the most common coordinating conjunction.
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
The three sad eyes of the ellipses... by Gary Barwin
for Craig Conley
The three sad eyes of the ellipses. Something is lost. Three islands. Small songs of in a sea that prefers to forget the land. The mouth opens and begins to speak; there is nothing that can be said. One world followed by another and then another. Tiny black specks at the end of the galaxy. A three frame animation where nothing appears to happen, though perhaps down on the miniscule surface, there are different kinds of silences, memories, things forgotten or left. The trailing off, the continuing on. Small black stones in the river of speech. Three tunnels waiting for the three trains of past, present, and somewhere in between. Dots lost and drifting from i’s, j’s, or umlauts, floating between words in the cloudbound grammar above the teleological cities of the sentence. Notes from a song with neither pitch nor rhythm. The dark matter music between things. Three brother molecules in a subatomic folktale, though it is unclear which is the youngest, most foolish, most likely to wed the princess. An echo of the full stop at the end of the sentence. Things end, but their ripples mark the page with their tiny fingerprints. Here I am, though what I was is forgotten, disappeared, or unclear. I grip the cliff of the page, holding on until you get here ready to imagine what I might have been.
I misunderstood a warning sign that said "Hot cars kill dogs." I thought it was referring to a Corvette (fast cars run over animals), or perhaps a Jaguar (for a play on the food chain).
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
The original lowbrow: Alexander Wedderburn, 1st Earl of Rosslyn (Lord Loughborough).
Though prima facie the opposite of highbrow, lowbrow is actually a corruption of Lord Loughborough (Alexander Wedderburn, 1st Earl of Rosslyn), notorious for being so dull that he caused dullness in others.
Clue: This is according to literary humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.
Answer:MasterCard. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
Citation: Personal correspondence, Aug. 25, 2007. Jonathan adds:
"And what a triumph for "MasterCard" to be even funnier than a word with an "ee" sound in it! "MasterCard" sounds like someone has dropped an empty corrugated* box down a flight of stairs.
* Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour. In this rebus-style puzzle, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes. Try to guess the exact hue of each. Roll your mouse over the colored boxes to reveal the missing words. Click the colored boxes to learn more about each hue. Special thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research.
Folklore warns against eating oysters in months without "R's" (namely May through August). Those oyster-free months constitute the "dog days of summer," which is ironic given that "R is the dog's letter" (Ben Jonson, 1636).
"Making a book creates a midnight in which synaptic lightning illuminates our skull’s planetarium. It lets us peek into how we think we might work. . . .
"A book is a delivery system for a hallucinogen you ingest though the eyes and digest in the mind. A book allows one imagination to taste the inside of another.”
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
Which windy phenomenon is funnier: a hat blowing off or an umbrella turning inside out?
Clue: This is according to Fordham University’s Thought magazine
Answer:an umbrella. “An umbrella turning inside out is funnier than a hat blowing off because an umbrella is made to be opened, to change its shape when its owner wills.” (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
Citation: Fordham University, Thought (Spring 1952), p. 59
We popularly say that ASAP is an acronym meaning "as soon as possible." But ASAP comes to us from the Greek storyteller ÆSAP, whose brief fables can be read on the quick.
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
* A manual for typographers published in 1917 acknowledged that there are many beautiful forms of the ampersand, yet it forbade their use in "ordinary book work." Extraordinary books are another matter. Our lavishly illustrated Ampersand opus explores the history and pictography of the most common coordinating conjunction.
The blogger at Grammar Tales recently encountered our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary at the University of Toronto library: "My first thought was that this must be a very short book."
—John Donne, ‘Communitie,’ 1633; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009
* Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour. In this rebus-style puzzle, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes. Try to guess the exact hue of each. Roll your mouse over the colored boxes to reveal the missing words. Click the colored boxes to learn more about each hue. Special thanks to Paul Dean for his colorful research.
"Somebody should write a book on 'Debunking the Debunkers,' somebody, that is, aside from the Freudians." —Ralph Tyler Flewelling, The Personalist, 1947, p. 435.
True or False: Vegetables are “as funny now as they have ever been, especially leeks”?
Clue: This is according to comic writer Terry Pratchett
Answer:False. Vegetables are “not as funny as they used so be, especially leeks.” (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
Citation: Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2001), p. 106.
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
Printed collections of Forgotten Wisdom diagrams are available: Volume I from Lulu and Volumes II, III and IV from Amazon. Selected posters are also available via Zazzle.
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
![The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine](/weblog/images/covers/ghost-scanning-machine.png)
