The Right Word

The Last Sentence by Maxwell Gray (1893) has a doozy of a first sentence, with no fewer than four semicolons and an em-dash.  The last sentence of The Last Sentence?  It is: "One day, perhaps, the muffled echo might cease."

For reformation read separation, for hamper read transfer, for addressing read advising, for ministers read members.  From The Law Magazine and Law Review, 1856.

From Hoenshel's Advanced Grammar, 1899.

A son of Penn wasn't a son of man, in this correction from The Messenger of Peace, 1922.

The mole in molecules.  From The Story of a Secret and the Secret of a Story by Ismay Thorn, 1887.

These rows of asterisks are a veil of winking stars from the birth of creation, relating details that the author fears to describe.  From The Mythological Zoo by Oliver Herford, 1912.

Pine/rhyme.  If a near-rhyme falls in a pine forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make an assonance of itself?  Needles of Pine: Lines Without Rhyme by Charles Wellington Stone, 1886.

From The Elements of English Grammar by George Philip Krapp, 1908.

Here's an all-consonant word (or a sentence of one-letter words?) written on a wall by spirits with a candle.  (Truly, some of the most fascinating messages are written on walls with candles.)  It translates as, "Spirits of a higher order desire to communicate with you soon."  From Modern Spiritualism by Eliab Wilkinson Capron, 1855.   See Webster's Dictionary of Improbable Words: All-Consonant and All-Vowel Words as well as One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.

And how true those words are, even today.  From A Work on English Grammar & Composition by Clark & Maynard, 1877.

You may say to-may-toe or to-mah-toe, but it's actually "Tommatoo," and here's what it means.  From The Diamond Lens and Other Stories by Fitz-James O'Brien, 1887.

From Pure Logic by William Stanley Jevons, 1864.  The text reads, "Let it be borne in mind that the letters A, B, C, &c., as well as the marks +, 0, and =, afterwards to be introduced, are in no way mysterious symbols."  However, we found some rather mysterious meanings of A, B, C for our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, and some even more mysterious meanings of &c for our book entitled Ampersand.

Three compound words for the lightheaded of society.  Madmoments, or First Verseattempts by a Bornnatural (Henry Ellison), 1839.

Have you ever communicated something and then, too late, wished you could revise it?  Joseph Smith simultaneously made a statement and a correction, bach in 1896.

For theologic read geologic, and for work read mark.  Corrections from Wilford's Microcosm, 1882.

"Whizzerinktums" is a word we've found only in Medical Pickwick, 1920s.

From English Lessons Book Two by the California State Text-Book Committee, 1903.