"You're sure you don't mean ordering hotcakes like books?"  From The Addams Family, 1965.

We're honored that Cyril the Sorcerer calligraphized two lines of ours about speaking magic words: "Speak your words of magic with all the weight of saying 'I love you' to someone for the very first time. ... Speak the word as if you were presenting a lost relic from another time."  Cyril added, "Thanks Prof. Oddfellow aka Craig Conley for your artistry with ink, words and magic."

"'Must' is a word I do not recognize."  Actually, most everyone at Collinwood, like Bartleby, would prefer not to, as we proved here.  It's more like Collin-wouldn't.  From Dark Shadows episode 641.

Don Lancaster's Cheap Video Cookbook (1978) is dedicated to the Yeahbut.

"You slide the mask down the page until you see a new row of ___."

As we proved previously, it's a bizarre and wonderful phenomenon that whenever you see rows of asterisks in a book, they invariably illustrate the text either following or preceding them.

From a 1968 education monograph.

A tombstone-worthy sentence diagram: "If an inscription be put upon my tomb, it may be this."  From Manual and Diagrams to Accompany Metcalf's Grammars, 1901.

From The George Washington Ghost, 1926.

"Sweet it is to have done the thing one ought."  From Hoenshel's Complete English Grammar, 1897.

A florist innuendo joke from the 1930s, in Purple Parrot (1938).  "Do you have any pansies?"

"We drink that wine all day, till the last drop is drained up; and are lighted off to bed by the jewels in the cup."  From Manual and Diagrams to Accompany Metcalf's Grammars, 1901.

You've heard of "letters to the editor," and here they are -- a, b, c, and z.  From Avila's 1970 yearbook.  For what those individual letters actually mean, see One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.

"How far that little candle throws its beams."  From Manual and Diagrams to Accompany Metcalf's Grammars, 1901

The name "Vercingetorix Chilblains," as of this posting, delivers zero Google results.  From Purple Parrot, 1923.

"It makes a girl feel all creepy, having all that hocus pocus said over her."  From Dark Shadows episode 874.

From Harpers, 1932.  The article in question is charming and very funny.

Confession -- we, too, use "thee's" and "thou's" to deaden the buzz of living conversation.  From Lighted Pathway, 1981.

From St. Nicholas magazine, 1916.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

Wintertime in Florida: the "reason for the season" rearranges into "seashore afternoons" (with a seahorse).

From St. Nicholas, 1913.  See One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.