From Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie:

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Thirty years before this Don Luigi had sent in his bill to Christopher with a demand for immediate payment and a threat of legal proceedings. Whereupon Christopher had paid the bill and told Don Luigi that he would never enter his café again as long as the owner of it was alive. This vow nothing would induce him to break. Duncan Maxwell had begged Don Luigi to try the effect of peremptory bills on some of the other residents in the hope that they too would make solemn vows never to darken his doors again.

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Scudamore’s humour was a mixture of American pawkiness and international pedantry. An elfin ponderousness is the paradox that describes it best.

[New restaurant concept: International House of Pedantry!]

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He had a beard so long and so thick that he was never upset by the hoops of the little Sirenisi being driven between his legs, for it served as a sort of cow-catcher, and it was generally believed that he used it as a most efficacious mosquito-net. Scudamore had a theory that he had already been dead for some years and that it was only his beard and nails which were still alive, it being a well-known fact that the beard and nails continue to grow long after death.

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Gigi had once read on a tinned tongue that it was hermetically sealed, and he had spent so much time trying to open that tin that thenceforward /ermeticamente/ became his adverb of extreme degree. For a thing to be hermetically impossible implied something beyond even the omnipotence of the Almighty.