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, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, 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.
Thirty-three years before Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries," in which he likened a far-off train to a crawling caterpillar, this caterpillar train appeared in Punch (1865).
"You may find it hard to believe, but the last thing I want is to inherit a title tainted by the suspicion that I murdered the previous holder to gain it."
—Shirlee Busbee, Rapture Becomes Her(2011)
"For every magician who plucks a coin or card out of thin air, some cohort has to send a coin or card back into that air!" —Larry Thornton, "A Brief Dissertation Plucked out of Thin Air"
"Everywhere, all the time, a barrage of scrambled images assaults us -- disjointed scenes, outlandish mergers. ... But by now we have little trouble reading or understanding this new visual lingo. ... We have already had our homework done for us by Picasso." —Life, "The Power of Picasso," Dec. 27 1968
One hundred years earlier, a proto-Picasso debuted in Punch (1860).
"We can't see peels of thunder because they're the same color as the sky, so they blend in." —Jeff Hawkins
Not that we didn't trust him, but we sought to corroborate Mr. Hawkins' assertion. In Frances Hodgson Burnett's T. Tembarom (1913), we find verification that purplish-gray is "the color of thunder" (p. 273).