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.
"The adorable living past. One must wallow, just wallow in it. How can anybody be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense?" —Leonora Carrington, "Waiting," The Seventh Horse (emphasis ours)
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~ Classic Sightings ~
Portrait from A Memoir of the Life of William Livingston.
"This is not rocket science but if you draw four horizontal lines across the page equally spaced down the sheet you will magically produce five sections!" —Essential Skills for Managing in Healthcare (2010)
We tried it ... and were delighted to see that the five sections correspond to a rocket's five stages!
"It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government!' The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy." —Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
"Even liquids may be magnetic. This may surprise you, but you can easily prove it to your own satisfaction." —Raymond B. Wailes, "Fun With Magnetic Chemicals," Popular Science, April 1938
We've previously noted that even a squiggle isn’t immune to the corruption inherent in transliteration. Here's our newly updated pictorial study of how Laurence Sterne's elegant and eloquent squiggle (d)evolved through various editions of Tristram Shandy. We call it "Lost in Transliteration." We're proud to be the only place on the Internet that compares Dutch, French, Spanish, German, and English squiggles from literature.