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.
Here's a precursor to the Dial-A-Joke telephone service phenomenon. From Athens Female College's Oracle yearbook, 1912. (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)
Carrier pigeons get all the glory as postal carriers, but we learn here that "chicken mail" required a self-addressed, stamped envelope. From St. Nicholas magazine, 1900.
It's difficult for newer generations to imagine what mail delivery was like before the advent of electronic communication. Younger folks would find the old ways quite stilted, literally. From The Mysteries of the Court of London by George William MacArthur Reynolds, 1849.
Why is a jester associated with a cone? We find our answer in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Oedipus Tyrannus, in which Swellfoot says, "Sustain the cone of my untroubled brain, / That point, the emblem of a pointless nothing!" (I.i.).
Here's a precursor to the pushpin marker in Google Maps, from Millsaps College's Bobashela yearbook, 1905. (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)
