Who Do I Trust?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My first instinct, which is that my first instinct can not be trusted, is usually wrong. This often puts me in any number of conundra.

The paragraph immediately above gives a clear example: My typing fingers wanted to write “conundrum,” then wanted the plural form. But what is the plural of conundrum? My all-too clever brain thought: “conundra. That’s funny. It’ll get a smile from someone.” The someone who smiled was me, which was enough to make it so, and I typed “conundra” for “conundrums.” But I go look it up and learn—thanks, World of Information!—that since conundrum does not come from a Latin root, but sounds like it might have, the proper plural is “conundrums.” Further, the word “conundra” has existed for a long, long while as a humorous, mock-educated plural form for plural problems. “Mock-educated.” That’s me, so it remains “conundra.”
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Today in History: Oct. 16

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
 
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
 
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.—a section of Oscar Wilde’s poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

Oscar Wilde was born on this date in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland.
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Today in History: Oct. 15

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

… [I]f you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.—Grace Bedell, letter to Abraham Lincoln dated October 15, 1860

Grace Bedell, an 11-year-old girl from Westfield, New York, wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln, candidate for U.S. President, on this date in 1860, in which she urged him to grow a beard. “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” she wrote.

Years later, she recounted that she saw a photo of Lincoln and was struck by the deep lines around his mouth and his high forehead and thought there up a solution.

Her letter in full, as reproduced in AbrahamLincolnOnline.org:
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