The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebowski?

in Comedy, English Language, Literature | July 29th, 2015

We live in an age of mash ups. A few years ago some malcontent came up with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Our cities are teeming with food trucks hawking Korean tacos and ramen burgers. And chess boxing is apparently a thing. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that some evil genius would merge the most quotable movie of the past 20 years, The Big Lebowski, with William Shakespeare.

The resulting book, written by Adam Bertocci, is called Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, and it does a surprisingly good job of capturing the language of the Bard while staying true to the original movie. The author reportedly wrote the first draft of the book in a single sleepless weekend. An impressive feat that the author dismisses in an interview with CNN that you can see above.

“Anybody could, given the lack of a social life,” deadpans Bertocci, “take a weekend with a movie they admired and an author that they knew well and make a similarly lengthy mash up of it.”

In Bertocci’s fevered reworking (read the first 3 scenes for free here), the Dude is recast as The Knave. His belligerent best friend is Sir Walter of Poland. The hapless Donnie is Sir Donald of Greece. Knox Harrington, Mauve’s gratingly giggly conceptual artist friend, is in this version a tapestry artist. And of course, Da Fino, the PI, who shadows the Dude in the movie, is listed simply as Brother Seamus.

But where Bertocci really shines is in his clever appropriation of Shakespearean language. The film’s copious profanity has been replaced with more Bard-worthy epithets like “rash egg” or “varlet.” The word “verily” peppers the Knave’s dialogue as the word “like” peppers the Dude’s. And when Walter waxes poetic about the rules of bowling, he does so in iambic pentameter.

To get a sense of the differences, compare the clip above from the movie with the Bard-ofied text of the same scene below.

THE KNAVE’s house. Enter THE KNAVE, carrying parcels, and BLANCHE and WOO. They fight.

BLANCHE
Whither the money, Lebowski? Faith, we are as servants to Bonnie;
promised by the lady good that thou in turn were good for’t.

WOO
Bound in honour, we must have our bond; cursed be our tribe
if we forgive thee.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the chamber-pot, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.

They insert his head into the chamber-pot.

BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cool’d
thy head; think now upon drier matters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the
money, Lebowski?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse
again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.

They again insert his head into the chamber-pot.

BLANCHE
Trifle not with the fury of two desperate men. Long has thy
wife sealed a bond with Jaques Treehorn; as blood is to blood,
surely thou owest to Jaques Treehorn in recompense.

WOO
Rise, and speak wisely, man—but hark;
I see thy rug, as woven i’the Orient,
A treasure from abroad. I like it not.
I’ll stain it thus; to deadbeats ever thus.

He stains the rug.

THE KNAVE
Sir, prithee nay!

BLANCHE
Now thou seest what happens, Lebowski, when the agreements
of honourable business stand compromised. If thou wouldst
treat money as water, flowing as the gentle rain from heaven,
why, then thou knowest water begets water; it will be a watery
grave your rug, drown’d in the weeping brook. Pray remember,
Lebowski.

THE KNAVE
Thou err’st; no man calls me Lebowski. Hear rightly, man!—for
thou hast got the wrong man. I am the Knave, man; Knave in
nature as in name.

BLANCHE
Thy name is Lebowski. Thy wife is Bonnie.

THE KNAVE
Zounds, man. Look at these unworthiest hands; no gaudy gold
profanes my little hand. I have no honour to contain the ring. I
am a bachelor in a wilderness. Behold this place; are these the
towers where one may glimpse Geoffrey, the married man? Is
this a court where mistresses of common sense are hid? Not for
me to hang my bugle in an invisible baldric, sir; I am loath to
take a wife, or she to take me until men be made of some other
mettle than earth. Hark, the lid of my chamber-pot be lifted!

Personally, I’m hoping that the Globe Theatre stages a version of this.

While you are waiting for that to happen, you can see another scene from Two Gentlemen from Lebowski above where The Knave and Sir Walter commiserate about a rug, which was besmirched by a “most miserable tide.”

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

George Orwell Blasts American Fashion Magazines (1946)

in English Language, Magazines | June 30th, 2015

While the print magazine industry as a whole has seen better days, publications dedicated to women’s fashion still go surprisingly strong. Perhaps as a result, they’ve continued to attract criticism, not least for their highly specific, often highly altered visions of the supposedly ideal body image emblazoned across their covers. One critic called it an “overbred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty,” with nearly all of the women on display “immensely elongated” with narrow hips and “slender, non-prehensile hands like those of a lizard.”

This hardly counts as a recent phenomenon; that particular criticism comes from 1946, the critic none other than Animal Farm and 1984 author George Orwell. He lodged his complaint against an “American fashion magazine which shall be nameless” in his “As I Please” column for the British Tribune. The New Republic, which subsequently ran Orwell’s broadside stateside, re-published it on their web site last year. On the magazine’s cover Orwell sees a photograph of “the usual elegant female, standing on a chair while a gray-haired, spectacled, crushed-looking man in shirtsleeves kneels at her feet” — a tailor about to take a measurement. “But to a casual glance he looks as though he were kissing the hem of the woman’s garment—not a bad symbolical picture of American civilization.”

But this wouldn’t count as an Orwellian indictment of the state of Western society without a harsh assessment of the language used, and the author of “Politics and the English Language” doesn’t neglect to make one here. In the fashion magazine Orwell finds “an extraordinary mixture of sheer lushness with clipped and sometimes very expensive technical jargon. Words like suave-mannered, custom-finished, contour-conforming, mitt-back, inner-sole, backdip, midriff, swoosh, swash, curvaceous, slenderize and pet-smooth are flung about with evident full expectation that the reader will understand them at a glance. Here are a few sample sentences taken at random”:

“A new Shimmer Sheen color that sets your hands and his head in a whirl.” “Bared and beautifully bosomy.” “Feathery-light Milliken Fleece to keep her kitten-snug!” “Others see you through a veil of sheer beauty, and they wonder why!” “An exclamation point of a dress that depends on fluid fabric for much of its drama.” “The miracle of figure flattery!” “Molds your bosom into proud feminine lines.” “Isn’t it wonderful to know that Corsets wash and wear and whittle you down… even though they weigh only four ounces!” “The distilled witchery of one woman who was forever desirable… forever beloved… Forever Amber.” And so on and so on and so on.

From what I can tell by the fashion magazines of 2015 my girlfriend leaves around the house, while the specific terminology might have changed, the brand-strewn overall wordscape of meaninglessness and obscurantism remains. Orwell surely didn’t foresee that lamentable linguistic and aesthetic situation changing any time soon — though it might surprise him that, despite it all, American civilization itself, in its characteristically unsleek, inelegant, and provisional way, has continued lumbering on.

You can read Orwell’s short essay on Fashion here.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Artist Turns 24-Volume Encyclopedia Britannica Set into a Beautifully Carved Landscape

in Art, Books, English Language, History | June 29th, 2015

Not too long ago, an older relative tried to donate the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia he’d owned since boyhood to a local charity shop, but they refused to take it.

What an ignominious end to an institution that had followed him for seven decades and twice as many moves. Like many such weighty possessions, its provenance was sentimental, a graduation gift I believe, bestowed all at once, rather than purchased piecemeal from a traveling encyclopedia salesman.

By the time I came along, its function had been reduced to the primarily decorative. Every now and then, he’d find some pretext to pull one of its many volumes from the shelf.

Did I know that Tanzania was once called Tanganyika?

And Thailand was once Siam!

The vintage Funk & Wagnalls’ many facts, maps, and illustrations were not the only aspects in need of an update. Its pre-Women’s Lib, pre-Civil Rights attitudes were shocking to the point of camp. There was unintentional comic gold in those pages. A collage artist could’ve had a ball. Witness the success of the Encyclopedia Show, an ongoing performance event in Chicago.

Multidisciplinary artist Guy Laramée takes a much more sober approach, above. Adieu, his sculptural repurposing of a 24-volume Encyclopedia Britannica feels like a memento mori for a dimly recalled ancestor of the information age.

Quoth the artist:

I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

An enemy of 3D printing and other 21st-century technological advances, Laramée employs old fashioned power tools to accomplish his beautiful, destructive vision. What’s left is a deliberate wasteland.

Kudos to filmmaker Sébastien Ventura for transcending mere documentation to deliver the befitting elegy at the top of the page. He presents us with a beautiful ruin. Whatever happened there, nature will reclaim it.

You can see more of Laramée’s work at This Is Colossal.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

F. Scott Fitzgerald Conjugates “to Cocktail,” the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb (1928)

in English Language, Food & Drink | June 25th, 2015

I regularly meet up with speaking partners who help me learn their languages in exchange for my helping them learn English. Even though they usually speak much better English already than I speak Korean, Spanish, Japanese, or what have you, I often feel like I’ve got the heavier end of the job. Why? Because the English language, for all its advantages — its global reach, the ease with which it incorporates foreign terms and neologisms, its wealth of descriptive possibility — has the major disadvantage of seldom making immediate sense.

From English’s great flexibility flows great frustration: how many times have foreign friends put up a piece of text to me — often from respected, canonical works of English literature — and demanded an explanation? They’ve usually stumbled over some obscure usage that qualifies as at least unorthodox and perhaps downright ungrammatical, but nonetheless intuitively understandable — if only to a native speaker like me. Here we have one example of just such a linguistic invention refined by no less a respected, canonical writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald: the verb “to cocktail.”

“As ‘cocktail,’ so I gather, has become a verb, it ought to be conjugated at least once,” wrote the author of The Great Gatsby in a 1928 letter to Blanche Knopf, the wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Who better to first lay out its full conjugation than the man who, as the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center puts it, “gave the Jazz Age its name”? Given that his fame “was for many years based less on his work than his personality—the society playboy, the speakeasy alcoholic whose career had ended in ‘crack-up,’ the brilliant young writer whose early literary success seemed to make his life something of a romantic idyll,” he found himself well placed to offer the language a new “taste of Roaring Twenties excess.”

And so Fitzgerald breaks it down:

Present: I cocktail, thou cocktail, we cocktail, you cocktail, they cocktail.

Imperfect: I was cocktailing.

Perfect or past definite: I cocktailed.

Past perfect: I have cocktailed.

Conditional: I might have cocktailed.

Pluperfect: I had cocktailed.

Subjunctive: I would have cocktailed.

Voluntary subjunctive: I should have cocktailed.

Preterit: I did cocktail.

If you, too, decide to teach this advanced verb to your English-learning friends, why not supplement the lesson with the audio clip just above, a reading of the letter from the Ransom Center? Language-learning, no matter the language, inevitably gets to be a grind from time to time, but varying the types of instructional media can help alleviate the inevitable headaches. And when the day’s studies end, of course, an actual cocktailing session couldn’t hurt. After all, they always say you speak a foreign language better after a drink or two.

via the great Lists of Note book

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Triumph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the English Language a New Expletive (1910)

in English Language, Poetry | June 23rd, 2015

Every period of literary history has its share of bawdy, satirical poetry, from Mesopotamia, to Rome, to the age of Jonathan Swift. Every period, it often seems, but one: The late Victorian era in England and America often appears to us like a dry, humorless time for English poetry. Two of the most renowned poets, Alfred Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are, fairly or unfairly, viewed as wordy, sentimental, and didactic. At the dawn of the new century, tough-minded modernists like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot remedied these failings, the story goes. And yet, despite their symbolist influences, these would-be radicals can seem themselves pretty conservative, turning Tennyson and Wadsworth’s affirmations of an ordered world into maudlin, and reactionary, laments over its loss.

Eliot’s work is especially characteristic of this high church disdain for social change. Eliot, writes Mental Floss, was “stodgy.” Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine writes of Eliot’s “almost papal authority in the world of literature” and his “magisterial criticism”—hardly descriptions of a revolutionary. “Looking at the severe, bespectacled face of the elderly poet on the cover of his Complete Poems and Plays,” writes Kirsch, “it is hard to imagine that he was ever young.” But young he was, and while always pedantic in the most fascinating way, Eliot was also once a writer of very bawdy verse.

He was also, unfortunately, a composer of racist verse, a fact which many readers of Eliot will not find overly surprising. Mental Floss quotes from one of those ugly early works, featuring “the racist caricature of a well-endowed ruler named ‘King Bolo.’” But it also quotes from an early poem said to contain the first use of a word that aptly describes the language in that first distasteful poem. According to Language Log, a site maintained by University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman, who source their etymology from the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “bullsh*t” originated with Eliot’s poem “The Triumph of Bullsh*t.”

Wyndham Lewis first mentions the poem, which he calls a bit of “scholarly ribaldry,” in 1915, but it was probably written in 1910. With its first three stanzas addressed to “Ladies,” and all four ending with “For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass,” the poem piles up line after rhyming line of archaic, Latinate words, undercutting their obscurantism with lowbrow crudeness. The third stanza becomes more direct, less laden with clever diction, as Eliot lays out the conflict:

Ladies who think me unduly vociferous
Amiable cabotin making a noise
That people may cry out “this stuff is too stiff for us” -
Ingenuous child with a box of new toys
Toy lions carnivorous, cannons fumiferous
Engines vaporous — all this will pass;
Quite innocent — “he only wants to make shiver us.”
For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass.

“The Triumph of Bullsh*t” functions as a bratty riposte to Eliot’s critics. (It was, in fact, originally addressed to “Critics,” then changed to “Ladies” in 1916.) Language Log questions whether Eliot “really invented bullsh*t in 1910,” since he “could hardly have aimed to shock the ‘ladies’ by naming his little poem ‘The Triumph of Bullsh*t’ if the term had not already been a commonplace vulgarity.” Perhaps. But according to Wyndham Lewis and the OED, he was the first to use the word on record. Harvard Magazine’s Kirsch calls these early poems (collected here)—and others such as the profane “Inventions of the March Hare”—the last manifestations of the “American Eliot” before he went off and became the “British Eliot” who would not deign to utter such vulgarities so freely.

The word in question never appears in the poem itself, only the title, and given the speaker’s literary chest-thumping, we might even speculate that “Bullsh*t” is a proper name, or a personification, and his triumph consists of a gleeful middle finger to Victorian decorum. It’s language only slightly more exaggerated than some of Mark Twain’s or Herman Melville’s characterizations, marking Eliot’s kinship with a particularly American sense of humor. The poet, writes Kirsch, later “buried his Americanness deep enough that it takes some digging to recognize it.” In these poems, we see it—juvenile insults, grotesque, sexualized racial caricatures, a crude defiance of tradition—and women’s opinions.… And yes, whether he invented the word or just did us the honor of popularizing it, a snide elevation of what he rightly called “bullsh*t.”

via The Paris Review

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A Creepy Cut Out Animation of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 Novel, The Unnamable

in Animation, English Language, Literature | June 8th, 2015

Morning, friend! Ready to kick off your week with a Beckettian nightmare vision?

Samuel Beckett scholar Jenny Triggs was earning a masters in Visual Communications at the Edinburgh College of Art when she created the unsettling, cut out animation for his 1953 novel, The Unnamable, above. (Her PhD exhibition, a decade later, was a multi-screen video response to Beckett’s short story, Ping.)

The wretched creatures haunting the film conjure Bosch and Gilliam, in addition to Ireland’s best known avant-garde playwright.

Triggs seem to have drawn inspiration from the nameless narrator’s physical self-assessment:

I of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. I know I am seated, my hands on my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet? I don’t know. My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed.

Despite the narrator’s effort to keep track of his parts, Triggs ensures that something will always be missing. Her characters make do with rods, bits of chess pieces or nothing at all in places where limbs should be.

Are these birth defects or some sort of wartime disability that precludes prosthetics?

One character is described as “nothing but a shapeless heap… with a wild equine eye.”

The narrator steels himself “to invent another fairy tale with heads, trunks, arms, legs and all that follows.” Meanwhile, he’s tormented by a spiritual push-me-pull-you that feels very like the one afflicting Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot:

Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Triggs describes The Unnamable as a book that begs to be read aloud, and her narrators Louise Milne and Chris Noon are deserving of praise for parsing the meandering text in such a way that it makes sense, at least atmospherically.

To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Stars Read Classic Children’s Books: Betty White, James Earl Jones, Rita Moreno & Many More

in Books, Education, English Language, K-12 | April 3rd, 2015

As if we needed the competition—am I right, parents?—of some very excellent children’s books read by some beloved stars of stage and screen, and even a former vice president. With Storyline Online, the SAG Foundation, charitable arm of the Screen Actor’s Guild, has brought together top talent for enthusiastic readings of books like William Steig’s Brave Irene, read by Al Gore, Satoshi Kitamura’s Me and My Cat, read by Elijah Wood, and Patricia Polacco’s Thank You, Mr. Falker, read by the fantastic Jane Kaczmarek. There are so many readings (28 total), I could go on… so I will. How about Betty White’s irresistible reading of Harry the Dirty Dog, just above? Or Rita Moreno reading of I Need My Monster, below, a lighthearted story about our need for darkness? Or James Earl Jones, who touchingly discusses his own childhood struggles with reading aloud, and tells the story of To Be a Drum, further down?

I won’t be able to resist showing these to my three-year-old, and if she prefers the readings of highly acclaimed actors over mine, well, I can’t say I blame her. Each video features not only the faces and voices of the actors, but also some fine animation of each storybook’s art. The purpose of the project, writes the SAG Foundation, is to “strengthen comprehension and verbal and written skills for English-language learners worldwide.” To that end, “Storyline Online is available online 24 hours a day for children, parents, and educators” with “supplemental curriculum developed by a literacy specialist.” The phrase “English-language learners” should not make you think this program is only geared toward non-native speakers. Young children in English speaking countries are still only learning the language, and there’s no better way for them than to read and be read to.

As a matter of fact, we’re all still learning—as James Earl Jones says, we need to practice, no matter how old we are: practice tuning our ears to the sounds of well-turned phrases and appreciating the delight of a story—about a dirty dog, a monster, cat, cow, or lion—unfolding. So go on, don’t worry if you don’t have children, or if they happen to be elsewhere at the moment. Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of hearing Robert Guillaume read Chih-Yuan Chen’s Guji Guji, or Annette Bening read Avi Slodovnick’s The Tooth, or… alright, just go see the full list of books and readers here… or see Storytime Online’s Youtube page for access to the full archive of videos.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Oh My God! Winston Churchill Received the First Ever Letter Containing “O.M.G.” (1917)

in English Language, History | November 27th, 2014

Winston Churchill is one of those preposterously outsized historical figures who seemed to be in the middle of every major event. Even before, as Prime Minister, he steeled the resolve of his people and faced down the Third Reich juggernaut; even before he loudly warned of the Nazi menace before it was polite to do so; even before he was pilloried in the press for the disastrous Gallipoli invasion during WWI, Churchill was a famous and controversial figure. As a young cavalry officer, he left his post in India to report on the bloody colonial campaign in the Swat Valley in present-day Pakistan. His hugely popular articles pushed the military slang word “sniper” into popular use. During the second Boer War, Churchill was not only captured at gunpoint by future South African prime minister Louis Botha but he managed to successfully escape from his POW camp. And after being pushed out of the government following Gallipoli, he returned to the military as a Lieutenant Colonel and commanded a battalion of troops in France. He also won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 and was, as we’ve recently seen, a pretty good painter too.

Add to this one more triumph: he unwittingly had a hand in shaping the speech patterns of teenaged girls some 50 years after his death. Churchill was the recipient of a missive containing the first ever usage of the oft-texted acronym “O.M.G.”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, O.M.G.’s origins can be traced back to a letter to Churchill from Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher, sent on September 9, 1917. After complaining about the state of affairs of the Navy during the war, Fisher closes with the following lame joke: “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) – Shower it on the Admiralty!!”

Churchill’s relationship with Fisher was complex. While he was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill brought Fisher out of retirement in 1911 to head the royal navy. Their relationship went south in 1915 following the failure of the Dardanelles campaign. Churchill was still roundly blamed mostly because of Fisher’s loud, public protestations. (In fact, had the naval officers pushed through the Dardanelles to Constantinople, as Churchill commanded, the war would have likely ended years earlier than it did.) Yet, much to his wife’s dismay, Churchill remained cordial enough with Fisher to exchange friendly notes.

The first online usage of O.M.G., by the way, came on a usenet forum about soap operas in 1994. Churchill does not appear to be connected to that instance.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebowski?

George Orwell Blasts American Fashion Magazines (1946)

Artist Turns 24-Volume Encyclopedia Britannica Set into a Beautifully Carved Landscape

F. Scott Fitzgerald Conjugates “to Cocktail,” the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb (1928)

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Triumph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the English Language a New Expletive (1910)

A Creepy Cut Out Animation of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 Novel, The Unnamable

Watch Stars Read Classic Children’s Books: Betty White, James Earl Jones, Rita Moreno & Many More

Oh My God! Winston Churchill Received the First Ever Letter Containing “O.M.G.” (1917)

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