Anguished English And The Hunt For Sources

Introduction

Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language (1987) is a best-selling compilation of bloopers by renowned verbivore Dr Richard Lederer. For people new to blunder books, Anguished English provides a good introduction to the genre. For the bloopers connoisseur, the originality in Anguished English comes mainly from Lederer's selection, arrangement, and editing of the bloopers, and from Bill Thompson's 30 or so original drawings.

Anguished English includes a broad range of English language blunders, including chapters on student howlers from English classes, history, and science; accidentally humorous newspaper advertisements; funny newspaper headlines; and Irish bulls.

Of these kinds of blunders, I know more about the history of compiling student howlers than the other kinds; so I will focus my comments on the chapters of Anguished English that contain student bloopers.

The Matter of Sources

Anguished English has received popular and critical acclaim — and deservedly so. But one customer's review has prompted me to look more closely at the matter of sources.

"The biggest drawback to the book is that other than for Lederer's short ... introductions to each chapter, the book is basically a series of lists, ordered by topic, with no indication of source ... [I]t would have added to his efforts if he had described the process of accumulating his trove of malapropisms, informing us about the source, rather than just laying them out, naked on the ice, as it were. That would have given the reader a bit more to chew on than the warmed over fare offered here, some of which seem too perfect to be true."

Anguished English

The World According to Student Bloopers

One of the most popular parts of Anguished English is a section called "The World According to Student Bloopers". This section has taken-on a life of its own, with several versions appearing on the Internet and virally through email.

In The World According to Student Bloopers, Lederer has skilfully pasted together student bloopers into an alternative history of the world. In doing so, he has added a new layer of humour to the howlers. (Lederer is not the first to string together students' howlers into a humorous chronology. Karl Reginald Cramp did the same thing for The "Roar" Material of History: Schoolboy Howlers Collected and Arranged from Very Original Sources (1946)).

I have started tracing the sources of some of the howlers that make-up The World According to Student Bloopers. I present the results below.

In the following version of The World According to Student Bloopers, I have inserted references [in brackets like these] to books in which the relevant student bloopers were published pre-Anguished English.

My version of Anguished English is the 1990 reprint; my versions of the Boners books are the early 1930s editions, not modern reprints.

Please refer to the following key and note that "Alexander Abingdon" is a pseudonym invented by the books' editors and publishers at Viking Press. (The first two of the following Boners books were famously illustrated by Dr Seuss.)

• B = Alexander Abingdon, Boners (1931)
• MB = Alexander Abingdon, More Boners (1931)
• SMB = Alexander Abingdon, Still More Boners (1931)
• PS = Amsel Greene, Pullet Surprises (1969)

The World According to Student Bloopers

"Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies [MB, 40], and they all wrote in hydraulics [SMB, 30]. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot [PS, 24]. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere [B, 46], so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation [B, 55]. 

The pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain [B, 50]. The Egyptians built the pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube [SMB, 85]. 

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses [B, 38], Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked "Am I my brother's son?"

God asked Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Issac, stole his brother's birthmark [MB, 59]. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it [B, 37]. One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites [B, 41].

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients [MB, 15]. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments [PS, 25].

David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines [B, 35].

Later came Job, who had one trouble after another. Eventually, he lost all his cattle and all his children and had to go live alone with his wife in the desert [B, 33].

The Greeks were a highly sculptured people [MB, 46], and without them we wouldn't have history [SMB, 37]. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns — corinthian, ironic, and dorc — and built the Apocalypse. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth [Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 73].

One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in The Illiad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity [B, 23], in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name [B, 20].

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock [B, 99]. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath [SMB, 89].

The government of Athens was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands [MB, 17]. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were doing [MB, 17]. When they fought the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men [SMB, 37].

Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.

Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul [B, 73]. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king [B, 73]. Dying, he gasped out the words "Tee hee, Brutus" [SMB, 74]. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them [MB, 17].

Rome came to have too many luxuries and baths [SMB, 37]. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair [SMB, 98].  They took two baths in two days, and that's the cause of the fall of Rome [SMB, 37]. Today Rome is full of fallen arches.

Then came the Middle Ages, when everyone was middle aged. King Alfred conquered the Dames [MB, 22]. King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery with brave knights on prancing horses and beautiful women. King Harold mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings [SMB, 41]. Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw [B, 74]. And victims of the blue-bonnet plague grew boobs on their necks.  Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense [MB, 23].

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote literature [B, 28]. During this time, people put on morality plays about ghosts, goblins, virgins, and other mythical creatures [B, 26]. Another story was about William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head [MB, 19].

The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences [B, 75]. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull [B, 75]. It was the painter Donatello's interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance.

The government of England was a limited mockery [MB, 33]. From the womb of Henry VIII Protestantism was born. He found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee [B, 77].

Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success [B, 79]. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted "hurrah." Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible [MB, 48]. Another important invention was the circulation of blood [SMB, 38]. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking [B, 81].  And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday [SMB, 11]. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays [MB, 48]. He lived in Windsor with his merry wives [B, 20], writing tragedies, comedies, and errors [B, 20].

In one of Shakespeare's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. His mind is filled with the filth of incestuous sheets which he pours over every time he sees his mother. In another play, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. The proof that the witches in Macbeth were supernatural is that no one could eat what they cooked [SMB, 72].

The clown in As You Like It is named Touchdown [SMB, 71], and Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet [SMB, 71].

Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained [B, 26].

During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic [MB, 33]. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.

Later, the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and this was called the Pilgrim's Progress [B, 84].  The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea [SMB, 45]. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps [MB, 34]. During the War, the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm [MB, 51]. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards [B, 57] and declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand" [MB, 80]. Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead [MB, 34].

George Washington married Martha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country [MB, 35]. His farewell address was Mount Vernon.

Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility [MB, 35]. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat [SMB, 46]. He said, "In onion there is strength."

Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope [SMB, 47]. He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation.

On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show [SMB, 48]. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy. Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees [B, 64]. 

Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between, he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large.

Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes [B, 98]. Then the Spanish gorrilas came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon's flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't have any children [SMB, 40].

The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West [B, 47]. Queen Victoria was the longest queen [B, 82]. She sat on a thorn for 63 years [SMB, 12]. Her reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species [B, 56]. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by an anahist, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history."

British Influences

Lederer introduces The World According to Student Bloopers by saying at page 10 of Anguished English that he has pasted together "genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eighth grade through college level".

This statement suggests that Lederer might not have known that the American Boners books of the 1930s, published by Viking Press, were preceded by a series of British Howlers books by Cecil Hunt (published by Ernest Benn).

Several student bloopers published in the American Boners books were published first in the British counterparts. Examples are:

"The climate of Bombay is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 119; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 10).

"Certain areas of Egypt are cultivated by irritation" (Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 41; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 10).

"The Pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 126; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 10).

"The first book in the Bible is Guinessis" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 31; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 11).

"Job had one trouble after another. He lost all his cattle and all his children and then he had to go live alone with his wife in the desert" (Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 10; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 11).

"Homer wrote The Oddity" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 97; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 12).

"Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 103; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 12).

"Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 108; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 12).

"Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 46; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 13).

"Joan of Arc was cannonised by Bernard Shaw" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 94; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 13).

"Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 32; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 14).

"Henry had an abbess on his knee, which made walking difficult" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 45; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 14).

"Shakespeare lived at Windsor with his merry wives" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 104; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 15).

"Shakespeare wrote tragedies, comedies and errors" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 103; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 15).

"Milton wrote Paradise Lost, then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 96; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 15).

"In 1620 the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, which is known as the Pilgrim's Progress" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 45; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 16).

"Gravity was discovered by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 82; Richard Lederer, AAnguished English (1987) 18).

"During the Napoleonic Wars crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 65; Richard Lederer, Anguished English , 20).

"The sun never sets on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the west" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 119; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 20).

"Queen Victoria was the longest queen on the throne" (Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 35; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 20).

In the foreword to Howlers (1928), Cecil Hunt writes at page 5 that these howlers, or at least "the most delightful ones", were sent to him by "teachers who have vouched for their accuracy and have quoted the school, form, and date of examination".

Some of the howlers in The World According to Student Bloopers trace even further back than 1928. Several of the howlers in the Boners and Howlers books seem to have come from a magazine called The University Correspondent published by London University in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Every year, starting in 1892, The University Correspondent would call for the best examination howlers and award a prize to the best submission. Some of the howlers in Lederer's The World According to Student Bloopers, and in the Boners and Howlers books, appear in editions of The University Correspondent. Examples are:

"Parts of Egypt are cultivated by irritation" (The University Correspondent, 1 Jan 1929, 7; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 10).

"The Pyramids are a range of mountains separating France from Spain" (The University Correspondent, 1 Jan 1914, 10; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 10).

"The first book in the Bible is Guinessis" (The University Correspondent, 1 Jan 1926, 7; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 11).

"Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences" (The University Correspondent, 1 Jan 1919, 10; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 14).

"In 1620 the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, which is known as the Pilgrim's Progress" (The University Correspondent, 1 Jan 1924, 9; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 16).

"Gravity was discovered by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees" (The University Correspondent, 18 Dec 1897, 803; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 18).

"The sun never sets on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the west" (The University Correspondent, 2 Jan 1928, 7) and "The sun never sets on British possessions because the sun sets in the west and our colonies are in the north, south, and east" (The University Correspondent, 15 Dec 1903, 374). (Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 20.)

So at least some of the student bloopers in The World According to Student Bloopers would have come not from "student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States" as Richard Lederer states at page 10 of Anguished English (1987), but from bloopers collected by teachers in the United Kingdom and other countries — in January 1930, Cecil Hunt wrote that his Fresh Howlers included howlers from Italy, France, Malta, Jamaica, Sarawak, South Africa, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries (Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 5).

Other sections of Anguished English have evidently also been influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by early blunder books. The three sources mentioned above — the Boners books by Viking Press, the Howlers books by Cecil Hunt, and the London University's The University Correspondent — published the same or similar howlers as several of those listed in other sections of Anguished English .

For example, Lederer's "Student Bloopers Win Pullet Surprises" include the following howlers from the Boners books, to give just three examples:

"A virgin forest is a place where the hand of man has never set foot" (Alexander Abingdon, Still More Boners (1931) 27; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 5).

"The Gorgons had long snakes in their hair. They looked like women, only more horrible" (Alexander Abingdon, Boners (1931) 7; a longer version of the quote appears in The University Correspondent, 1 Jan 1927, 9 and in Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 98; a shorter version appears in Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 79). (Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 7.)

"The difference between a king and a president is that a king is the son of his father, but a president isn't" (Alexander Abingdon, More Boners (1931) 33; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 7).

And these appear in Hunt's Howlers books:

"The bowels are a, e, i, o, u and sometimes w and y" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 74; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 6).

"A passive verb is when the subject is the sufferer, as 'I am loved'" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 114; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 6).

"Zanzibar is noted for its monkeys. The British Governor lives there" (Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 44; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 7).

"To collect fumes of sulphur, hold a deacon over a flame in a test tube" (Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 54; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 7).

"When you breath you inspire. When you do not breathe you expire." (Cecil Hunt, Fresh Howlers (1930) 63; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 8).

"Necessity is the mother of convention" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 112; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 9).

Lederer's section on "Laffing at Misspellings" also includes quotes published in the Boners books and Howlers books, such as:

"Geometry teaches us to bisex angels" (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 86; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 162).

"They gave the Duke of Wellington a lovely funeral. It took six men to carry the beer. (Cecil Hunt, Howlers (1928) 41; Richard Lederer, Anguished English (1987) 162).

Other Influences

Anguished English's other possible influences include various works from the prolific author Denys Parsons. For example, Lederer's quote at page 5 that "It is bad manners to break your bread and roll in your soup" might have been an amalgam of these two bloopers from Parsons' Even More Fun-tastic (1972) at page 95 and WW Scott's Breaks (1931) at page 80:

"It is not considered polite to tear bits off your beard and put them in your soup."

"Never crumble your bread or roll in the soup."

Another possible influence is Juliet Lowell, especially through her Dear Sir series. For example, Lowell's book Dear Sir or Madam (1946) at page 14 includes this letter quoted by Lederer in Anguished English at page 68:

"I am very much annoyed to find that you have branded my son illiterate. This is a dirty lie as I was married a week before he was born."

And this one is on page 78 of Dear Sir or Madam (1946), quoted in Anguished English at page 69:

"You have changed my little boy to a girl. Will this make a difference?"

The earliest source I could find for a howler quoted in Anguished English is from 1871. In the chapter "Stop the Presses!", Lederer quotes at page 81:

"Yesterday we mistakenly reported that a talk was given by a battle-scared hero. We apologize for the error. We obviously meant that the talk was given by a bottle-scarred hero."

This is a variation of quotes from Charles Bombaugh, The Book of Blunders (1871) 203 and Marshall Brown, Bulls and Blunders (1894) 16.

Reflections

At the end of Anguished English, Lederer thanks:

"my students, relatives, friends, and hundreds of my readers and listeners who, I trust, will be pleased to find their submissions given national exposure ... To those intrepid verbivores who have so divinely gathered bloopers into folk photocopies, books, magazine squibs, and newspaper articles, I offer my profoundest thanks".

To satisfy Jean Pouliot's curiosity, and my own, we can put some names to these intrepid verbivores. They include Cecil Hunt, Viking Press, and the editors of The University Correspondent.

Lederer might not have known that some of the bloopers he compiled had been published many years earlier. His readers and listeners might have sent him the bloopers believing them to be recent. A lot of the other kinds of bloopers collected in Anguished English, such as the funny newspaper headlines, funny signs, and mistranslations, might indeed have come from contemporary, primary sources. We do not know these matters because Lederer has not cited his sources.

But hardly any blunders books cite sources. On one hand, this is a pity. Citing sources helps in satisfying the reader of the howlers' authenticity. In the case of Anguished English, citing sources might have also helped in explaining the Britishness of some of the humour in what is an American book. For modern blooper books, citing sources also shows readers that the book is not simply a compilation of quotes collected from the Internet.

On the other hand, citing sources can take up a lot of the book's space. Citations can distract the reader, and take some of the fun out of the bloopers. The solution for my own book of bloopers, Funny English Errors and Insights (2010), has been to number the bloopers in the book and post the sources on this website once the book is published. This option was not available to Lederer when he published Anguished English in 1987.

In any event, the student bloopers that Anguished English may have borrowed from the early blunder books are, to the best of my knowledge, all in the public domain. As secondary sources go, these early blunder books are the best — that is, the funniest and the most authentic — compilations of bloopers that you can get.

It is much harder than you might think to find enough modern examples of student howlers that are actually funny. This may explain why some more recent compilations of student bloopers have not succeeded anything like Anguished English. By contrast, the bestselling blunder books of the 1920s and 1930s have been delighting readers for decades.

Overall, I want to celebrate Lederer's choice of sources, or his unconscious use of them, as the case may be. It is a good thing that some old and delightfully funny howlers have found a new and almost unanimously appreciative audience.