Month: April 2017

“Good must be done in particulars”

Robert Blake quoted in Cummings Six Non-Lectures

Are you a Doubting Thomas?  Well bless you.  Here is why:

A Doubting Thomas is a skeptic who refuses to believe without direct personal experience—a reference to the Apostle Thomas, who refused to believe that the resurrected Jesus had appeared to the ten other apostles, until he could see and feel the wounds received by Jesus on the cross.

When a military officer changes out of uniform into civilian clothes, he is in “mufti.”  But a mufti is a muslim scholar.  So, why?

Mufti  has been used by the British Army since 1816 and is thought to derive from the vaguely Eastern style dressing gowns and tasselled caps worn by off-duty officers in the early 19th century. Yule and Burnell’s Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive (1886) notes that the word was “perhaps originally applied to the attire of dressing-gown, smoking-cap, and slippers, which was like the Oriental dress of the Mufti,”

And now Dorothy Parker:

“If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“I can only drink two martinis.  If I drink three, I’m under the table.  If I drink four, I’m under the host.”

“This is not a book to be cast aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”