 |
| The Huff (left) and a Gloat near a patch of I-Told-You-So. |
 |
| The Hoodwink on a spray of Ragamuffin. |
 |
| Left to right: the Thesaurus, the Stereopticon, and the Hexameter. The tree is a Sacroiliac. |
Thurber, of course. These are from his A New Natural History, which, along with a whole lot of other good stuff . . .
. . .can be found in
Alarms and Diversions, one of his best collections. You can
download it for free, in PDF, EPub, HTML and a bunch of other
formats, here.
5 comments:
Very cool. Thurber was a genius.
Coincidently, I have been working on a rabbit design for the last couple of days based on seeing a lot of rabbits in my yard this year. My design is a nice folk art sort of leaping rabbit, not a death from above killer rabbit like Thurber drew. Perhaps I need to steal from a better source, eh?
I looked up hexameter because I really liked that critter. This is what I read "Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet."
As a carpenter who uses American units, I know six feet equals seventy two inches. There is a reason I did not do well in English class and it was this poetical stuff that killed me.
Speaking of poetic feet -- two of the other critters in A New Natural History are the Spondee and the Trochee.
Good find. Go to main page, T, Thurber, and pick "Let Your Mind Alone!" self help send-ups.
If you knew morse code as a kid, poetic feet are easy to memorize for the test.
DISTA
DAMNU
remember those two. One's the first letter of the meter name, the other's the morse code for the accents.
I haven't checked that I've remembered it all correctly but I bet I have. It's a mnemonic, or as a girl wrote in a work memorandum once, pneumonic. She remembered there was something weird about it.
Post a Comment