OED3: printed, or not?

’Tis sad news, indeed: the Oxford English Dictionary will probably cease printed versions and will make the upcoming 3rd edition online only.

The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year, Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, told the Sunday Times. Asked if he thought the third edition would be printed, he said: I don’t think so.

Almost one third of a million entries were contained in the second version of the OED, published in 1989 across 20 volumes.

The next full edition is still estimated to be more than a decade away from completion; only 28 per cent has been finished to date.

It’s sad, in that the world will miss a beautifully bound piece of work. No more will we be able to heft a volume and see several pages of definitions and references for just a single word. The OED is the most researched word reference there is.

But it’s not just a large tome: it’s a large set of large tomes. It takes up a great deal of shelf space, it’s very expensive (Amazon sells it for $1300, but they’re out of stock as I write this), and it takes them more than 30 years to put out a new edition, once they decide to get started. It’s sad that it probably won’t be printed, but it’s not surprising.

With an online version, users can access entries quickly and easily from their computers — and these days, that means iPads, iPhones, BlackBerry devices, and others of that sort — untethered from the couple-of-dozen weighty volumes, however nicely bound they be. Updates can go in incrementally, so every time you access what’s there, you get the latest version, with whatever updates they’ve put in. And cross-references are right there, simple and quick. When puggle sends you to echidna, which sends you to monotreme, you can flip from one to another with a click — you don’t have to run to the shelf to pick up a different volume.

Of course, even the online version is expensive. £240 is about $370, and that’s the annual fee — four years of that, and you’ve paid more than what Amazon wants for the printed second edition. Of course, you’re also paying for the convenience of having it online, as I note above. But ten or twenty years of twenty-pound-a-month subscription fees really add up.

The official word of Oxford University Press is that another printed version is still possible. I’m sure they want to keep their options open as they test the waters with this announcement. And they’ll still print the other, smaller editions, which abound: the Compact OED, the Concise OED, the Shorter OED, the collegiate version, the pocket version, and so on.

It really is a sign of the times.

Books, using all the senses

In 1999, the radio show This American Life broadcast an episode called The Book that Changed Your Life. The episode was re-aired a while ago, and I recently got to listening to the podcast of it — I save them on my BlackBerry, and I have a bunch yet to hear.

One of the segments is about a guy called Roger, a construction worker who decided to collect — at great expense — journals of and books about the explorers Lewis and Clark. In case you listen to the audio stream, the segment starts about 26 minutes into it. About 31 minutes in, Roger has this to say:

When you get something, 18th, 19th century... you open up the book, and you look at the discoloration of the pages, and the smell, and that’s when you really feel the true energy of history. Not what you would read, but you’ve got more senses than just your eyes. You can smell, you can feel, you can touch.

Indeed: this is what I miss when I read things electronically, and it’s why I still like books, and will always like books.

Books are more than the words that are in them. Roger talks about more than eyes, but it’s eyes as well, seeing the book as a book, looking at the cover and the pages. There’s the slightly musty smell of an old library, with aging, worn paper. You feel the pages as you turn them, and hear the shuffling and crinkling of the pages, not as a digital sound effect, but as something real, there in front of you. For taste, well, unless you’re 18 months old and everything goes in your mouth, we’ll have to add a cup of tea to sip while you read. I guess we could do that with digital, as well as with paper.

I hope we never lose the books. There are advantages to digital versions, when you want to search, or when you need to keep a lot of verbal material in a small footprint. But nothing can replace sitting in a comfortable chair in a well lit corner of a dimly lit room... and seeing, feeling, smelling, and hearing a real book.

Book: IBM and the Holocaust

My former IBM colleague and friend Nathaniel Borenstein has recently left IBM. He’s also recently read a book that he’d reserved for when he was no longer working for the company: IBM and the Holocaust.

The book talks about the part IBM played in supplying Hitler’s regime with technology and machines, which helped enable the rounding up of the Jews in Germany, and the transportation of them to concentration camps. What Nathaniel writes in his blog is disturbing enough; I’ll have to read the book myself to see the full extent of it.

As I read what Nathaniel wrote, I thought, How awful the company’s leaders were then, to participate in that. Surely they knew what Hitler was doing, and how IBM’s technology was helping him do it!

But, I added, mentally, that was then, and that was Thomas Watson, Sr, and much has changed since. It’s a different company now, and we can’t blame the current leaders for what happened in the 1930s.

Nathaniel had similar thoughts, writing, But the war has been over for 65 years. Nearly everyone involved in IBM’s shameful activities is dead, of course. Why should we care today? What does it have to do with today’s IBM? He goes on to explain:

It must still have some relevance, because IBM is still stonewalling. Mr. Black dug through archives and libraries throughout the world, but over a hundred requests for information from IBM were denied. Typical responses claimed that IBM has no information relevant to that era — this from a company with legendary archives and full time archivists on staff! I can only conclude that today’s IBM is actively hiding something — something even worse than what I’ve summarized above.

He asks IBM to hold itself accountable, to be open about what happened, to set free the information and records about those years. Go read what he has to say, read his suggestions; I agree with them all.

Nathaniel has confidence that the IBM of today is a good company and will, eventually, be willing to be open about this. So do I. What do my readers who are still working for IBM think? Are you willing to work toward that?

He wrote the book

Teachers, especially at the college level, have been using their own books for textbooks for a long time, and that’s a fine thing. In college, we’d often want to have a particular professor for a class because “he wrote the book.” But now, textbook publisher McMillan will be introducing changeable textbooks that allow teachers not only to reorganize the material that’s there, but actually to rewrite sections as they want them to be. It will let them rewrite the book.

In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.

“Readers,” the Times asks, “can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?”

The good side of this, of course, is that teachers will be able to correct real errors, update changing information, and point students to new studies and results, without having to wait for a new edition of the book to come out. But, really, teachers have been doing that forever, by providing adjuvant material to accompany the textbook — in my school days, it was a few mimeographed sheets, or lecture material that students were expected to note themselves.

“There’s an error in the textbook,” we might have been told, or “We have new information since the textbook was printed.” That worked for us, and it made the process quite visible.

But the answer to the Times’ question is that with this mechanism, changes can be made quietly, without an opportunity for review, without pointing out what the changes were.

Creationist science teachers can undermine their science classes by altering the sections about evolution.

Racist or sexist history teachers can alter history, minimizing the contributions of certain people.

Teachers can change information simply because they disagree with it, perhaps because of political, social, or religious ideology.

Even when the changes are intended to correct facts, it’s harder to identify the corrections, and, so, harder to determine whether the corrections are themselves actually correct.

This technology certainly has potential. I wonder, though, how it will turn out to be used — and abused — and whether it will work in practice.

I guess we’ll just have to see. I hope someone will be watching very closely.

Fact, or fiction?

We generally take it for granted, when we read books, that non-fiction is... well... non-fiction. We expect memoirs, autobiographies, to present the author-subject in a positive light, of course, and perhaps to skip a few of the less flattering details — most writers aren’t terribly eager to highlight their own failings — and truth is often open to interpretation. But basic facts are assumed to be correct; it’s where non-fiction starts.

Once in a while, though, someone crosses the line between “spin” and outright falsification. Occasionally, someone lies. In recent years, James Frey made up part of the story of his recovery from drug addiction, and Margaret Seltzer, in her memoir of growing up as a foster-child amid gangs and drugs went farther, making up the whole thing — including her racial background.

And now, a nice old man, a Holocaust survivor named Herman Rosenblat, turns out to have made up some key details about how he met his wife at the Buchenwald concentration camp:

A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.

And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.

This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.

What’s the real problem, though? It’s entertainment — can’t it be OK to add a few “facts” that didn’t really happen? Doesn’t every family have stories that are told through the years as true, though everyone knows they didn’t really happen that way?

I have three points on this.

Point one: This stuff is supposed to be non-fiction, and that matters. Readers expect to be able to trust what’s there, and they deserve to get it. It’s a violation of readers’ trust to make up details just because they sound nice.

Point two: Readers give more latitude to non-fiction, especially to autobiographical things, in terms of writing quality. If we want to read about someone’s life — say, the trials of someone trying to shake a drug habit or get away from a youth around gangs — we’re willing to accept dry or less-than-polished prose. If you want us to read a novel, you’d better be a better writer. The standards are higher for that, and it’s not fair to readers to fail to meet them and to justify it with a false claim of “reality”.

Point three, relating to this particular case: Stories dealing with the Holocaust are especially touchy. We really have to know, when we’re reading about something that emotional to that many people, what’s truth and what’s a yarn. Fiction based on the Holocaust is certainly fair, but it needs to be clear that it’s fiction.

The general point is that you have to be honest with your readers.

Keeping books on the shelves

The American Library Association keeps track of complaints from the public, and annually release a list of the most frequently challenged books. Challenges? Complaints? What? OK, here’s what that means:

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received a total of 420 challenges last year. A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness. According to Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the number of challenges reflects only incidents reported, and for each reported, four or five remain unreported.

And what do “content and appropriateness” mean? Oh, c’mon, do you really have to ask? It’s the usual stuff: references to sex, homosexuality, bad language, ethnic slurs, violence. Fair enough, we know there are people out there who don’t like all that, and so those people should certainly not read books that have it.

What’s scary, though, is that even in 2007, people still think it’s appropriate to make formal complaints and to demand the removal of the books from library shelves, so no one else can read them either. And that one of them is reasonably likely to become the Vice President of the United States.

And this week is Banned Book Week, a week meant to highlight the problem and to light a fire under the free thinkers among us. Those of us who, whether or not we personally want to read specific books, insist that all books be allowed a place, must make sure our voices are as loud as those who would burn them.

But here: would we want to read these particular books? Oh, yes, look at the list; this it not fringe material, not quasi-porn nor doggerel that few would actually want to pick up. We’re talking about mainstream reading, including classics and wildly popular current writings. Have a look at the ten most challenged books from 2000 to 2005, and the 100 most challenged of the 1990s.The lists include these:

• the “Harry Potter” series (witchcraft!)
• “Of Mice and Men”, John Steinbeck’s classic
• Maya Angelou’s acclaimed “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
• “Huckleberry Finn”, with references to slavery and a bad word for slaves
• “The Color Purple”
• “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Margaret Atwood’s excellent portrayal of the subjugation of women in a totalitarian theocracy
• “To Kill a Mockingbird”, on my list of three indispensable books, the story of a white southern lawyer defending an unjustly accused black man

...along with many, many others, “Beloved”, “Flowers for Algernon”, “Brave New World”, “James and the Giant Peach”, “Lord of the Flies”. And, yes, “Heather Has Two Mommies”, of course.

How sad it is that the beliefs and morality of some are teetering on such a brink that they’re threatened by books that challenge them... so threatened that they seek to hide those books and prevent anyone from reading them.

I almost have pity for them, but that I find the concept so vile.

[Hat tip to Les, at Stupid Evil Bastard.]

“Church Meets State in the Oval Office”

My local NPR station has been begging[1] has had their membership drive going, so I’ve had to listen to other things on the way to and from work lately.[2] I’ve used the opportunity to catch up on some backed-up podcasts from NPR and WNYC, which have been collecting on my BlackBerry.[3]

I’ve just listened to this Fresh Air interview from 28 January, with Randall Balmer, author of God in the White House:

In his new book, God in the White House, Randall Balmer explores the interplay between religion and politics in America, tracking the “religionization” of the Oval Office across the last half of the 20th century. How did faith become such an important criteria for the presidency?

Mr Balmer, himself raised as a Christian, takes a somewhat different view of the interaction between politics and religion than I would — looking also, for example, at how the politics affects the religion — and getting a different view is always an interesting thing.

He attributes the rise of the conservative Christian right as a political entity not to issues such as abortion and gay rights, but to the issue of tax-exempt status for organizations with practices of racial discrimination, specifically calling out the case of Bob Jones University in the mid‘70s. He also points out that the flap about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism simply wasn’t an issue in 1968, when his father, George Romney, was running for president — and that matches my recollection, as I don’t remember even hearing, in 1968, that Mr Romney was a Mormon.

Listen to it. It’s interesting.

There was one little bit about how Mr Balmer said something that I found amusing. Here’s my transcription of a sentence from 15 minutes or so into the audio, when he talks about Richard Nixon, a professed Quaker, and how he handled the conflicts of the presidency and the Vietnam war:

I think it’d be very hard, and I certainly haven’t run across any historian prepared to argue that Nixon was a deeply pious and devout man whose piety, whose understanding of the faith was reflected in his policies as president.

When I listened to that, I had to mentally rewind it and re-analyze it. The sentence is complex enough that the lead-in, which negates the rest, doesn’t tend to stay with one. So without care, one can easily be left with the impression that he said that Mr Nixon was deeply pious — exactly the opposite of Mr Balmer’s point.

In speaking, especially, avoid making your sentences too complicated. People can’t usually go back and “re-read” them.
 

---

[1] I say that to be silly, but I do support them every year, and I include my employer’s matching contribution. You should too — many people think NPR gets lots of government funding, but they don’t; they rely on endowments, sponsorships, and contributions “from listeners like you.”

[2] Even when one supports their need to solicit contributions, one can’t really drive around listening to it, now, can one?

[3] I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the 17 This American Life programs that are waiting....

You Must Read This

In the warehouse of blog lists that’ve usurped and perverted the term “meme”, there’re many items that ask you to list favourite books. Most of them, though, just have you throw the book’s name out there, with little or no explanation of why you like it.

On the other side of things is NPR’s series, “You Must Read This”. In each item in the series an author talks about one book, which that author considers indispensible, and there’s time for the essayist to go into the “why”.

I’m going to cross the two, mostly because I can’t pick one indispensible book, but have chosen three that everyone should read, each for a different reason. And there’s room here to talk about the reasons.

You must read these:

Don Quixote

Alonso Quixano, enamored of stories of knights and their quests, imagines himself as the knight errant Don Quixote de la Mancha, and his imagination turns into delusion as we follow Don Quixote’s adventures.

Miguel de Cervantes wrote the book in two parts, published ten years apart — in 1605 and 1615. Cervantes was roughly contemporary with Shakespeare, so the original was not only in Spanish, but in turn-of-the-17th-century Spanish. I find that the most enjoyable translations take that into account, and render the text in something of Elizabethan-era English. Do look for that, and for a “full” version, not a pocket edition (it should be on the order of 1000 pages or more).

What is on the surface a story of the fantasies of a delusional man is, at a lower level, satirical commentary on the society of the time. There’s more clever insight here, than just fanciful silliness. And Cervantes was a master of a well-turned phrase: he gives us almost as many common phrases as did Shakespeare, phrases such as, “time out of mind,” “too much of a good thing,” “there’s the devil and all to pay,” and “I begin to smell a rat.”

I consider Don Quixote to be the single best book prior to the modern era. I wish I could read it in the original Spanish, but I’ve delighted in the English translations.

Catch 22

Staying with satire, we have Joseph Heller’s story of Captain Yossarian, a U.S. bombardier in World War II Italy, and an extensive array of other characters around him, from Milo Minderbinder to Major Major Major Major to General Scheisskopf. Through it all, Yossarian is the only relatively normal one in a very nutty story-world, and is essentially set up as our narrator, introducing us to everyone else and leading us through the swamp of craziness.

The title comes from this: while the bomber crews can theoretically go home after a fashion, there’s a catch. The number of missions one has to fly in order to go home keeps being raised before anyone actually attains the threshold, so the only way out is to be declared crazy. Wanting to go home, though, is a sign of mental stability. You can go home if you’re crazy, but if you want to go home you’re not crazy and you have to stay. That’s the catch; that’s Catch 22.

Of course, the story is merciless about ridiculing the military, and bureaucracy in general, but it doesn’t stop there. It also pokes fun at our general tendencies to rigidity and tunnel vision, at our social interactions, at our notion of sanity, at our religious beliefs, and, well, pretty much at everything else, as well.

I’m about to read this one again; I can never tire of it. (The movie, by the way, is amusing (hey, screenplay by Buck Henry, directed by Mike Nichols, Alan Arkin as Yossarian, what could be bad?), but just a shadow of a semblance of a snippet of the book. Read the book.)

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee gives us a compelling story about the defense of a black man in 1930s Alabama, who is falsely accused of a vicious attack on a white woman. A young girl called “Scout” narrates for us, and tells us how her father, Atticus Finch, takes on the defense of Tom Robinson, alienating most of the white townfolk in the process.

This is a story of fighting for justice and principles, regardless of the cost. It’s a story of how we can be blinded by our prejudices. It’s a story of how even when we can’t win against them, we can have a piece of victory for having stood for what we know is right.

There’s no satire here. To Kill a Mockingbird looks the evil of racism in the deep south of the time, straight in the eye. Telling it from the perspective of a young girl gives it a different quality, and adds impact. It’s another book I can read again and again, and that I re-read every few years. And, while the movie is excellent, with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the book is simply essential reading.

[A side note here. In 2001, NPR reported that at the same time as the Chicago Public Library decided to put the book in its “One Book, One Chicago” program, the school board in Muskogee, Oklahoma, chose to remove it from their required reading list (but not ban it). The largely African-American community was uncomfortable requiring the reading of a book that uses a particular racial epithet with which we’re all unfortunately familiar. The book’s overall anti-racism message was not enough to make a difference there.]

“I mean it, Yossarian. You’ll have to keep on your toes every minute of every day. They’ll bend heaven and earth to catch you.”

“I’ll keep on my toes every minute.”

“You’ll have to jump.”

“I’ll jump.”

“Jump!” Major Danby cried.

Yossarian jumped. Nately’s whore was hiding just outside the door. The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”

—— the final lines from “Catch 22”

Who was Dewey Decimal?

A recent New York Times article tells us about a library that's abandoned the Dewey Decimal System. Some old-time librarians decry the move, but, well, I think they're being a bit stuffed in the shirt.

The system always puzzled me, from the time I learned it as a child. It depends upon a somewhat arbitrary classification of books into categories and subcategories, irrespective of the books' authors. The categories are defined in advance, making the system inflexible as new genres and sub-genres appear (and that's resulted in several updates to the system over time, requiring all libraries to change accordingly). Further, if the classification of the books is done by different groups in isolation, the same book may be put into different categories in different areas.

The Library of Congress system is better standardized, and makes more sense, but it's still not terribly accessible to the average library user — and that is, after all, who the library is serving.

In the time before computers, the Dewey Decimal System and the accompanying card catalogue made it possible to find any book. If you were looking for a book on, say, Civil War history, you could go to that subcategory section. You could cross-reference authors and titles in the card catalogue. And that all worked for many years.

But, look: we have computers now. There's no need for static cross-referencing in a card catalogue, and many libraries have already eschewed the card catalogue and provided the same function and much more with computer stations. If the computer can tell you where to find the books, is there really value, any more, in shelving them according to an antiquated system that few people understand?

Good riddance to the Dewey Decimal System. Thank you, Mr Dewey, for giving us something that served us for a long time. It's time, now, though, for that to be set aside in favour of arrangements that better attract browsers and readers.

Reading Harry

On Friday's Morning Edition, NPR tells us about the Chinese industry of fake books, including Harry Potter books. And we're not talking, here, about unauthorized editions — we're talking about completely fake books, where the story is entirely different from the one in the real book. They knock out a fake version, with a made-up story, in far less time than it takes to do a proper translation, and they sell them and make big money. They even did a fake version of Bill Clinton's biography.

But now, as the fifth movie is out and the seventh book is imminent, the New York times tell us that the conventional wisdom that Harry Potter is getting kids to read is wrong, at least on the whole:

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.

And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

[...]

Young people are less inclined to read for pleasure as they move into their teenage years for a variety of reasons, educators say. Some of these are trends of long standing (older children inevitably become more socially active, spend more time on reading-for-school or simply find other sources of entertainment other than books), and some are of more recent vintage (the multiplying menagerie of high-tech gizmos that compete for their attention, from iPods to Wii consoles). What parents and others hoped was that the phenomenal success of the Potter books would blunt these trends, perhaps even creating a generation of lifelong readers in their wake.

All that said, the key to me is in the first sentence of the second paragraph: “And so it has, for many children.” We have a tendency to look for universal or unqualified success, and then to devalue lesser levels of success. As I see it, striving for perfection is fine, but rejecting anything less than perfection hurts us. If the Harry Potter books — or any others — are getting even a few kids to read more, well, that's a good thing, worthy of praise and of news stories.

Now, when am I going to get to the cinema for movie #5?

Read me a story?

Recent mentions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the comments have prompted me to talk about this: an adult friend and I used to read books aloud to each other. Reading aloud isn't just for children's stories.

We started doing this when, as a Christmas gift, I gave her the “Hitchhiker's Guide” trilogy, and one day in January, when we were otherwise idle, I just picked up the first book and started reading it. After that, we read many books to each other over the years, with neither of us doing it all, but loosely taking it in turns. “Loosely”, because we'd skip a turn if the situation warranted; for instance, she couldn't read in a moving car and I could, so we made sure it was my “turn” to read when we had a car trip coming, and she'd drive while I read. It made the drive seem so much shorter.

It also wasn't so much one of us reading “to the other”, as it was one of us reading “to us”. Except for the “Hitchhiker's Guide” series, we chose books that neither of us had read before, and so the books were new experiences for us both, and the reader, as well as the listener, was seeing it for the first time. This does add some challenge for the reader, since the material is unfamiliar. We both tried to use intonation appropriate to what was being read, and I, in particular, good with voices, liked to put different voices and accents to the different characters. Cohen would get a New York Jewish accent, O'Rourke would have a bit of an Irish brogue, and so on. But many was the time I'd have Cohen and Shapiro arguing in their way, and O'Rourke would intercede with, “Vill you shtop yellink, you'll vake the dead!” Oops. Begorrah. Or I'd shout, “Oh, just leave me alone!, ” Um. “...she said quietly as she left the room.”

Perhaps the most interesting challenge is reading things with adult vocabularies. We often don't realize how we take words for granted when we read them silently, but when we read aloud, especially when we do it with adult, not children's material, we encounter many words that we know very well... but that we've never said aloud before. This often lead to the “Is that how you pronounce it?” interruption as we'd look the word up in a dictionary. Sometimes I was right. Sometimes my friend was right. Sometimes we were both right, with a word that has more than one acceptable pronunciation. Sometimes, though rarely, we'd find we were both wrong. And once in a while the one of us who was wrong would refuse to accept the verdict of The Dictionary, and would continue to pronounce the word wrong, thank you very much.

It does take longer to read a book this way; with limited time available, Michener or Eco can take months to finish. And it's not something we could do, say, on a plane flight. But it is such a delightful way to read a book.

Anguish Languish

Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

That's the opening paragraph from "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", the first "furry tell" in the 1956 book Anguish Languish, by Howard Chace.

The tongue-in-cheek premise, according to Mr Chace, is this, from the Introduction:

The experiments described above, and hundreds of similar ones conducted by SPAL [the Society for the Promotion of the Anguish Languish] show that an unbelievable number of English words, regardless of their usual meanings, can be substituted quite satisfactorily for others. When all the words in a given passage of English have been so replaced, the passage keeps its original meaning, but all the words have acquired new ones. A word that has received a new meaning has become a wart, and when all the words in the passage have become warts, the passage is no longer English; it's Anguish.

The stories therein are meant to be read aloud, as Arthur Godfrey did on his show when the book came out, and they can be quite hilarious fun. Apart from "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", "Center Alley", and "Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers", we find nursery rhymes ("noisier rams"), such as

Sinker sucker socks pants
Apocryphal awry
Foreign turnkey blank boards
Bagged inner pyre

...and songs ("thongs"), such as "Freyer Jerker" and "Hormone Derange". Some bits are hard to figure out when you look at them, but just say them aloud, with the right emphasis, and they'll usually reveal themselves.

Anguish Languish is long out of print, though used copies can be found. It's a rarity, and the prices for the used copies are high; a search on abebooks.com has them starting at USD 125. Alternatively, one can find several web sites that have the book transcribed in its entirety, as the copyright has long expired.

If you like words, as I do, check it out, and be amused.

MURAL: Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls stopper torque wet strainers.