The fullest effect of President Shuibian's comment is achieved only if the listener or reader knows something about the decade-long Trojan War, chronicled in the Greek poet Homer's epic, The Iliad.
Priam and Hecuba were king and queen of Troy and their son Hector its bravest defender. In an effort to win the war, the Greeks sent a huge wooden horse to the Trojans as an offering to Athena. Inside the horse were hiding a host of soldiers. The priest Laocoon tried to warn the Trojans to beware of Greeks bearing gifts but was killed by two giant serpents. Later, the Greek soldiers emerged from the horse by night and overthrew Troy.
Allusions like the "Trojan pandas" allow us to experience an idea on two levels at once by linking what we are reading or hearing with what we have read or heard in the past. Allusions enhance the present through experiences that glow through time. Our lives are considerably enriched when we are able to identify such references because allusions play an important role in creating impressions and emotions.
Not long ago, I received the following satirical virus warning in my bag of e-mail:
"Hey Hector,
"This was forwarded to me by Cassandra -- it looks legit. Please distribute to Priam, Hecuba, and your 99 siblings.
Thanks, Laocoon
"WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!" "If you receive a gift in the shape of a large wooden horse, do not download it! It is extremely destructive and will overwrite your entire city!!!
"The 'gift' is disguised as a large wooden horse about two stories tall. It tends to show up outside the city gates and appears to be abandoned. Do not let it through the gates! It contains hardware that is incompatible with Trojan programming, including a crowd of heavily armed Greek warriors that will destroy your army, sack your town, and kill your women and children. If you have already received such a gift, do not open it! Take it back out of the city unopened and set fire to it by the beach."
"Forward this message to everyone you know!"
Well, please forward this message to everyone you know. The more you learn about the references and allusions that knit us together as a civilization, the deeper you will live -- and the more you will laugh. Knowledge of the Trojan horse is the pass-key to appreciating a host of cartoons and captions:
© Richard Lederer
In Navajo culture, there is something called the First Laugh Ceremony. Tradition dictates that each Navajo baby is kept on a cradle board until he or she laughs for the first time. Then the tribe throws a celebration in honor of the child's first laugh, which is considered to be his or her birth as a social being.
We are not only Homo sapiens, the creature who thinks. We are Homo guffawus, the creature who laughs.
Did you know that babies are born with certain natural instincts? Neurologists have discovered that the reason babies cry right after they are born is that they instinctively understand the magnitude of the national debt they are going to be saddled with.
Just kidding. But I'm completely serious when I report the fact that five-year-olds laugh naturally about 250 times a day. How sad it is that as we age, we almost inevitably gain girth and lose mirth. Many of us don't laugh 250 times a month!
"Man is the only animal who blushes - or needs to," wrote Mark Twain. He could have added, "Man is the only animal that truly laughs. Or needs to." How solemn can God be if He endowed us with the priceless gift of laugher?
We all need to laugh. Recent studies have shown that he or she who laughs lasts. Norman Cousins, who used laughter to conquer a debilitating disease, writes "Illness is not a laughing matter. Perhaps it ought to be. Laughter moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectation . . . . It has always seemed to me that hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors."
"A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures," winks an Irish proverb. Laughter stimulates the circulation, tones the muscles, energizes the lungs and respiratory system, stimulates endorphins in the immune system and provides superb aerobic exercise. In Make 'Em Laugh, Stanford University professor William Fry explains, "When laughter gets to the point where it is called 'convulsive,' almost every muscle in the body is involved."
Laughter is also an elixir for the mind. Tests administered before and after humor therapy reveal a reduction of stress and depression and a heightened sense of well-being and creativity. More and more, science is discovering that it hurts only when we don't laugh. "Laughter is to life what shock absorbers are to automobiles. It won't take the potholes out of the road, but it sure makes the ride smoother," observes Barbara Johnson. "The most wasted of all days is one without laughter," adds the magician of poetry, e e cummings.
According to Robert Provine, author of Laughter, A Scientific Investigation, we laugh also to promote social bonding-- a trigger that appears to be genetically determined. His studies document that we actually laugh more frequently during the course of conversation at things that aren't funny to show agreement or approval, than we do to voice our amusement at something that tickles our funny bone.
"Humor is not a trick," writes author and A Prarie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor. "Humor is a presence in the world-- like grace-- and shines on everybody." The profound act of laughter is a special blessing to us who live in the long, dark shadow of that day terrorism shook our land. The late and beloved humorist Erma Bombeck, whose column "At Wit's End" was read by millions, speaks to us today: "Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage." And the also late and beloved humorist Richard Armour observed, "Comedy, I think, is as high an art as tragedy. It is as important to make people laugh as to make people cry."
As bread is the staff of life, laughter is its nectar. Go forth and practice random acts of laughter. Ripples of laughter will wash the brightest pearls onto the shores of your life. Laughter makes life the merriest of go-rounds and will keep you from getting dizzy. In a recent AARP interview, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was asked, "And what is the single greatest thing that sustains you?"
His answer: "A sense of humor. And I laugh at myself."
Employ Annan's wisdom. Be sure to laugh at yourself. Others are laughing at you, so why not you, too?
© Richard Lederer
Being a lexicon based on historical principles, the Oxford English Dictionary is an undertaking that attempts to record the birth and history of every printed word in the language from the time of King Alfred, in the ninth century, and how their forms and meanings have changed over time to the current date of publication.
It took 71 years to complete the original 12 tombstone-size volume edition and 29 years to update it in an integrated 22,000 page, 20-volume second edition that consists of nearly 60 million words. Reduced-type one-and two-volume editions (nine or four pages compacted into each sheet) are now available, complete with magnifying glass accessory.
I urge you to learn more about this magnificent tribute to our collective love of the English language in Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press), published this month. Here is how Winchester describes the grand plan of the OED:
"No, nothing that had been made so far was good enough. What was needed was a brand-new dictionary. A dictionary of the English language in its totality. From a fresh start, from a tabula rasa, there should be constructed now a wholly new dictionary that would give, in essence and in fact, the meaning of everything.In The Meaning of Everything, you will meet and get to know the OED's editors - from the brilliant but tubercular Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the poet Samuel; to the colorful, boisterous Frederick James Furnivall, who left the project in a shambles; and focusing on James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent half a century bringing the dictionary to fruition - "the man who would make all the difference." Such was Murray's passion for the aborning dictionary that before the Oxford University delegates added three subeditors to the staff, he was working 90 hours a week caught in the web of words."Moreover, the book must be sure to present an elegantly written and carefully thought out definition, an exquisite summation of every single sense and meaning of every word ever known. It had to explain, in detail and as comprehensively as could be ascertained, every single word's etymology. And it had to offer up a full-length illustrated biography of every word."
Volunteer readers from all over the world participated in the massive research, sending in to the staff more than 6 million slips of paper with recorded usages. These were housed in an ugly corrugated iron shed that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium - the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it. Murray lined the Scriptorium with pigeonholes, but there were never enough to hold the mountain of hand-written slips. They arrived in parcels, sacks (a dead rat in one, a live mouse with family in another), a baby's bassinet and a bottomless hamper.
Among the legion of volunteer readers was Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit who obsessively devoted at least four hours every day for 20 years to the OED. Another devotee was Dr. William Chester Minor, a Civil War veteran locked away in an Asylum for the Criminally Lunatics. Minor was the madman in Winchester's 1998 chronicle, The Professor and the Madman, and the author, in his current book, recapitulates Minor's journey from homicidal madness to ultimate redemption.
Author Anthony Burgess calls the OED "as much a poem as the source of poems, and hence the longest epic ever written." What the pyramids were to ancient Egyptian civilization, the Oxford English Dictionary is to English language scholarship -- the most impressive collective achievement of our civilization. The difference is that inside the OED pulses something alive, growing and evolving.
© Richard Lederer
Are you confounded by commas, addled by apostrophes, and queasy about quotation marks? Do you believe that a bracket is just support for a wall shelf, a dash is something you make for the bathroom, and a colon and semicolon are large and small intestines? If so, I'm pleased to tell you I'm about to be the father of a bouncing baby about mastering punctuation.
In Comma Sense: A Fun-damental Guide to Punctuation (St. Martin's Press), humorist John Shore and I present what we hope will be a hilarious portraits of American icons and connect each one to a mark of punctuation. We hope that while you're laughing your head off over the weird but instructional examples, you'll master everything you need to know about punctuation through simple, clear, and right-on-the-mark rules.
Punctuation can make an enormous difference in meaning. Which dog has the upper paw?: "A clever dog knows its master." "A clever dog knows it's master." The second sentence, of course. Why do so many people insert a squiggle before the s in the possessive its?
Which speaker beheld a monster?: "I saw a man eating lobster." "I saw a man-eating lobster."
Note the effect of the missing apostrophe in this sentence: "The butler stood in the doorway and called the guests names." And in this classified ad: "Note the havoc wreaked by a missing apostrophe in this ad: "WANTED: Guitar for college student to learn to play, classical non-electric, also piano to replace daughters lost in fire."
Note the startling result of the absence of hyphens in this headline: FATHER TO BE STABBED TO DEATH IN STREET.
Behold the effect of the missing serial comma (the one that should go before the "and") in this book dedication - "To my parents, the Pope and Mother Teresa." And in this sentence - "At summer camp I missed my dog, my little brother, the odor of my dad's pipe and my boyfriend."
Now have a look at the difference between these two love notes:
My Dear Pat,The power's in the punctuation, baby! The first letter is a clear (albeit clunky) profession of undying affection; the second is sure to sweep Pat onto her feet. The only thing separating one document from the other is, of course, punctuation, which can mean the difference between a second date and a restraining order.
The dinner we shared the other night -- it was absolutely lovely! Not in my wildest dreams could I ever imagine anyone as perfect as you are. Could you -- if only for a moment - think of our being together forever? What a cruel joke to have you come into my life only to leave again; it would be heaven denied. The possibility of seeing you again makes me giddy with joy. I face the time we are apart with great sadness.
John
P.S.: I would like to tell you that I love you. I can't stop thinking that you are one of the prettiest women on earth.My Dear,
Pat the dinner we shared the other night. It was absolutely lovely -- not! In my wildest dreams, could I ever imagine anyone? As perfect as you are, could you -- if only for a moment -- think? Of our being together forever: what a cruel joke! To have you come into my life only to leave again: it would be heaven! Denied the possibility of seeing you again makes me giddy. With joy I face the time we are apart.
With great "sadness,"
John
P.S.: I would like to tell you that I love you. I can't. Stop thinking that you are one of the prettiest women on earth.
You can obtain inscribed and signed copies of Comma Sense directly from me by following the instructions in the book section of this site.
© Richard Lederer
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