New Year’s Day – Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.–Mark Twain
The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.–W.H. Auden
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.–Brooks Atkinson
May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.–Joey Adams
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
–Alfred, Lord Tennyson
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.–T.S. Eliot
Archives for January 1, 2008
Other Matters: The Language–Speaking Ill
Hugh Massingberd, the longtime obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London, died on Christmas day at the age of sixty. From 1986 to 1994, Massingberd converted the dullest page in the paper into one so entertaining that his obits were collected in six anthologies. In her obituary of Massingberd in today’s New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote that he spoke “frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead.” She provided translations of some of his terms.
To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:
“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.
“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.
“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.
“A man of simple tastes”: A complete vulgarian.
“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.
“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.
“Relished physical contact”: A sadist.
“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.
To read all of the Massingberd obituary, go here.