The other day a line from a poem came into my head, something about "peanut shells". It rattled around in there until I realized it came from some sort of sonnet. Something about - prunes?
I was sure I must have imagined it, but finally thought of an old (old) book of mine called An Almanac of Words at Play by Willard R. Espy. And there it was, the Sonnet on Stewed Prunes, (14 November), written in some sort of Scandinavian dialect.
The chances of finding it on the 'net were nil, so I was astonished when I found not only the sonnet, but about a thousand other dialect verses in a collection called The Norsk Nightingale by William F. Kirk. (This was one of those books from the Gutenberg Project, a great site which offers thousands of downloadable/public-domain books for free. Take one, please.)
I promise I'll get to the prune sonnet! I know you are in an agony of waiting (prunes will do that to you). But one other entry (The Russian-English Phrasebook, 10 December) caught my memory. You won't find this on the net anywhere, but it's classic and reminds me of the twisted phrasebook, English as She is Spoke.
This is one thing I can't cut 'n' paste, so I'll just have to get busy and transcribe it the old-fashioned way. By hand.
"Time has described The Russian-English Phrasebook as a vade mecum for Soviet visitors to the United States. Time adds that the respect in which it is held does not say much for the level of communication between one country and the other.
At a restaurant, the Russian tourist is instructed to say, 'Please give me curds, sower cream, fried chicks, pulled bread and one jellyfish.' At the doctor's, he complains of 'a poisoning, a noseache, an eyepain or quinsy'. He asks, one assumes with trepidation, 'Must I undress?'
At Saks Fifth Avenue he looks for a 'ladies' worsted-nylon swimming pants'. If he is a she, she asks the stylist at a beauty salon to 'make me a hair-dress', 'sprinkle my head,' or 'frizzle my hair'. If he is a businessman, he demands sternly, 'Whose invention is this? When was this invention patented? This is a Soviet invention.'
