[Allen Tice]

A verbalizing coat-rack. What will we see next!

[Roger Slater]

Is that how it comes across? I intended only that the coat-rack be addressed, not that it be seen as responding!

[Allen Tice]

Oh, I got the picture I think you intended, don't worry. Sorry.

[John Whitworth]

You know, George, I cannot in my wildset imaginings, see the word condoms in the works of Mrs Woolf. Mind you, I cannot see the word cornflakes either..Now there's a challenge for you.

[George Simmers]

Maybe the correct word for the period would be prophylactics?

[Allen Tice]

French letters (not postcards) would be the words, me hearties.

I'm thinking of changing my contrib (which I sent in) to read "that impertinence" instead of "that importunity". After all, we're considering a cozy troika of E. Heminghaw, Alice Toklas, and Gertrude Stein. Should I resend it that way? Which is better?

Can you revise previously emailed entries?

Thus:

Hemingway: "Our moustaches are so good together. Look, mine moved, and then yours moved."

Gertrude: "I feed you all my cookies and nacreous buttons. Pigeon strut toward the sun arose! And it more arose! And it be rosing higher! Oh Alice, what's Oakland to that impertinence of Ernest?"

[Don Taylor]

Jocasta-- "Come back to bed, Ed honey."

dt

[John Whitworth]

Yes, Allen. Just email it again with the instruction that this version is to replace the other. I think. I think I have done this. Ah, John, but have you won AFTER doing it?

French letters is indeed le mot juste. Les mots...

[basil ransome-davies]

Gresham Mortimer had taken it all too fastidiously, as he ruefully reflected he was wont to do, that the summons to the Contessa's bedchamber signalled, again, that she had fallen prey to a recurrent indisposition, that being 'out of sorts' she felt unable to confront the inevitable dérangement – normally borne with exemplary fortitude – of rising to welcome visitors, yet he had not expected to find her so radically, indeed to a degree which bestowed on the expression its ultimate meaning, en déshabille. He was, in short, 'taken aback' by the vision now presenting itself to his innocent unpreparedness, which, though in outline familiar from his earnest odyssey among European galleries, he associated principally with the allegories of painting and sculpture; to face it 'point blank' was as devastating to his ingrained sense of propriety as the words she uttered with an unabashed urgency – 'give it to me, big boy!'

(Henry James)

[Allen Tice]

Could you work in "hot boy"? Hautbois? Hotboy?


John, I shall say no more, say no more.