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By Branko Collin

The Distributed Proofreaders have a long running forum topic called “Most amusing (or astonishing) text you’ve come across.” It is a no-holds-barred list of things that proofreaders thought remarkable; from the very horrible to the horribly funny.

What follows is a short selection of quotations that survived the ages to resurface in Project Gutenberg, selected for no other reason than that they amused and astonished both me and the proofreader who posted them. These are all recent examples, so the books may not have been published by PG yet.

From the Dictionary of Faiths and Folk-Lore:

“Armstrong, in his “History of Minorca,” says, “During the carnival, the ladies amuse themselves in throwing oranges at their lovers: and he who has received one of these on his eye, or has a tooth beat out by it, is convinced, from that moment, that he is a high favourite with the fair one who has done him so much honour. Sometimes a good hand-full of flour is thrown full in one’s eyes, which gives the utmost satisfaction, and is a favour that is quickly followed by others of a less trifling nature.”"

The litany of the French common soldier, according to Kathleen Burke in The White Road to Verdun:

“Of two things one is certain: either you’re mobilised or you’re not mobilised. If you’re not mobilised, there is no need to worry; if you are mobilised, of two things one is certain: either you’re behind the lines or you’re on the front. If you’re behind the lines, there is no need to worry; if you’re on the front, of two things one is certain: either you’re resting in a safe place or you’re exposed to danger. If you’re resting in a safe place, there is no need to worry; if you’re exposed to danger, of two things one is certain: either you’re wounded or you’re not wounded. If you’re not wounded, there is no need to worry; if you are wounded, of two things one is certain: either you’re wounded seriously or you’re wounded slightly. If you’re wounded slightly, there is no need to worry; if you’re wounded seriously, of two things one is certain: either you recover or you die. If you recover, there is no need to worry; if you die, you can’t worry.”

Excerpts from A Finnish Grammar:

“Venäjällä hakkaavat paljo metsää, they cut a great deal of wood in Russia.

“The third person sing. is also used in this sense: kesällä elää vaikka ilmalla, in summer one can live easily (literally, on air); tekee minkän jaksaa, one does as much work as one can.

“The second person sing. is also used in this impersonal sense, much as in Russian. Kävelet kadulla, et näe mitään, mutta yht’äkkiä putoat kuopaan, one walks along the street, sees nothing, and suddenly tumbles into a hole.

“Oma maa mansikka, muu maa mustikka, one’s own land is a strawberry, foreign lands are only blackberries. Ei pyyssä kahden jakoa, a partridge is not enough for two.”

From Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess of Saxony (1912):

“This easy change from one extreme to the other at a lover’s behest is one of the things that make woman’s rule–or co-rule–as the male’s political equal–impossible. It’s a sort of Phallus worship that always was and always will be.”

From the same work:

“Richard is jealous–jealous of the men I did love and the regiments that public opinion give me credit for. He must needs think I have loins of steel.”

From The Pirates’ Who’s Who:

“POUND, Captain Thomas.

“On August 8th, 1689, this pirate, with five men and a boy, sailed out of Boston Harbour as passengers in a small vessel. When off Lovell’s Island, five other armed men joined them. Pound now seized the craft and took command, and declared his intention of going on a piratical cruise. The first vessel they met with they decided to take. It was a fishing boat. Pound ran his craft alongside, but at the last moment his heart failed him, and he merely bought eight penn’o'th of mackerel from the surprised fishermen.”

A footnote in Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, Volume 1, commenting on a letter by a 15th-century Italian:

“Though pruned of not a few redundant particles which obscure the original, this letter proves that even before Spanish fashion had elaborated feebly magniloquent expletives, the Italian style was justly chargeable with verbiage.”

And finally, H.G. Wells on H.G. Wells in Anticipations (1902):

“I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea.”

There are those who review whole books that came out of Distributed Proofreaders: but of those, little old me is woefully unproductive.

A prolific duo are Bill and Barbara Tozier; they use their Notional Slurry and Odd Ends blogs to draw attention to the texts that pass through Distributed Proofreaders. Recommended reading for those who want to be hip with the then.

This is the second installment in a series of introductory articles on Distributed Proofreaders. The previous article was: 5 Years of Distributed Proofreaders. Distributed Proofreaders is a system for automating and distributing the task of proofreading etexts.

 
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