[bksvol-discuss] too darned funny! ;-))
- From: "Dan Beaver" <dbeaver888@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:09:18 -0400
Hi all,
I am back to validating again. I got access to MS Word again so I am back off
the chocks.
I am validating the book All things Herriot. It is about the life of James
Alfred Wight who was the real vet. He sure did a wonderful job of creating all
the characters and places and events in his books.
While working through this book I came across a passage that just shook my tree
and I fell over cackling. Read it below and I hope you all find this
histerical too.
New characters enrich the text. The portrait of Mr. Pickersgill is a
classic study in malapropism worthy of any eighteenth-century comedy or
of a Dickens character. If a little learning is not always a dangerous
thing, it is often a funny thing. Farmer Pickersgill, a good stocksman
with a small herd, once attended a two-week course of instruction for
agricultural workers at Yorkshire's Leeds University. "This brief
glimpse of the academic life had left an indelible impression on his
mind. . . . No capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among
the spires of Oxford with more nostalgia than did Mr. Pickersgill to his
fortnight at Leeds".
Pickersgill's vocabulary has slipped
since his long ago "college days." He phones Herriot from the "cossack"
in the village to treat a calf for "semolina," meaning salmonella. The
animal is bleeding from the "rectrum," and the farmer wants a feces
sample sent to the "labrador," although he is convinced that the calf's
problem is due to the fact that the animal bled at birth from its
"biblical" cord. Pickersgill does not want to be charged an "absorbent"
price and he knows from experience that troubles come in "cyclones".
Have fun.
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