'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents'
Jo's words in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women are always with us as Christmas approaches and we search the shops, looking for something to suit people of so many different tastes. Lewis Carroll once described the variety of topics which can interest different people:
'The time has come,' the Walrus said,
'To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings -
And why the sea is boiling hot -
And whether pigs have wings.'
Open the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and you can find shoes: 'I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet' (a modern saying derived from the Persian poet Sadi) and ships: 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?' (Christopher Marlowe). George Bush Sr. comments on a close relative of cabbage: 'I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!' Looking for kings and the sea you can travel the world: Shakespeare spoke of England as 'This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle' while Katherine Lee Bates wrote of America 'From sea to shining sea'.
Both pigs and wings appear in the Dictionary, though not together. In one of his lighter moments, Winston Churchill said 'I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals'. It was the American meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz who first asked 'Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?'
In case you were wondering what happened to sealing wax, a quotation comes, most appropriately, from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol: 'It was a turkey! He could never have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em off short in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.'
Whatever your interests, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has something to say on every subject. It is both wise and witty, ancient and modern, and the perfect Christmas present.
Susan Ratcliffe
18/11/2008
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