Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?
r. PoiroT, PoWderMill Wood, eaST SuSSex
Clearly, the questioner has never traveled beyond the shores of this fair isle. The answer is perhaps most elegantly expressed by the travel diaries of Robert
Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, who spent his twilight years in the tropical island nation of Samoa.
Sitting on his veranda in Upolu one evening in 1890, watching the candy-floss sunset after an afternoon of heavy tropical rain, scratching out his accounts for the month, Stevenson looked up to see what he perceived to be a stream of small, white rats scampering down the slopes of a nearby hilltop. His curiosity piqued, Stevenson shouldered a bag of provisions and set off in search of the mysterious animals.
His discovery astonished him: a flock of tiny, bedraggled sheep, each no bigger than a man’s hand, that had been shrunk by the warm tropical downpour—
nature’s answer to a forty-degree spin-cycle. Stevenson at once fired off a letter to his great friend, the dashing young adventurer Arthur Staunton-Whipsthistle:
“Padso—2000 guineas for you, sir, if you can travel to the driest place on earth and find me a sheep. Report back on what you find.”
Staunton-Whipsthistle set off immediately (or at least, four months later, when Stevenson’s letter arrived in London). Four months later still, and he found himself in the Atacama desert in Chile, parts of which had not seen rain for generations. He was, to say the least, astonished by his findings: vast, roaming herds of enormous sheep the size of elephants. Hosing one down gently with water that had been scientifically measured at twenty-two degrees, or that of a normal light shower on a Welsh hillside, Staunton-Whipsthistle almost fell off his llama as he watched one of the noble behemoths slowly shrink down to the size of an ordinary,
British sheep. He earned his two thousand guineas, and Stevenson made his fortune shipping millions of tiny tropical sheep to Liverpool, where they immediately tripled in value in the cooler British weather.
mAry pEtErS, knIttErS’ CIrClE, tImbuktu
¦
Why do people, when they want to be offensive, say, “no offense, but…”? or when they want to be funny, say, “I’m not being funny, but…”?
aMy roWe, crouch end
Both phrases date back to Elizabethan times, where they were used by actors to soften and ritualize their frustrated responses to the heckles of the paying public.
Under a constant rain of apple cores, dried turds, gravel, and mice, working conditions in the average Jacobean theater were enough to try the patience of even the most experienced of actors; as a result, as we can see in the index to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, a long list of set responses was drawn up to address specific audience complaints. These responses were intended to be learned by rote and repeated without thinking by a young actor under pressure.
Thus the sound of someone’s personal message bell being rung by a servant outside the theater—the precursor of the modern mobile phone—would be met with a hoarse shout of: “Marry sir, I wish thee no offense, though I doubt thee as a noddy and a dog fingerer!”
(“Footballer” was another favorite insult.) In response to repeated mutterings breaking up the performance:
“I aspire not to comedy with my words, but today’s performance is much like wading through country soup” (the coarse pun is clear to all). Perhaps the most famous recorded example of this usage, however, was during the private performance of a masque for the ten-year-old King Edward VI, who repeatedly bleated to his mother, “Is it nearly finished yet?” at five-minute intervals throughout the performance. The famous actor Richard Burbage is said to have responded, “I wish his Majesty no harm, but whilst a true artist strives to create beauty, couldst some kind fellow not gag and bind the little shit?”
Burbage’s comment is said to have drawn merry laughter from much of the court, though just an hour after the curtain fell he was summarily beheaded, minced, and fed to the ravens in the Tower.
ChArlES StAnforth, profESSor of thEAtEr StuDIES,
¦
GhEnt unIvErSItyBoth these phrases actually came to popular use in the late 1950s thanks to a minor character from the popular and long-running Little Rascals shorts. Early episodes featured a character named Teddy Ripley, who was
known as “Rippers.” His catchphrase involved starting every sentence with “No offense, but…” before saying the worst thing he could come up with, or, “I’m not being funny, but…” and coming out with some or other dreadful pun. It quickly spread to the playground and became well used around the country. Ripley was also fondly remembered for hilariously sneaking behind other boys and goosing them. This takes on a sinister air when one reflects that the actor, Ralph Underwell, was actually an unusually youthful and round-faced seventy-one-year-old while the other cast members really were young boys. There were rumors, hotly denied by his family, that the police were about to take action against him when he died of a heart attack during the filming of the last episodes.
GErAlD fItzCAkE, phoSphorouS, nEW South WhAlES