1881
Birth of P.G. Wodehouse
The greatest 20th-century wordsmith at work in the English language was Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Stand aside, Hemingway, Joyce, Nabokov and Churchill, you are as but tykes, tyros or tots in the shadow of P.G. Wodehouse.
After a brief stint as a banker, Wodehouse tried his hand at writing fiction in 1900 and never looked back. He became an enormously successful playwright on Broadway, and a screenwriter in the Golden Age of Hollywood, but his lasting fame and fortune came with writing short stories and novels of a comic nature. He became the creator of the Jeeves and Wooster saga, the chronicler of the strange deeds done at Blandings Castle, and the observer of that stylish member of the Drones Club, Psmith (the “p” is silent, as in “pshrimp”).
Consider these sentences:
The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!”
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.
Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
And she’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.
It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.
I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.
Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.
Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman.
Yes! One of the great masters of the language … I know many who sneer at that, but they are wrong.
My favorite:
“I’m sorry I called you a dish-faced moron.”
“You didn’t.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Well, I meant to.”