The Old Excuses

One of the favourite books from home that I have recently been reunited with (I posted a parcel to myself on my last visit back to the UK, and then suffered 5 or 6 weeks of hellish anxiety as to whether it would make it through) is The Best of Myles, an anthology of Flann O'Brien's (one of the first of my Unsuitable Role Models on this blog) humorous pieces from his Irish Times column during the 1940s.

This has become my current dipping-into book, always in my jacket pocket, a reliably amusing companion whenever I find myself in a bar or restaurant or coffee shop bereft of flesh-and-blood friends.

One of O'Brien's regular-ish features was 'The Catechism of Cliché', an hilarious round-up of tired and overused verbal formulations.

Here's the opening instalment:


Is man ever hurt in a motor smash?

No. He sustains an injury.

Does such a man ever die from his injuries?

No. He succumbs to them.

Correct. But supposing an ambulance is sent for. He is put into the ambulance and rushed (never merely taken) to hospital. Is he dead when he gets there, assuming he is not alive?

No, he is not dead. Life is found to be extinct.

[Or these days, I suppose, "he was pronounced dead on arrival".]

Correct again. A final question. Did he go into the hospital, or enter it, or be brought into it?

He did not. He was admitted to it.

Good. That will do for today.



And a little later, there were these examples from the pub:

Take drinking. It is lawful for a group of citizens to enter a tavern and order drinks. But according as they swallow their golden thimblefuls, they deem it desirable for some reason to invent pretexts for having one more. These reasons are always somewhat tenuous, and to set them out in the frigid medium known as 'cold print' brings us once again back into the dark underworld of cliché. Let us treat the matter catechistically.

What is it that a final drink will not do us?

Harm.

What is the condition which, by reason of the long time we will be subject to it, supports the theory that it would be safe to have one more?

The condition of being dead.

For what service maintained by the rating authority is it permissible to have still another final drink?

The road.

And upon what did bird never fly?

Wan [One] wing.

I recently posted another wonderful passage of O'Brien's over on Froogville here.