Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage will be unsurprised to learn that it is, literally, a /death pledge/.

Reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.

Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage will be unsurprised to learn that it is, literally, a /death pledge/.

Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don't believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.

But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615. The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realize that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable.

The problem with the alphabet is that it bears no relation to anything at all, and when words are arranged alphabetically they are uselessly separated. In the OED, for example, aardvarks are 19 volumes away from the zoo, yachts are 18 volumes from the beach, and wine is 17 volumes from the nearest corkscrew.

So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.