If you are to use Alexander Graham Bell’s product, which is to say the blower, you should, in all courtesy, use it as he would have wished; and Dr Bell insisted that all phone calls should begin with the words ‘Ahoy, ahoy’. Nobody knows why he insisted this – he had no connection to the navy – but insist he did and started every phone call that way. Nobody else did, and it was at the suggestion of his great rival Edison that people took to saying ‘Hello’. This seems unfair.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was the sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

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

Freud said that everything was secretly sexual. But etymologists know that sex is secretly food.

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

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.

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