The readies, by bob brown  (Page 3/22)

From actual laboratory tests I have proved that long drawn-out gutta-percha words when stretched to the limit of elasticity invariably snap back and hit the experimenter on the nose with unexpected violence.

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Cross-word puzzle fans blow the intellectual bellows of the time, fans with philological flares for flapping flaming fl-ashes back to ashes. They leave me cold; hearthless; cross. They’ve crossed my fingers for me. Crossed my eyes. Christ! how he must have suffered.

Making puns is as dangerous as making bombs. T.N.Tless, purely toothless, optical, gum-chewing puns as in opposition to the skull-grinning oral kind are not so risky, not so likely to go off in the hand. It is possible to turn out harmless eye-ticklers without undue hazard, though not without experience. Word-plays to fill the elegant eye more than to cram the merry mouth. Yet they may be judicially mixed while holding in a covered metallic receptacle at arm’s length, as:

Gants (Or, even) gants

Pants more Daring- pants

Louis Quince ly Experi- louisquince

Your (mental.) your

Gants Louey! Not pants! louey

Your For your

Pants Quince! (Neophytes) gants! cants

Amateur alchymists while trying to magnetize mystical oracular utterances into glowing rosicrutian word-formulas will find it convenient to hold their noses firmly pinched, owing to the noxious gases given off.

Fumblers for the Philosopher’s Stone or stones and Elixir Vitae chasers will always take the Precatalanian caution of drawing the gants firmly over the pants and topsy-turvically.

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Social experimenters in b e l l e s l e t t r e s will realize that a taste for acquired words is as exacting as a Bell Mare hostess who requires green gloves to be worn throughout the olive course. But don’t let that make you a modest literary wall-flower. Try all the new good forms; one at a time or in the altogether; Romp with the Rhomboids, take home a Hexagon to Give your Hetaera the Gapes.

Bull-fights are optical grand opera; but just because one Brooklyn boy has bit the sand of a bloody arena in the s o l and s o m b r a of Sevilla don’t let that tempt you out of your eye-teeth.

Word-weaving makes pleasing patterns refreshing to the patinaed retina, now that there’s not so much written oratory and reading aloud of literary lullabies, except by radio at bed-time.

I fear for my word only when egotistical hoarse bronchial word-busters forgetting their troches, ride out brandybreathed, brandishing branding irons at tropes, lassos writing around their hollow heads, screaming, “Write ’em, Cowboy, write ’m.”

Maiming words for some whets the appetite; for me, wets my throaty-apple pie-eye. These desperanto language-melangers spik English writers who threaten to internationalize the word horrify, scarify me, as the Bolshevik Bogy of socializing intent hobgoblined all virtuous kept women five years ago. I tremble lest the Rooseveltian Harangueoutanging Rough-riders of the Word bully us back to the Hog-Latin of our youth for full esoteric