DOG DITTY DAILY #24

A Motivational Moment for Misguided Masters & Mutts

By Hugo Hotagen, DDD (Duke of Doorknobs & Doghouses), a loyal lapdog-in-training apprenticed to the affable, agnostic and all-round air-headed Court of the Quipping Queen.

Here are a few piffling pieces of pooch wisdom in honor of the "Year of the Dog":

"And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp and hound,
And curs of low degree."

(Oliver Goldsmith, 18th Century Irish playwright, witty poet, and entertaining essayist from his celebrated work entitled, "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog")

"Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime." (Mark Twain's Autobiography)

"A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, ..." (John Steinbeck, 20th century American writer and novelist)

__________

An American journalist by the name of Harry Esty, (born in Syracuse, New York in 1889), wrote about a mangy mutt called "Nibbie" in his book entitled, "Some Nonsense About a Dog".

For those who can't abide dog-eared books, perhaps they can quit complaining and check more of these Mark Twain quotations.

And speaking of "mongrels"...here's a whack of wicked information about this word which hails from the old Latin term "mixticius", and Amazon.com notes that the noun "mongrel" is searched for 34 times a day on their English-language book site, while the term ranks 36,835 in a list of approximately 700,000 words in the English language.