The Wit’s Guide to Usefulness
Or, eating glass to fit in
A really useful witticism should make something happen in the world, and by that totally arbitrary standard this line qualifies:
“My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.”
— Groucho Marx
Simon Brett cites Marx in his introduction to The Faber Book of Useful Verse, a 1981 anthology that promises tips on “how to predict the weather, make invisible ink, remember dates, cure hangovers, seduce women, seduce men, cook trout, conceive boys, grow cucumbers, or obvious things like that.” Obviously I bought this book as soon as I spotted it on a shelf at Sellers & Newel, and now I know that of stalagmites and stalactites:
The mites go up
And the tites come down
And that the value of pi to six decimal places is contained within number of letters in each word of:
How I wish I
Could calculate pie
But I’ve yet to master rhyming meteorology and this invisible ink is still somehow showing up in your inbox, so there’s an upper limit to the utility of nineteenth century verse.
“Poets aren’t very useful
Because they aren’t consumable or very produceful.”
— Ogden Nash
Elsewhere in the arts, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s holding company is called the Really Useful Group, an entirely accurate representation of their services. Looking for a template for a national rail service based on roller skates? Look no further than Starlight Express. Trying to hang a chandelier the wrong way? Phantom of the Opera. Wonder who is killing all the migratory birds in your neighbourhood? Cats, now and forever. And if you can’t make it to the theatre, you can always sign up for an Andrew Lloyd Webinar.
“The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.”
— Oscar Wilde
The sublime depths of uselessness can perhaps only be spelunked by those trying to be maximally useful. Hence: “My postillion has been struck by lightning,” an infamous and mildly apocryphal phrase that is said to have appeared in foreign language phrasebooks across the continent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Naturally we are all aware that a postillion refers to the rider of the left-hand horse in a team pulling a carriage, and yet how often were these coachmen struck down? Similarly, the phrase “La plume de ma tante” — my aunt’s quill — has achieved some small level of infamy as the most useless phrase ever taught to aspiring French speakers; in The Exorcist, the demon screeches it at Father Karras.
“Much of the most useful knowledge has to be buffeted into us.”
— John Lancaster Spalding
Much better, then, is the late-’90s project to translate the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” into every possible language.
, at the time a Harvard student associated with the Immediate Gratification Players, justified the project — perhaps the earliest meme — with the assertion that while every traveler wants to speak a phrase in the local language, most of the obvious phrases immediately mark you as a tourist. Of course you’re looking for the bibliotheque.“But, if one says “I can eat glass, it doesn’t hurt me,” you will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect, ” Mollick argued. And so the project “is a challenge to the human spirit, in much the same way as the Apollo Program or the Panama Canal was, except that it involves much less digging and slightly less spaceflight.”
“Paradoxes are useful to attract attention to ideas.”
— Mandell Creighton
Usefulness is a fool’s errand, and it’s useful to tell a fool to get lost. On its own, the term “useful” often isn’t. As useful verse compiler Simon Brett notes, it “is a word of such elastic definition that it needs constant qualification.” A chocolate teapot, held up in metaphor as the most useless possible object, makes delicious hot chocolate.
“Music is essentially useless, as life is.”
— George Santayana
Your weekly ReccoMention
For my paying subscribers this week, a look at the diaries of an entirely useful man whose philosophy was as follows:
“There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.”
Your monthly Riposte Card
Ah, spring!
*checks calendar*
Oh wait, still winter.
*looks out window*
No, spring!
We need a word to describe the mood-boosting yet existentially worrisome effect that unnaturally warm winter days have on the soul. Until we find that word, here is an excellent poem by Emily Dickinson that captures the spirit, elegantly rendered by illustrator Laurna Germscheid:
That, my friends, is the Riposte Card for March, and a few of them will be stuffed into envelopes this week (along with April’s Card to save a few cents) and mailed out to my Founding Subscribers. You too can get a limited edition print of this postcard-sized artwork — and 11 more unique artworks, one per month — by subscribing today for a mere $C80/year.
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“How good and excellent a thing it is to feel quite useless, like an old boiled rag, and to know ourselves.”
— Bertrand Wilberforce
Your readership is intensely useful, in part because you tell me what to write about each week. In keeping with the theme, let’s think of some useful applications of wit in everyday life:
This concludes Issue No. 244 of Get Wit Quick, a newsletter whose impressive regularity is a useful weekly check of your ability to receive email. What could be more useful than this translation of Mollick’s phrase: “I can smurf glass, it does not smurf me?” These days, Mollick is a Wharton professor who helps people write AI prompts. I once prompted my brain to write the book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting and it did so promptly. You can tap the ❤️ below, it does not hurt me.
dear benjamin,
these are great, as always!
i particularly love this poem:
“Poets aren’t very useful
Because they aren’t consumable or very produceful.”
— Ogden Nash
thanks for sharing!
love
myq