We, of course, shared the night nursery, and we soon invented games together, some of which were distracting, not to say maddening, to grown-up people. One was an imaginary language in which even the word "Yes" was a trisyllable, namely: "Sheepartee," and the word for "No" was even longer and more complicated, namely: "Quiliquinino." We used to talk this language, which was called "Sheepartee," and which consisted of unmitigated gibberish, for hours in the nursery, till Hilly, Grace, and Annie could bear it no longer, and Everard came up one evening and told us the language must stop or we should be whipped.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, August 27, 2024
A Private Language
Maurice Baring (1874-1945), The Puppet Show of Memory (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1923), pp. 36-37: