Porkopolis

Say It With Swine

pg 2 of 2

My own dearest piggish pig...

Simone de Beauvoir
A favorite form of address that the French existentialist, and feminist writer and author of The Second Sex (1949), uses in letters circa 1947-48 written to her new lover, U.S. author Nelson Algren, while they are traveling and separated from each other.

Pearls before swine.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Attributed to this U.S. writer and critic, replying to someone after they held a door open for her, saying "age before beauty."

Spelling reform has only made [our alphabet] bald-headed and unsightly. There is a whole tribe of them, "row" and "read" and "lead" — a whole family who don't know who they are. I ask you to pronounce s-o-w , and you ask me what kind of a one. If we had a sane, determinate alphabet, instead of a hospital of comminuted eunuchs, you would know whether one referred to the act of a man casting the seed over the ploughed land or whether one wished to recall the lady hog and the future ham.

Mark Twain, a pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910)
U.S. writer and humorist. The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling, an address at the dinner given to Mr. Carnegie at the dedication of the New York Engineers' Club, December 9, 1907.

Already the legend had gifted him with supernatural powers. Yes, it was said, there had been many ropes cunningly disposed, and a strange contrivance that turned by the efforts of many men, and each gun went up tearing slowly through the bushes, like a wild pig rooting its way in the undergrowth...

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Polish-born British author. Lord Jim (1900).

But I do remember myself on deck watching the hills now well above the horizon, asking myself again if Ireland were going to appear to me small as a pig's back or a land of extraordinary enchantment? It was the hills themselves that reminded me of the legend — on the left, rough and uncomely as a drove of pigs running down a lane, with one tall hill very like the peasant whom I used to see in childhood, an old man that wore a tall hat, knee-breeches, worsted stockings, and brogues. Like a pig's back Ireland has appeared to me, I said; but soon after on my right a lovely hill came into view, shaped like a piece of sculpture and I said: Perhaps I am going to see Ireland as an enchanted isle after all.

George Moore (1852-1933)
Irish novelist, playwright and poet, and a co-founder of the Irish Literary Theatre (1899) which eventually became the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Hail and Farewell (1914).