SCHOOLBOY HUMORISTS

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 234, 29 June 1922, Page 5

SCHOOLBOY HUMORISTS

Schoolboy humorists have been at it again—so successfully that one begins to doubt if it is'all unconscious effort. From 'the latest natch of “howlers” (the'SOth selection) published by the. “University Correspondent,” the London “Daily Chronicle” picks the following youthful efforts in history, geography, grammar, and literature:— < " In his journev to Mount Zion, Christian had a fight with a'polygon. Richard II is said to have been murdered by some historians. Chaucer wrote in middle-class English. Stirling is noted for its fine silver. Julius Caesar was renowned for his strength. He threw a bridge across the Rhine. , . , Translation errors are equally bright. For example, “un hommo singulier” is given as 1 a bachelor,” and “il.est unique en son genre” as “he is unique in his gender.” ■ A very superficial acquaintance with Einstein may account for some of the tangled .tangents of mathematics, while physics and chemistry are in danger of being too aptly "applied”: — 1 . , „ , To find the area of the walls of a room you take the baiometer and multiply by the. height. A centilitre is an insect with a hundred legs. , Parallel straight lines are those which come together closer further oft but. do not meet. . Carbon dioxide is prepared by the action of hydraulic acid on marble. A budding party politician on the classical side tells us that I' 0 ?" George is the Prime Mixture of England ” and some future Livingstone or Gus Elen, with a present bent for biology, informs us, with appropriate economy in words, that “people go to Africa to hunt rhinostriches. “Everybody needs a holiday from one year’s end to another” is a philoso-, phic’ dictum with which most of us agree; and the descnntion of a skeleton as “a man with his inside out nnd his outside off” is quite-an up-to-date note in anatomy for the rran m the street.