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*Did I mention that my moth and star are part of a matching set? And that I’ve got an ex-girlfriend who has the moral from the same fable, “The Moth and the Star,” tattooed onto her back? You think explaining a moth every once in a while is a task, try justifying this written on your skin—in italics, no less: Moral: Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.
*Ed. Note: The ring of that phrase is so “deliciously” Thurberesque, as Mr. Olbermann undoubtedly relishes . . . even as Thurber did. Thurber’s preface to My Life and Hard Times ends, “It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life cannot lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies. As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.” (The phrase is a chapter title from Smith’s romance, The Tides of Barnegat, published when Thurber was twelve, in 1906. As for “sea-puss”? Derived from the native Algonquian languages, it refers to a strong undertow or riptide rushing seaward.)
*Baker, Russell. From the afterword of My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber. New York Times Co., 1989. Reprinted by Harper Perennial Classics, 1999.
*McCord, David. Twentieth Century Children’s Writers, 4th ed., edited by Laura Standley Berger. Farmingham, Mich.: St. James Press, 1995.
*Weales, Gerald. Commonweal, January 18, 1957.
*Breit, Harvey. “Mr. Thurber observes a serene birthday.” New York Times Magazine, Dec. 4, 1949.
*Letter to William Faulkner, October 2, 1956, from The Thurber Letters, edited by Harrison Kinney with Rosemary A. Thurber (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 663.
*“Who put eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?” A series of radio spots by Stan Freberg from 1956.
*The forerunner of the rifle; a muzzle-loaded firearm held against the shoulder.
*The Latin translates as “talking trees, not only in the wild.” Thurber is citing Phaedrus’s Prologue to his fables. Or perhaps Dr. Johnson’s use of it in his Life of Gay, in which he posits: “A fable or apologue seems to be, in its genuine state, a narrative in which beings irrational, and sometimes inanimate (arbores loquuntur, non tantum ferae) are, for the purposes of moral instruction, feigned to act and speak with human interest and passions.”
*A cougar, or any medium-size great cat.
*The mammalian Order that includes bats.
*Based on the character in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt, the word has come to mean a smug, complacent, middle-class person.
*A comic dramatist of ancient Greece.
*A species of crow associated with the idea of thieving.
*Playing off the proverb “A fool and his money will soon be parted,” Thurber’s Latin can be translated as “A fool(lish lady) and her legs will soon be parted.”
*The French translates as “to each his own taste.”
*The German translates as, “God in heaven! It sounds like a rusty iron gate that needs to be oiled.”
*A Confederate general known for his cavalry raids.
*A Latin idiom meaning “when necessary changes have been made.”
*This letter from Thurber accompanied his submission of “The Last Clock” manuscript to The New Yorker editor William Shawn.