Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime.

The number is 8779-9-9-6673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us.

Thanks for listening.

You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Every once in a while,

a book comes along that I just want to recommend to everybody, not just my close friends, but I want to

put this book in the hands of every single person I meet. And these days, that book is Letters of

Note. This is a book that grew out of a website by the same name run by Sean Usher.

And you might have seen this website before because a lot of times the letters on that site get passed around the internet.

But don't settle for the site because there's nothing like curling up with this big, beautiful book and going through all this personal correspondence. It's

subtitled an eclectic collection of correspondence deserving of a wider audience. And these were

letters that were never intended for publication, but he's gathered them together in what he

calls a book-shaped museum. And I've just been delighting in these. And you've been reading it too, right?

The book is filled with letters from important people to important people, letters from

nobodies to nobodies. A lot of the letters are about important events, even if you don't know

the names attached to them. Some of them are in there simply because they're beautifully written,

not just the handwriting, but the composition themselves. And some of them, of course, are put in there for their humor. And so there's one that I wanted to share. I love Dorothy Parker. Yeah. She probably wouldn't have a thing to do with me. Where are we contemporaries? But this is a great letter. It's 1927. She's in the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City from exhaustion. She's trying to recover from this. But she's stir crazy. And she's having a hard time dealing with the fact that she can't do all the things she wants to do. And her little pet dog is not with her. So she writes this letter to her lover at the time with her usual wit and dryness. And there's a part where she talks about a nurse.

And she says,

there is the nurse who tells me she's afraid she is an incorrigible flirt,

...