At Accardo, you'll save 25% on your first shop and get free delivery,

which means if you were to buy a four cheese pizza, you'd basically be getting one of the cheeses for free. Save and splurge at Accardo, the online supermarket. Geographical and other restrictions. Min spend £60 on charge to apply. Discount available on food, new customers only, max saving £20,000. Terms at Akado.com. 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?

Yes, yeah. The book is filled with letters from important people to important people, letters from

nobody's 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. Okay. 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. 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's an incorrigible flirt, but somehow she just

can't help it. She also pronounces picturesque, picture skew, and unique as Unicue.

And it is amazing how often she manages to introduce these words into her conversation, leading the laughter herself.

Also, when she leaves the room, she says, see, Anon, I have not shot her yet.

Maybe Monday.

Brilliant.

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