Categories
1900-1949

Edwin Moo’d

An quote from Charles Dickens in the 1938 Weekend Book – “Cows are my passion”.

Categories
1900-1949

First Drown your Kitten, 1935

Today – some rather upsetting advice from the 1935 Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts on how to kill unwanted kittens. Your choices are either to drown them in a bucket, or by administering chloroform onto their little kitten faces. Chloroform, you say…….hmmm, perhaps a bit of the old Owbridge’s Lung Tonic might do the trick.

From the matter-of-fact way this is described, it seems to be that as far as they were concerned this was the humane thing to do. One of the cats we had when I was a child was rescued by a family friend who discovered a man with a bag of kittens, preparing to drown them in a river. I bet (hope!) there’s not too much cat-drowning happening now.

“A healthy cat can bring up four kittens, but unless you are deliberately breeding cats, you will only want to keep one or two.”

Of course, if a cat accidentally nearly drowns itself, this is the thing to do. You can swing a cat in here apparently.

Resuscitating a drowned cat
Resuscitating a drowned cat
Categories
1900-1949

An Absurdity of Plurals, 1938

Who came up with the pluralisations of animals? When and, also, why? They are gloriously poetic but useless – you can hardly use most of them in real life without looking like a self-satisfaction of tossers.

And whoever invented “A Singular of Boars” is just taking the piss.

Animal collective nouns, The Weekend Book, 1938
Animal collective nouns, The Weekend Book, 1938