5 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2025
    1. did she also recall the opening line of the novel Snoopy never did get to finish? “It was a dark and stormy night ….”    Time didn’t allow me to explain that this was not actually a Snoopy original. The celebrated incipit was dognapped by Snoopy’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, from Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, a mid-19th century English novelist, poet, playwright and politician who also coined phrases such as “the great unwashed”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar” and “the pen is mightier than the sword”.
  2. Jun 2025
  3. Mar 2024
    1. Evenbefore his betrayal, though, he felt little identification with the colonists,writing that North Carolinians were the most “cowardly Blockheads[another word for lubber] that ever God created & must be used likenegro[e]s if you expect any good of them.”29

      blockheads as a synonym for lubber

      This gives new meaning to the use of "blockhead" in Charles Schultz' Peanuts (usually Lucy in reference to Charlie Brown).

      Recall Samuel Johnson's (1709-1784) aphorism:

      “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”


      Definition from Webster's Dictionary (1913):

      Block"head` (?), n. [Block + head.] A stupid fellow; a dolt; a person deficient in understanding.

      "The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head." —Pope.

  4. Sep 2023