Geep,' whuppled the parrot. - James Thurber

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly — too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System — the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.

The old man moaned and maundered, murmured, muttered, mumbled odds of this and ends of that, bits and pieces, shreds and edges, full of ifs and whens and theres and thens, amounting in the end and all to six times less than nothing.