But the true and natural home of merism is in legal documents. Lawyers are like Cole Porter and Alfred Lord Tennyson with a blender. A lawyer, for a … - Mark Forsyth

The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well.

Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realize that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We're bound to coincide sometimes.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

But nothing has ever been as new as the French Revolution, which was essentially a mob of new ideas armed with pitchforks and intent on murder.