Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a … - Mark Forsyth

Gambling in medieval France was a simple business. All you needed were some friends, a pot, and a chicken. In fact, you didn’t need friends — you could do this with your enemies — but the pot and the chicken were essential.

Baron von Munchausen (1720–97) was a real person who had fought as a soldier in Russia. On his return home he told stories about his exploits that nobody believed. These included riding on a cannonball, taking a brief trip to the moon, and escaping from a marsh by pulling himself out by his own hair. This latter feat is impossible, for the upward force on the Baron’s hair would have been cancelled out by the downward force on his arm. It’s a nice idea, though, and von Munchausen’s preposterous principle was later taken up by Americans, but instead of talking about hair, the Americans started in the late nineteenth century to talk of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. What’s impossible in physics is possible in computing, and a computer that’s able to load its own programs is, metaphorically, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. In 1953 the process was called a bootstrap. By 1975 people had got bored with the strap, and from then on computers simply booted up.

If you're too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you're not saying, you must...I'm sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying.