Epistrophe is the trope of obsession. It's the trope of emphasizing one point again and again. And it's the trope of not being able to escape that on… - Mark Forsyth

So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.

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.

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely.