Help! I have a vivid recollection of a column Cecil wrote about the (or just “a”) Defenestration of Prague, only instead of Hussites tossing out the screaming bodies of corrupt Catholic Church officials, this story involved students at the University of Prague giving a despised professor the heave-ho. Did I imagine this? Was this column deemed apocryphal and somehow deleted? Pretty sure it was from the late 1980s.
Beyond my searching. I’ll pass your question over to Ed, see if he can help.
Cecil has written no such column. The closest thing that comes to mind is the following small masterpiece:
Did a mob of angry Dutch kill and eat their prime minister?
However, this appeared relatively recently, not in the 1980s.
Ah, well. I’m on day 3 of a 5-day stay in Prague and was hoping this memory was not some hallucination. Wonder where this oddly-specific story came from?
Wikipedia talks about several.
“The First Defenstration of Prague”, “The Second Defenstration of Prague”, an unnamed defenestration (sometimes called the one and one half defenstration) and one and that may or may not have been a self-defenestration. None of them sound like they involved students or professors.
Merriam-Webster has a video entry for ‘defenestration’ and I thought it’d be nice to add it to the thread.
WARNING: The video does not show anyone being thrown out a window!!!
Huge disappointment.
Thanks for the warning! I almost wasted part of my life watching that for no payoff.
Walt Kelly’s Pogo’s Jack Acid Society Black Book featured the following exchange:
First character: Defenestrate him! Death to the enemies of our country!
Second character: Defenestration’s too good for him. Chunk him out the window!
One of the novels in Eric Flint’s 1632 series speaks of the first defenestration of Prague. Then, in the storyline’s new history, there is a second.
I keep trying to figure out how Prague could get thrown out a window. “All of it? At once?” That would be a big window.
