Great prose tidbits from reference books

[twickster]

I was looking up Laurence Sterne in the Reader’s Encyclopedia (the 1948 edition, for which I have an inordinate fondness). The entry ends with the following:

Sterne, the son of a subaltern in the British army, was impoverished duirng most of his life and had a persistent weakness for the ladies of his acquaintance. His first wife died of insanity.

How delightfully evocative!

[Zsofia]

The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is full of wonderful gems. I don’t have mine handy, but I’ve been skimming the A’s in the bathroom and it’s just tremendously entertaining prose.

[CalMeacham]

It’s not a reference book, but the opening paragraph of David L. Goodstein’s solid-state physics text States of Matter is so wonderful that I used as a sig line for a time:

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

…

[BrainGlutton]

From Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language):

Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people.

[BrainGlutton]

Here, in fact, is a whole page of gems selected from Johnson’s Dictionary: http://www.samueljohnson.com/definitions.html