Some Stuff

Here is another of the odds and ends. I have them in all sorts of places that I have to search for them and then post them. I believe that this is by Margaret Gibbons though I am not sure about it.

Give me your tears; your laughter I have known,

Blithe as a singing bird that takes the sky:

But all your sorrows are and hid;

As if revealed would cause you shame thereby.

Your troubles are my own and who but I

Should ease your heart and stem the tears you shed.

Is not a sorrow shared a sorrow halved.

Are not the tenderest words “Be comforted”.

Here is another one .....

If ever in your salad days – as one of my comic Uncle calls them – you were compelled to do a Latin unseen you will find that it presents an acute parallel with criminal detection. You have a long sentence full of inversions, just a jumble of words it looks at first sight too. The subject is the murdered man, the verb is the “modus operandi”, the way the crime was committed, the object is the motive. These are the three essentials of every crime. First you find the subject then you look for the verb and the two of them lead you to the object. But you have not discovered the criminal – the meaning of the whole sentence – yet. There are a number of subordinate clauses, which may be clues or red herrings and you got to separate them from each other in your own mind – reconstruct them to fit and amplify the meaning of the whole.