This is an archive copy of wikilivres.ca as of 18 February 2017 (from the WikiTeam dump). The original site is closed.
Review:Leacock:Winsome Winnie (S.H.H.)
| Review:Bosanquet:What Religion is (S.H.H.) | Review:Leacock:Winsome Winnie (S.H.H.) written by Author:S. H. H. |
Review:Milligan:The Beckoning Skyline (C.E.A.) |
| In The Canadian Forum, February 1921, p. 154 |
Winsome Winnie and other Nonsense Novels, by Stephen Leacock (Gundy). If I were a professor of higher mathematics, I should at once proceed to translate Winsome Winnie into terms of comic sections. It lends itself irresistibly to the charming precision of a formula. Then I would publish the formula for the benefit of a public suffering from malnutrition of the higher humour. Immediately elderly fathers of families upon whom dulness has long descended would forsake their clubs and spend their evenings at home writing nonsense novels by the aid of my formula and reading them aloud to an enchanted family circle. The decay of family life would be arrested, and I should probably be knighted at the next birthday honours. The formula would be something like this, only not quite:
The approximate value of the symbols, aided by the imagination being as follows: f is the comic coefficient, the secret of which I am prepared to dispose of for a reasonable sum; abc' is any collocation of commonplace names and occurrences arranged in every possible order or disorder of ideas; n is the number of times this can be done without the reader becoming aware that it has been done before; α is infinity. The net result of this operation will be n2, a nonsense novel, every time. The reader must not confuse this with my formula for novel nonsense which is quite different. ::::::::S. H. H.