Word: aesop
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Some 2,000,000 Americans suffer from the same speech impediment that tripped the distinguished tongues of Demosthenes, Aesop, Aristotle, Virgil and Winston Churchill. Demosthenes, so the story goes, cured himself of stuttering by stuffing his mouth with pebbles and competing with the roar of the surf. He may have had something. A Detroit physician, Dr. Marvin E. Klein, 33, reports remarkable results with an instrument that fills the stutterer's ears with the sound of a waterfall whenever he opens his mouth...
Winston Churchill retouching Peter Paul Rubens? During the war, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told a TV interviewer, it happened to a painting by Rubens and Artist Frans Snyders that hangs at the P.M.'s country house, Chequers. Although the canvas was supposed to depict Aesop's fable of the lion and the mouse, Churchill could barely discern the mouse. One day he took brush in hand to highlight it. "But it's still difficult to see," Wilson admitted. Would he try to improve it further? "I wouldn't touch up a Rubens " said Wilson, "still...
Times and critical tenets are changing, though. Aesop's ant is no longer quite so honored, his grasshopper no longer quite so despised. Play has ceased to be such a dirty word. The wise and serious artist is more and more free of the burden of having to sound like a high priest. Today's readers should be more inclined to accept Auden's virtuosity without imputing shallowness. He is serious, if not deadly-and who, save Lowell perhaps, can match him for compassion and complexity...
...have the point of Aesop's mice-belling-the-cat fable [Nov. 29] exactly backwards, I think. If the fable really offered "the best put-down of the narrow-gauge expert," as you suggest, the mice would have to be narrow-gauge experts at something. But what? Certainly not cats, bells, belling nor, on the evidence, any other form of mouse defense Far from being "assembled experts," the young mice are obviously ill-informed brainstorm-ers-generalists of the most shallow kind-glibly tossing out solutions to a problem they don't begin to understand. The old grey...
...Aesop offers perhaps the best comment-and the best put-down of the narrow-gauge expert. Once, he relates, a group of mice held a council to determine what they should do about a voracious cat. Finally one young mouse came up with a proposal to put a bell around the cat's neck, providing the mice with an early warning system. But with their tunnel vision, none of the assembled specialists thought to ask the most crucial question until a grey old mouse-a generalist, no doubt-rose. Who, he asked quietly, would put the bell around...