Letters of Note, a book based on the website of the same name, is a collection of funny, moving, and insightful letters from both famous people and nobodies. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Letters of Note”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Every once in a while, a book comes along that I just want to recommend to everybody, not just my close friends.
But I want to put this book in the hands of every single person I meet.
And these days, that book is Letters of Note.
This is a book that grew out of a website by the same name run by Sean Usher.
And you might have seen this website before because a lot of times the letters on that site get passed around the Internet.
But don’t settle for the site because there’s nothing like curling up with this big, beautiful book and going through all this personal correspondence.
It’s subtitled An Eclectic Collection of Correspondents Deserving of a Wider Audience.
And these were letters that were never intended for publication, but he’s gathered them together in what he calls a book-shaped museum.
And I’ve just been
Delighting in these and
You’ve been reading it too, right?
The book is filled with letters from
Important people to important people, letters
From nobodies to nobodies.
A lot of the letters are about important events
Even if you don’t know the names attached to them.
Some of them are in there simply because
They’re beautifully written. Not just the handwriting
But the composition themselves. And some of
Them of course are put in there for their humor.
And so there’s one that I wanted to share.
I love Dorothy Parker. She probably
And it had a thing to do with me,
Where are we contemporaries?
But this is a great letter.
It’s 1927.
She’s in the Presbyterian Hospital
In New York City from exhaustion.
She’s trying to recover from this.
But she’s stir crazy
And she’s having a hard time
Dealing with the fact
That she can’t do all the things
She wants to do
And her little pet dog is not with her.
So she writes this letter
To her lover at the time
With her usual wit and dryness.
And there’s a part where she talks
About a nurse and she says,
There is the nurse who tells me
She’s afraid she’s an incorrigible flirt.
But somehow she just can’t help it.
She also pronounces picturesque, picture skew, and unique as unicue.
And it is amazing how often she manages to introduce these words into her conversation,
Leading the laughter herself.
Also, when she leaves the room, she says,
See, Anon, I have not shot her yet.
Maybe Monday.
Brilliant.
And there’s a ton of this stuff.
There are letters in here that will make you cry.
There are letters to lost love, letters to the deceased, letters to the past and to the future.
Little kids writing to celebrities.
One of my favorite ones is a little kid writing to basically Australia’s equivalent of NASA with his rocket design.
It’s basically postcard size.
He’s got a picture of a rocket and a few little kind of pointers.
This is the nose and the antenna and so forth.
And he says, fill in the details.
Kind of like, you know, whatever happens inside the rocket ship.
You take care of that.
Yeah, just make it work.
We’ll share some more letters of note later in the show.
But in the meantime, we’d love to talk with you about language.
So call us 877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
