Lean Quotes (7 quotes)
Question: Why do the inhabitants of cold climates eat fat? How would you find experimentally the relative quantities of heat given off when equal weights of sulphur, phosphorus, and carbon are thoroughly burned?
Answer: An inhabitant of cold climates (called Frigid Zoans) eats fat principally because he can't get no lean, also because he wants to rise is temperature. But if equal weights of sulphur phosphorus and carbon are burned in his neighbourhood he will give off eating quite so much. The relative quantities of eat given off will depend upon how much sulphur etc. is burnt and how near it is burned to him. If I knew these facts it would be an easy sum to find the answer.
Answer: An inhabitant of cold climates (called Frigid Zoans) eats fat principally because he can't get no lean, also because he wants to rise is temperature. But if equal weights of sulphur phosphorus and carbon are burned in his neighbourhood he will give off eating quite so much. The relative quantities of eat given off will depend upon how much sulphur etc. is burnt and how near it is burned to him. If I knew these facts it would be an easy sum to find the answer.
Genuine student answer* to an Acoustics, Light and Heat paper (1880), Science and Art Department, South Kensington, London, collected by Prof. Oliver Lodge. Quoted in Henry B. Wheatley, Literary Blunders (1893), 183, Question 32. (*From a collection in which Answers are not given verbatim et literatim, and some instances may combine several students' blunders.)
All rivers, small or large, agree in one character; they like to lean a little on one side; they cannot bear to have their channels deepest in the middle, but will always, if they can, have one bank to sun themselves upon, and another to get cool under.
In 'Water', The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals, and Religion (1872), 62.
Faith and knowledge lean largely upon each other in the practice of medicine.
In The Collected Works of Dr. P.M. Latham (1878), Vol. 2, 408.
Fat paunches have lean pates; and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.
Spoken by character Longaville in play, Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1, Scene 1, Line 26. In Louis Klopsch, Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1896), 110.
It’s a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don’t find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.
In 'Extricating Young Gussie', Saturday Evening Post (18 Sep 1915), 10.
There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.
Samuel Butler, Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1917), 221.
There was rock to the left and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between
And thrice he heard a breech bolt snick, tho never a man was seen.
And thrice he heard a breech bolt snick, tho never a man was seen.
In 'Ballad of East and West', Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads (1893), 6.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
