{"id":17945,"date":"2019-06-15T20:29:32","date_gmt":"2019-06-16T03:29:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17945"},"modified":"2019-06-15T20:33:15","modified_gmt":"2019-06-16T03:33:15","slug":"allegations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/06\/15\/allegations\/","title":{"rendered":"Allegations"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/\">My father<\/a> told me a joke a couple of times when I was a kid that I could never entirely reconstruct later. I just found a version of it in a 1908 O. Henry story, \u201c<a href=\"\"https:\/\/americanliterature.com\/author\/o-henry\/short-story\/the-man-higher-up>The Man Higher Up<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>Partway through the story, a man named Alfred E. Ricks has been selling land in Florida to people in Chicago. One of the purchasers visits Florida and finds that the land in question\u2026<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>\u2026was under thirty-six feet of water, and, besides, had been pre\u00ebmpted so long by the alligators and gars that his title looked fishy.<\/p>\r\n<p>Naturally, the man goes back to Chicago and makes it as hot for Alfred E. Ricks as the morning after a prediction of snow by the weather bureau. Ricks denied the allegation, but he couldn\u2019t deny the alligators.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>[In the copy of this story that I have, it says <i>defied<\/i> instead of <i>denied<\/i>, but (a) this book includes several other typos, and (b) I found another printed version that says <i>denied<\/i>, and (c) I prefer it as <i>denied<\/i>.]<\/p>\r\n<p>That wasn\u2019t the form that the allegations\/allegators joke took when my father told it to me; I think the version he told me didn\u2019t have any real alligators in it\u2014I think it was just meant to be funny that someone would use <i>allegators<\/i> to refer to people who make allegations. (In fact, <i>allegator<\/i> meaning one who alleges is in my unabridged dictionary.)<\/p>\r\n<p>But I like this O. Henry version better. And it may have been the original source that my father\u2019s version derived from, not sure.<\/p>\r\n<p>The rest of the O. Henry story is pretty funny, too; I wasn\u2019t expecting so many malapropisms and cute turns of phrase.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puns"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17945"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17949,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17945\/revisions\/17949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}