“Car Door Handle in Lung 4 Years”

The title of this post was a headline I found while looking through microfilm Friday afternoon. It reads like something you’d see on the front page of a supermarket tabloid, but I didn’t find this one in the National Enquirer. This was in a 1943 issue of Ingalls News, the newspaper for Ingalls Shipyard. Paul Trehern, a cost clerk at the shipyard, unknowingly lived with a car-door handle in his right lung for nearly four years before he had it removed. How in the world does a door handle end up inside a person? And how does a person go on for that long without knowing it’s there?

Trehern, a Gulfport native, was riding his bicycle in 1939 when a car driven by a Florida tourist struck him, throwing him against the side of the vehicle. Trehern suffered an inch-and-a-half long wound on his right side and was rushed to the hospital with blood gushing from the injury. When he was thrown against the car, the door handle entered him, punctured his lung, and completely broke off from the car door. At the hospital, a doctor closed the wound with 23 stitches and took X-rays, but found no evidence any foreign object.

Trehern spent the next four years in pain. He was in so much pain, according to the article, that the only way he could sleep comfortably was by sitting in an upright position. Apparently, the pain wasn’t enough to keep him away from sports, though. A high school student at the time of the accident, Trehern was a member of the Gulfport High School boxing team, which is remarkable considering the unknown extent of his injury. Medical authorities of the day who were familiar with the case noted that a body blow in the right place would probably have killed Trehern instantly.

The car door handle was finally discovered during a medical exam at the state sanatorium in Magee, where it was removed by one of the state’s leading chest doctors. Trehern had to give up a rib in the process, but my guess is that he probably didn’t mind it that much.

Dirty Rotten Crums

This blog post originally appeared 5/9/2008.

Microfilm research can be tedious and tiresome. One of the treats microfilm gives in return are jewels like the following.

Wanted-- Fifty healthy cats to rid my place of rats. I will pay one dollar apiece for them if delivered to my residence at nine o'clock this Thursday night.... William Pettibone.

Winona Advance, Winona, MS April 18, 1884

He must have had an enormous rat population! I am vehemently opposed to thinking about that many rats at one time! Did people bring him fifty cats? Did he loose them all at at once like some sort of invading army to ransack and pillage the rat population? What did he do with the fifty cats once they had disposed of the rats? Oh, the things to ponder while scanning microfilm...

$29.50 Reward.... On last Friday night I had the misfortune to leave our Ford truck on the street in front of Campbell's photography gallery and during the night some low down crum maliciously cut my back tire with his pocket knife. I am offering the above reward for the low down scoundrel who done it. It is not the value of the tire I care for, it is the principle involved. I wish that I could have put in print what I would like to say about the scoundrel, but our editor refuses to publish..... Branch Grocery Company.

Winona Times, Winona, MS April 4, 1919

This appeal brought tears to my eyes. This poor man was willing to pay a reward that probably equalled the price of the tire that the lousy crum slashed. It is so very satisfactory to read that it was only the principle of the thing that concerned him! I wonder if any newspaper editors today would have published what the victim wanted to say about that rotten crum? I think I will make crum my word of the day.

-Tracy

Goodbye, Librarianship. Hello, Prestidigitatorship.

This blog post originally appeared 4/11/2008.

You know what it's time for, right? More tidbits from my Schott's Almanac Page-a-Day calendar!


Today's topic is Occupations of Note. "Librarian" seems so...obvious now. Here are some of the best ones:

Amanuensis: secretary
Bowyer: maker of archery bows
Colporteur*: door-to-door bookseller
Ecdysiast: striptease artist
Funambulist: tightrope walker
Ocularist**: false eye manufacturer
Prestidigitator: sleight of hand magician
Whitesmith: polisher of metalwork

*Interestingly, this guy was not one.

**Has anyone read Flannery O'Connor's short story "Good Country People"? I can't hear about a false eye or a prosthetic limb without immediately thinking of that story.

-Tracy

You Say Srimp, I Say Shrimp. (And Then I Go Research the Issue.)

I'm always interested in the various ways people pronounce words. We don't get a lot of to-MAY-to vs. to-MAH-to disputes around here (it's more like to-MAY-to vs. mater), but one word I have always been curious about is the alternate pronunciation of shrimp. Instead of the sh- sound at the beginning, I have noticed that some people pronounce it srimp. Who's correct? And why don't these folks also pronounce shrub as srub?

I turned to the trusty Oxford English Dictionary, and as usual, it explained it all. There's one official way to pronounce ye olde shrimp, and it's with the sh sound at the beginning. So why do I keep hearing about srimp étouffée?

Apparently I am not the only one for whom this question is a burning issue, but my company is small. I could find only one article that addresses the mighty shrimp vs. srimp debate, from a December 1941 issue of American Speech. In it, the author, George Reese, quickly points out that a variation is not incorrect, but rather, he endeavors to find out the source of it. Apparently swapping out the sh- for a s- is common in many areas of England and dates back to the 13th century. In the United States, it's usually confined to the South and creeps up the Atlantic seaboard. Virginians seem especially fond of their srimp cocktails.

While Reese makes the claim that it's not incorrect to use this variation, he does quote at length from an 1856 text, Punctuation and Improprieties of Speech, which goes beyond the polite term "incorrect." Allow me to quote at length as well, because I find it hilarious:

"Sometimes the words shrink, shriek, shrine, &c., are pronounced as if written srink, sriek, srine, the letter h being entirely suppressed. This is the affected pronunciation of over-refined school girls, who cannot bring themselves to utter the homely English sound of sh when combined with an r, for fear apparently of distorting their faces. The utterance of this combination of sounds certainly does require a projection of the lips beyond what is beautiful, but still all good authority requires that these and similar words should have the full sound of the sh as in show, shine" (253).

Am I the only one who finds this a laugh riot? I'm imagining a bunch of 19th century schoolgirls huddling together and making fun of the brave girl who dares to extend her lips beyond what is beautiful in order to shriek, "Which one of you shrews placed a shriveled shrimp on my shroud?"

Reese, George H. "Pronunciation of 'Shrimp,' 'Shrub,' and Similar Words. American Speech. Vol. 16, No. 4 (Dec. 1941), pp. 251-255.

Baby Come Back. You Can Blame It All On Me!

If you've recently tried to contact us through Meebo and didn't get a response, please come back. We've been experimenting a little with Meebo but now we're going back to basics. So, if you have a question, just type it in the Meebo box and we will be ready.

Exploring The Romance Precision Booksearch

This blog post orginally appeared 4/3/2008.

Yesterday while searching for a novel with a certain character's name in it for a patron, Elisabeth found this romance novel search engine from AllReaders.com. When she first sent me the link, I thought, ok, big deal. And then I examined some of the categories more closely.


I'm not so sure about how well the engine actually works, but the categories are so entertainingly thorough that I am led to believe that there are enough romance novels with those characteristics to justify the options.

Events At MLC

Here's a link for our meebo patron who asked if we have an events calendar.
http://www.mlc.lib.ms.us/aboutmlc/calendar.html

If you are looking for computer classes or other public training events, check your local library's home page. Or, better yet, contact the reference department here at MLC and we'll be happy to find a class near you.