Literary coincidences: 1

The other day someone - apologies: I don't recall... - told me that the real reason for what we commonly understand as leprous disfigurement is not the leprosy, per se, but the steady accretion of the constant damage sufferers unwittingly do themselves, on account of their non-functioning nerve-endings [approx.].

I wasn't really sure that I believed him (this explanation, somehow, didn't seem to cover it); but, since the only thing I had to offer on the subject was the 'How did you know it wasn't contagious?' scene from Papillon, I held my whisht.

Today, though, Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life - borrowed from my wife because I'd run out of Audible credits and needed something to listen to while I was out walking the dog - confirms that this is true.

Got Wood?

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 107

Books I've actually finished lately: 106

At the foot of my stairs, a small boy was spelling out my name on the name-plate. His mother yanked him away impatiently. "Come along," she said. "It's no good reading that. She's been dead for years."

- Olave, Lady Baden-Powell

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 105

'Forking that guy's repo'

I think it's a very special sort of hell where you're compelled to explain to a journalist some terrible throwaway joke you made ten months earlier - and the journalist keeps saying, "I'm sorry, I still don't get it."

- Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 104

Unwittingly or otherwise, the reader here appears to be channelling Alec Guinness...

InDefinition - 82

Herewith, n. Saxon saint of bureacratic terminology

Favourite footnotes: 11

I may have been wrong about this.

- Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist

Books I've actually finished lately: 103

After I publish a text on semiotics, I devote my time either to recognizing what was wrong or to demonstrating that those who did not understand it in the way I meant were misreading it. 

- Umberto Eco

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 102

NB I am not a fan of Mr William Hootkins.

'Etymology'

While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.

- Richard Hackluyt*, Principal Navigations (in Melville, Moby-Dick: 'Etymology - Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School')

--
* wonderfully misspelled by Melville, in all his sanctimony

Books I've actually finished lately: 101

The first rule of Sheep Club is you do not talk about Sheep Club.

- James Rebanks

Also feat. Beyoncé, Rajasthanis, and the number of balls a ram/tup should have.

(It's two, apparently.)

InDefinition - 81

inlawcest, n. sic

Favourite footnotes: 10

This article was amended on 12 January 2016: in the picture caption, Matthew Collings was initially misidentified as William Boyd; the painting by Stephen Finer was wrongly attributed by the provider to David Bowie

- The Guardian (but of course), in a William Boyd article about an artist he and Bowie had made up