Comment by ggm

Terence Gilmartin did his best translating Proust, but he leaned on Scott Moncrieff who had gone before. The semicolon count in those pages is pretty high.

I am very fond of the (apocryphal?) "peccavi" telegram from 1843: after annexing the Indian province of Sind, British General Sir Charles Napier sent home the least costly, least wordy report he could.

There's also one Richard Rhodes uses, well two: Oppie had been banned from secret status and wanted to know the result of the H bomb tests so he asked if it was "girl or boy" -the sexist usage of the time made "girl" pretty obviously a fizzle. The guy charged with commissioning huge volumes of liquified duterium to make "mike" class bombs had to be told to stop when Lithium Duteride solid shells worked: "why by cows when you can get powdered milk"