Mrs. Malaprop appeared in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals.
She had a habit of misusing words in sentences like “I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning.”
The character gave rise to the term malapropism.
The source of the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) was John Milton’s poem “Lycidas” (1637). Milton asks his dead friend, now an angel, to look back compassionately on his still-living friends: Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: And, 0 ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
These occupations of characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400) refer to the following: summoner—an officer who summoned suspects before the ecclesiastical courts canon’s yeoman—an attendant of a canon; a canon was a clergyman associated with a cathedral or large church franklin—a prosperous country man of low birth manciple—a steward of a community of lawyers…
English was not spoken in England until 449, when three Germanic tribes from Denmark, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, invaded Britain. The Angles, who settled along the east coast of north and central England, developed literate culture and gave their name to the country (Angle-land, England). The language of these tribes, Anglo-Saxon or Old English,…
Cabaret was based on the play I Am a Camera (1951) by John Van Druten, which was in turn based on Isherwood’s “Sally Bowles,” a story appearing in Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Isherwood lived in Berlin in the early 1930s.
In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Santiago catches a marlin.
Yes, there a real Baron Miinchausen. Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Miinchausen (1720-1797), a German adventurer, is believed to have served in the Russian army against the Turks. He was known for exaggerating his exploits. Satirical stories about him were told by Rodolf Erich Raspe in Baron Miinchausen, Narrative of his Marvellous Travels (1785).