the giblets of perquisquilian toys

I am enchanted by today's Worthless Word: perquisquilian. While this means "thoroughly worthless", and is thus a vital piece of additional vocabulary in our throw-away consumerist age, the kicker is the quote from whence it springs:

It is a most unworthy thing for men that have bones in them, to spend their lives in making fiddle cases for futilous women's fancies: which are the very pettitoes of infirmity, the giblets of perquisquilian toys.

I have never heard of Nathanial Ward, nor his tome The Simple Cobler of Aggawam, which apparently dates from 1647. But I have to say, rampant sexism aside, those seventeenth century Puritans can turn a phrase. "Men that have bones in them." "Futilous women's fancies." "The very pettitoes of infirmity." Don't the words just roll off your tongue? You can spit them like grapeseeds, satisfyingly.

I was going to talk about dalmations as the next outbreak of Retro Kiddielit, but Mr. Ward has infected me with the need for rounded, sonorous prose. Thus, James Thurber! But not Thirteen Clocks, which is a given. Not even The White Deer, passionate to it though my devotion is. Thurber's The Wonderful O is slightly too sophisticated and thoughtful to be strictly a children's book, but it's one of the happy childhood literary memories I owe to my grandfather. Apart from being a buried treasure mystery, pirate story, romance and comedy, The Wonderful O is also social satire, word game, moral treatise and profound exercise in signification. The pirates Black and Littlejack, with their parrot (who whupples "geep!"), arrive on the island of Ooroo with a treasure map. Black has a problem with the letter O, since his mother became wedged in a porthole one night. He and his bully-boys ban the letter O on the island, and all words which use it, and all the objects described by the words. The bemused islanders are forced to contemplate a world without opals, moonstones, love-notes, lockets, options, moss, moles, mortgages or owls in oaks. Thurber always had a love-affair with assonance, and it's allowed to roll forth in wonderful prose, pointing the flatness of the language without Os. Black and Littlejack are doomed, of course: their greed blinds them to the point, that the treasure is in freedom, honour, hope and other good O-words, and they are routed from Ooroo by the power of the unmutilated word. I love this book: it's apparently nonsense, but the things it's about are real.