putterings       542   <   543   >   544       index

The “Homo Fiend”...
“muttering and puttering and buttering his bread”
 

My Dear Friendly Friends :
      I know you will be interested in the returns to the prize contest started in the April Volta Review. In that number we announced that we would give a dollar for the best letter on “The Funniest Thing That Ever Happened to Me Because of My Deafness.” The award goes to Mrs. Ida H. Wilson, of Columbus, Ohio. Here is her letter:

      In cultivating a sense of humor, along with speech reading, I seem to have collected a sack full of funny things which happen to me nearly every day. Shall I shake the sack in hopes that the funniest of all may come to the top? Or shall I shut my eyes and “grab” for one of the funny things from this jolly bag of funnies?
      The “Homo Fiend” (see his photograph in the May issue of the Volta Review [ link ]) must always be reckoned with! When he is not “muttering and puttering and buttering his bread” he is sure to be engaged in other performances equally disconcerting. One morning he played a trick on me.
      I was feeling unusually virtuous, because the house had religiously been set in order, dishes washed, floors swept, and fragrant soup merrily simmering for the children’s lunch. All this, too, with the unopened pages of the Volta beckoning in a most tantalizing way. Faithfully I attended to “duty first,” then with a happy sigh, was soon lost in the inspiring pages.
      It may have been hours, or only a minute, before my nephew appeared in the doorway. I understood him to say something about “soup boiling over.”
      He probably thought I had taken leave of my senses, when I sprang from my chair, dashed the beloved Volta from me, and rushed madly toward the kitchen! Pell-mell I ran, only to find the soup at the same modest simmer. Following me in amazement, my nephew asked,
      “What is the matter with you?”
      “Didn’t you say that the soup was boiling over?”
      “Why no! I said that 'Zupe’ was born in Dover.”
      “Zupe was a shiny little ebony maid recently become a member of our household. She had explained. “Yass’m, my name’s Susan-Susanna Matilda Jefferson, but dey calls me ‘Zupe’ fo’ short.”
      Soup boiling over!
      Shades of the Homo Fiend. But what a merry laugh he gave us!

      The next letter, while not a personal experience, and therefore not fulfilling one of the conditions of the prize contest is certainly good enough to quote...

ex “The Friendly Corner” in Volta Review “For the Deaf, the Hard of Hearing, and Their Friends” 26:6 (June 1924) : 48
Harvard copy/scan (via google books) : link

—

homophenous words, homophenous sentences — words that look alike in their oral manifestation, that “seem the same to the eye.” These are of critical importance for lip-reading, of which the Volta Review was a proponent.
      See “A Proposal by Context,” by Marian J. Anderson, whose characters are Miss Tactless, Miss Neighbor, and Miss Bright : 559-61 (560) : link
 

5 August 2025