Linguist, lexicographer, writer, editor, broadcaster

There’s a right way and a wrong way, for instance, to get hit by a car

“I had to get all sorts of shots beforehand, just to swim in the Hudson, you know? I had like tetanus, like a gamma globulin shot. It’s a pretty dirty river, I guess. I’ve heard it’s gotten much better in the last few years but that it used to be odds were like one out of three that if you dove into the Hudson you were going to get hepatitis. (Laughs.) Anyway, all sorts of people tried to tell me how dirty it was. I mean, the doctor even told me when he gave me the shots, he’s like, ‘You realize what you’re doing here, right? You know, what the hell are you doing swimming in the Hudson River?’ And I’m, like, ‘I don’t know. It’s a paycheck.’ And it was no big thing, I didn’t even catch a cold.”

author avatar
Grant Barrett