By David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton
For more than a century, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories have delighted millions of "children of all ages" with their unique combination of over-the-top, exaggerated portentousness and scrumptious hyper-elocutionary wordplay. The first of these stories, "How the Whale Got His Throat," begins:
IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth—so!