Hulloa!

Besides rules, the embryonic phone book also featured pages of tips on placing calls — pick up the receiver and tell the operator whom you want — and how to talk on this gadget. Having a real conversation, for example, required rapidly transferring the telephone between mouth and ear.

“When you are not speaking, you should be listening,” it says at one point.

You should begin by saying, “Hulloa,” and when done talking, the book says, you should say, “That is all.”

The other person should respond, “O.K.” —NYT

Hanging on the telephone

"Now it may be," he typed, "that every other recorded instant of gold made by fire—there are hundreds of them, almost all seeming to be variant on a few themes, like old comedy plots—maybe every one is false, the product of mendacity or wishful thinking or the accumulating errors of multiple transmission, history's game of Telephone that always pushes anecdotes to clarity, wonder, or exemplum. Maybe this is the one and only real one we know about, the one that slipped through the baffle of advancing Time that falsified all the others, to reach us like Job's servant out of the wreckage of the former world: I only am escaped alone to tell thee." —John Crowley, Daemonomania

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. —Cormac McCarthy, The Road

* * *

From a recent game of Telephone:

When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.


(First line of E.B. White's Stuart Little)

After 14 permutations:

When the steward sees this person arrive, they all get very quiet.