Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor is a moderately successful play but not among Shakespeare's greatest hits. Nevertheless, there are two fragments of first-class witty dialogue that continue to tickle me even after all these years. The first is Falstaff's indignation at Parson Evans's Welsh-accented transformation of the words "cheese" and "butter." EVANS: Seese is not good to give putter. Your belly is all putter." FALSTAFF: "'Seese' and 'putter.' Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English." There's no mystery about the the imaginatively inappropriate word " fritters" — it simply means chopped meat fried in a batter. I don't know why "fritters" amuses me so, but it does. It's off-target and off-kilter and yet so very concrete and specific.
The second, and even funnier moment, is when Anne Page, one of the few sensible characters in the play, makes it clear that she won't marry the foolish Dr. Caius. "Alas," she says, "I had rather be set quick i'th'earth/ And bowled to death with turnips." "Set quick" means "buried alive," presumably up to the neck, but it's the lovely, unexpected "turnips" that produces the laughter, perhaps because no one before or since has thought to employ the usually harmless vegetable as a deadly weapon. I read the police blotters, I should know.
For the record, Shakespeare never, In the 38+ plays, used either word again. He knew that he had squeezed meaning enough out of both "fritters" and "turnips."
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