Max Klinger, Tod am Wasser (Der pinkelnde Tod) / Death by the Water (Death Pissing). Oil on canvas, 95 x 45 cm. 1881. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
"The p is silent, as in swimming,"
my new office mate Mrs. Simpson said.
I was eighteen; I didn't know diddly-squat—
save that she was too old for me, and yet . . .
(But somewhere, too, a Mr. Simpson surely slept!)
Sixty-six years on, alas, she's dead.
(Athough it might be maybe not.)
If one had known then what now's perforce forgot . . .
(Ah, what one so often wished one knew!)
"Youth's a terrible thing to waste on the young," quips GBS's aperçu.
Notes: GBS is the familiar abbreviation for George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), still celebrated in the 1950s as a playwright and critic.
At least until the appearance ofThe Simpsons on television, the p in Simpson was not pronounced in the "British English" current in South Africa.