The following is a serier of excerpts from a book entitled Anguished English. The book is a compilation of malapropisms and misspellings that have appeared on student examinations at the secondary school level. Here's a chance for those of us who did not pay attention in school to learn it all once again! "Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies, and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the dessert and travelled by Camelot. The climate was hot and dry so they had to cultivate by irritation. "The pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain. The Egyptions built the pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. "The Greeks were a highly scupltured people, and without them we would not have history. The Geeks invented three kinds of columns: corinthian, ironic and dorc. They also had myths, which are female moths. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. "Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. He died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline. "In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, threw the java, and hurled the bisquits. "The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands. "When they fought with the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men. "Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place very long. "Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him. Dying, he gasped out the words, 'Tee hee, Brutus'. "Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them. "Rome came to have too many luxuries and baths. The Romans took two baths in two days, and that's the cause of the fall of Rome. Today, Rome is full of fallen arches. "Then came the Middle Ages, where everyone was middle-aged. King Alfred conquered the Dames. Victims of the blue bonnet plague grew [appendages] on their necks. Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense. "In midevil times, people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer. During this time, people put on morality plays about ghosts, goblins, virgins and other mythical creatures. "Next came the Renaissance. They built big chruches with flying buttocks. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. It was the painter Donatello's interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. "The government of England was a limited mockery. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen". Her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo. "It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenburg invented the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper. "The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. Writing at the same time was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained. "During the Renaissance, America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Fe. "One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Eventually, the Colonists won the war and no longer had to pay for taxis. "Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jeffereson and Benjaminn Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin invented electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared 'A horse divided against itself cannot stand'. Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead. "Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms. "Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infance, and he was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands. Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Addresss while traveling from Washington to Gettysburn on the back of an envelope. He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theather and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career. "Meanwhile, in Eurpope, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltaire wrote a book called Candy. Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees. "Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between, he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Back died from 1750 to the present. "Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large. "Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He expired in 1827 and later died for this. "France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accompolished before it happened and catapulted into Napoleon. Napoleon wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't have any children. "The sun never sets on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the east and the sun sets in the west. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on the thorn for 63 years. Her death was the final event which ended her reign. "The nineteenth century was a time of great many thoughts and inventions...people started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Madman Curie discovered radio. Charles Darwin wrote the Organ of the Species. Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers. "The First World War, caused by the assignation of the arch-duck by an anahist ushered in a new error in the anals of human history. Aren't you glad to know how it all really happened?