I should like to think that inhabitants of other worlds, or other parts of one existence, have been teleported to this earth. How I’d like it, if I were teleported the other way, has nothing to do with what I’d like to think has befallen somebody else. But I can’t say that our own stories, anyway so far, have the neat and convincing finish of the conventional stories. Toward the end of the year 1850, or I should say a “mysterious stranger,” was found wandering in a village near Frankfort-on-the-Oder. How he got there, nobody knew. See the Athenæum, April 15, 1851. We are told that his knowledge of German was imperfect. [...] The man was taken to Frankfort where he told his story, or where, to pose as a linguist, somebody told one for him. It was told that his name was Joseph Vorin, and that he had come from Laxaria. Laxaria is in Sakria, and Sakria is far from Europe — “beyond vast oceans.”
In the London Daily Mail, Sept. 18, 1905, and following issues, are accounts of a young man who had been arrested in Paris, charged with vagrancy. It was impossible to understand him. In vain had he been tried with European and Asiatic languages, but, by means of signs, he had made known that he had come from Lisbian. Eisar was the young man’s word for a chair: a table was a lotoba, and his sonar was his nose. Mr. George R. Sims, well-known criminologist, as well as a story writer, took the matter up scientifically. As announced by him, the mystery had been solved by him. The young man, an impostor, had transposed letters, in fashioning his words. So the word raise, transposed, becomes eisar. But what has a raise to do with a chair? It is said that true science is always simple. A chair raises one, said Mr. Sims, simply. Now take the word sonar. As we see, when Mr. Sims points it out to us, that word is a transposition of the word snore, or is almost. That’s noses, or relation to noses.
(Aus “Lo!“, 1931)
