"... I was teaching 'Tristram Shandy' that semester so I ordered the audiobook and then, by mistake, I listened to the whole thing on shuffle play. Without realizing it."

"Only later did I come to understand this is what Sterne wanted! In 1767!"

Said Jill Lepore, quoted in "The Best Book Jill Lepore Ever Got as a Present Is One She Hates" (NYT). The headline refers to a copy of "Little Women," a gift from her mother — "It drove me crazy, the daffiness of the 19th-century girl."

I confess I've never read "Tristram Shandy," but I know it's structurally weird. Wikipedia says the author's "narrative structure digresses through many jumbled and fragmentary events into a non-traditional, dual overlapping plot." It really is very funny that the professor who was teaching the book listened to it on shuffle — that is, with the chapters in random order.

Lawrence O'Donnell learns the word "beclown."

Have you ever used the word beclown? I haven’t. Thank you @JRubinBlogger for this perfect word. https://t.co/Hg4kPshIbv

— Lawrence O'Donnell (@Lawrence) October 21, 2019

I guess Lawrence O'Donnell hasn't been reading Instapundit over the years, because "beclown" is a favorite word over there. Here are all the "beclown"s on Instapundit, the oldest one being this, from 2007:

I LOVE THIS PHRASE: “BECLOWNED HIMSELF.” It fits.

He loved it, and he remembered to use it. We'll see if O'Donnell, newly infatuated with "beclown," remembers it.

I checked my archive, and I see I've never used "beclown," never even quoted it. But the second place I check is the OED, and it is there, under the entry for the prefix "be-." And the quote is from 1609:

1609 S. Rowlands Whole Crew Kind Gossips 24 O wretch, O Lob, who would be thus beclown'd?

There are lots of "be-" words attested to by the OED — "bedoctor," "befinger," "berascal," "bebutter," "becobweb," "bepimple" (to choose a tiny handful).

Here's something Laurence Sterne wrote in "Tristram Shandy" (1769): "[T]he souls of connoisseurs... by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu'd—be-pictured,—be-butterflied, and be-fiddled."

I am amused (not bemused (which means puzzled)).