cerveral

Updated: June 25, 2025

I moved round with this man and heard him recite his tale three times, and every time he used just the same form of words, which he repeated pat like a lesson. His corruption of "cerebral" was amusing. "Nearly scattered the cerveral nerve, so help me!" he said. One could have understood it if he had been in the Spanish-American war. Another soldier used a word which I cannot explain.

Filson Young - The Relief of Mafeking: How it Was Accomplished by Mahon's Flying Column; with an Account of Some Earlier Episodes in the Boer War of 1899-1900

He was showing a mate how a bullet had entered his shoulder, "and," said he, "it penetrated me agamemnon." What is an agamemnon? It has been puzzling me ever since. Only a few of the more robust men were going on in this way, and there was enough of the pathetic even in the man with the "cerveral" nerve and him with the "agamemnon."

Filson Young - The Relief of Mafeking: How it Was Accomplished by Mahon's Flying Column; with an Account of Some Earlier Episodes in the Boer War of 1899-1900