Distict* (for District*)

A distich is defined as "two successive lines of verse regarded as a unit; a couplet." The shortest distich in the English language is very likely Strickland Gillilan's "Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes": Adam/Had 'em. Gillilan is probably better known, though, for his longer and more sentimental poem "The Reading Mother," which closes with the lines: Richer than I you can never be/I had a Mother who read to me. (I did too, and she started doing it pretty much as soon as I was born, which happens to have been the same year Strickland Gillilan died.) There were 44 cases of Distict* in OhioLINK this morning and, while it may be tempting to temporarily quarantine them into a sort of district for infectious typos, it would probably be better to just buckle down and, like Adam, get at 'em.

("Microbe" by Nevit Dilmen, 2009, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid