K Facts: "Klopstock, in his Messiah, makes the Magi six in number, and gives the names as Hadad, Selima, Zimri, Mirja, Beled and Sunith."17 In Literature: • "I drank my tea quietly, going on at the same time with my interrupted afternoon reading of [Goethe's] Sorrows of Werther, in which I had reached a part that has a special fascination for me every time I read it -- that part where Werther first meets Lotte, and where, after a thunderstorm; they both go to the window, and she is so touched by the beauties of nature that she lays her hand on his and murmurs 'Klopstock,' -- to the complete dismay of the reader, though not of Werther, for he, we find, was so carried away by the magic word that he flung himself on to her hand and kissed it with tears of rapture. I looked up from the book at the quiet pools and the black line of trees, above which stars were beginning to twinkle, my ears soothed by the splashing of the mill stream and the hooting somewhere near of a solitary owl, and I wondered whether, if the Man of Wrath were by my side, it would be a relief to my pleasurable feelings to murmur 'Klopstock,' and whether if I did he would immediately shed tears of joy over my hand. The name is an unfortunate one as far as music goes, and Goethe's putting it into his heroine's mouth just when she was most enraptured, seems to support the view I sometimes adopt in discoursing to the Man of Wrath that he had no sense of humour. But here I am talking about Goethe, our great genius and idol, in a way that no woman should." -- Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer (1899) • In 1748, Klopstock, "in the three opening cantos of his Messias, sounded that morning call of joyous idealism and exalted individualism which was to be the dominant note of the best in all modern German literature. No one has more vividly described the magic spell which the name of Klopstock exercised upon all aspiring minds of the middle of the eighteenth century than Goethe in The Sorrows of Werther." -- Kuno Francke, Social Forces in German Literature (1896) Klptzyxm Origins: This magic word comes from the Superman comic books. Facts: "The imp known as Mr. Mxyztplk [later changed to Mxyzptlk] first appeared in our dimension in Superman # 0 (1st series, 1944) . . . For those who haven't seen the original story, you can find it in The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told trade paperback. The bald little fellow in the purple suit and green bowtie creates all kind of havoc. . . . Mxy describes himself as a 17 Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama: Volume II (1892)