Response to the young narrator's question, "Are you lost, daddy?" in Ring Lardner's humorous novel The Young Immigrunts:

The lease said about my and my fathers trip from the Bureau of Manhattan to our new home the soonest mended. In some way ether I or he got balled up on the grand concorpse and next thing you know we was thretning to swoop down on Pittsfield.

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.

Shut up he explained.

Sometimes quoted as an example of a writer breaking the rules of "good" writing in order to produce better writing. In this case (though of course to dissect humor is to kill it), the father's growing frustration at the misadventures he suffers while moving his family East is more effectively conveyed by the use of a mild and reasonable word like "explained" with a jaw-grinding expression of anger that is anything but an explanation.