Today we mark the 1829 birth of writer Charles Dudley Warner. Even if you knew Warner was a newspaper editor and published more than a dozen books, we'd guess you'd be hard-pressed to come up with even one of the three phrases associated with him. (来源：EnglishCN.com)

We begin with his pithy four word observation, "Politics makes strange bedfellows," which first appeared in The Hartford Courant and was included in Warner's 1870 book, My Summer in a Garden.

Then, in 1873, Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain published a novel of social and political criticism featuring speculators and their greedy schemes in post-Civil War America. Its title, The Gilded Age, lives on as a name for an era of gross materialism and blatant political corruption. Word lovers note with approval the choice of the word gilded over golden. Gilded suggests excess or superficial splendor, a showy imitation of a golden age.

Finally, in 1897, in an unsigned editorial, today's birthday boy wrote a particularly trenchant remark about the way things are. "Everybody talks about the weather," pointed out Warner, "but nobody does anything about it."

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