A Google search within this site tells me that I've used the phrase "in other words" 48 times in the past. (Actually, the search is on the entire muse site which the site of the Knowledge Technology Lab of the School of Education of Tel Aviv University. The phrase has been used 67 times in the site, but 19 of those [I checked] aren't mine.) That suggests that the phrase is a rather common one, and sure enough, a general web search on Google tells us that it shows up on 6,330,000 web pages. I don't know how many of those 48 times I felt the urge to quote from one of my favorite books, though I've definitely thought about doing so. This time I decided that I had to seize the opportunity.

Toward the end of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (referred to three previous times in these columns - look them up yourself by making a site specific search in Google) Milo encounters the Everpresent Wordsnatcher. This particular bird is especially adept at, well, taking the words out of your mouth, and making them mean something different than what you intended:

"Well, I thought that by ---" he tried again desperately. "That's a different story," interjected the bird a bit more amiably. "If you want to buy, I'm sure I can arrange to sell, but with what you're doing you'll probably end up in a cell anyway." "That doesn't seem right," said Milo helplessly, for, with the bird taking everything the wrong way, he hardly knew what he was saying. "Agreed," said the bird, with a sharp click of his beak, "but neither is it left, although if I were you I would have left a long time ago." "Let me try once more," he said in an effort to explain. "In other words ---" "You mean you have other words?" cried the bird happily. "Well, by all means, use them. You're certainly not doing very well with the ones you have now."

Amazon's wonderful "Search inside this book" function greatly speeded up finding that quote. Of course it might have been quite a bit more enjoyable simply to read through the entire book until I found it, but though I knew it was there, my guess as to just where it was (p. 205) was quite off the mark. Running a search via amazon helped me find the quote in less than five minutes.