When Wilde originally wrote Earnest he never intended Lady Bracknell to be quite so gorgonlike. She became the stereotyped domineering and antagonistic mother-in-law in George Alexander's reworked version.

For example, he compares the monumental conquest of Mount Rushmore by Europeans, in which landscape became manscape, with the indigenous Lakota people's desire to honor the Great Spirit, Wakonda […]

The young newcomer is wiping the floor with the more experienced players.

[…] my chiefest design ever since the seventeenth year of my age […] consisted in elaborating such demonstrations in Natural Philosophy, as might serve to unfold the natures of Beings in relation to the Art of Physick, hitherto so uncertain, blind, and unfounded on Art […]