How now, wit; whither wander you?

Grandpa gave me this book mid-summer, and since then it's been the book I fall asleep to: read a few pages of quips every other day or so before nodding off. There also sections where the author, Mardy Grothe, explains what his definitions of ripostes, rejoinders, chiastic repartee, and oxymoronic repartee are. Most of the clever comebacks are part of legend and lore now.

The book is a bit heavy on the Winston Churchill, Mae West, Dorothy Parker, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. It's also sectioned off into chapters like Political Repartee, Sports Repartee, Literary Repartee, Stage and Screen Repartee, Chiastic Repartee, and Risque Repartee (which is all pretty tame, though Grothe warns readers not to read if they are easily shocked and offended).

My only quibble is the delivery style, where the smackdown delivery is formatted so that the rank-off comment is isolated and bolded, and the reader left to admire and exalt the word of wit, like so:

Oh snap! That was a good one!

I'm a little unsure why I was randomly given this book. Did some cousin complain that I was too often smacking them down (if so, I have my suspicions which one...)? Or did Grandpa think I was sorely lacking in the mental preparedness arena, and needed help formulating comebacks? I guess I'll never know for sure, though I'm confident it's neither!

So, in memoriam, here's one I think Grandpa would have liked:

"In the fourth century B.C., ... Sparta was at war with Macedonia, which was ruled at the time by Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. As Philip and his army gathered on the outskirts of the city, he send a message to Spartan leaders: 'You are advised to submit immediately. If I enter Laconia, I shall raze Sparta to the ground.' The Spartans defiantly [replied]:

If."