English As She Is Spoke was written by the Portuguese author Pedro Carolino as a conversation guide for Portuguese students. Carolino knew little English and had no Portuguese-English dictionary, so he translated each entry through a Portuguese-French phrasebook and then a French-English dictionary. The result is full of baffling lines such as 'You come too rare' and 'These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth.' The book includes dialogues, letters and a section of idioms, and it is now loved as a classic of unintentional comedy. Mark Twain wrote the introduction to the first English edition, calling it perfect and impossible to imitate.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.