If someone says that they’re vegan but you find out that they occasionally eat a box of fried chicken when they’re very drunk or very sad, they’re not necessarily wokefishing you - they’re just human.

His pinched face, with its wispish silver growths, bent pince-nez, cap crushed slightly on one side, and air of portentous, almost lunatic solemnity, lent itself to more than portraiture.

And if you happen to turn one of them over, you'd discover not the single row of belly scales characteristic of snakes but several rows of small scales indicative of lizardry.

[…]if thou woldest an eel or a laumprun holde with streite hondis, how myche strengerli thou thristis, so myche the sunnere it shal sliden awey.