What is surgical operation?

Famous quotes containing the words surgical and/or operation:

    With all the surgical skill and the vital rays lavished on him he should talk like a—like a congressman at a filibuster.
    —Kenneth Langtry. Herbert L. Strock. Prof. Frankenstein (Whit Bissell)

    It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.
    Sydney Smith (1771–1845)