h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What's unusual about this sentence?


Collier whingers drive handy Harlem butcher’s large phonic bittern


Icy

I'll bet it's a mnemonic for something terribly British.

Fairly international, actually.

I'm suspecting we need to decode the references for "collier whingers", "handy Harlem butcher", & "large phonic bittern".


I was playing with "miner whiners" and suspected more alliteration, but that didn't seem to pan out.

I don't know my wading birds enough to identify which bittern.
And I don't recognize the handy Harlem butcher amongst the list of famous NYC serial killers.

There is a partial link to NYC, but serial killers aren't involved

I am *so* relieved that serial killers aren't involved. Well, literally, yes, but also in a sarcastic way.

Is either Tyrone Jackson the Harlem Butcher referenced?

And as for the bird, are any of the following relevant:
"bog bumper", "stake driver", "thunder pumper", or "bog bull"?

Colliers whinger. Charles Windsor?

phonic bittern. Philip Battenberg?

I'm suspecting the meaning of the words is fairly irrelevant. Something about the play of the letters...

Yes, there is no Harlem butcher, as such. In fact, the NYC-related part of the solution hails from a different borough altogether.

Different burrow? Well, den........

It doesn't contain a "z"?

Harlem in Holland?

Butcher's = look? Colliers - miners? Whingers = moaners?

http://www.iamsterdam.com/en/plan-your-trip/day-trips/haarlem/haarlem-top-10

The Harlem butcher's got German connections

To go back to Dmitri's first comment: How on earth can you think that this is a mnemonic? Aren't they supposed to be easy to remember?

Maybe they're easy for *Icy* to remember.

As Recumbentman said earlier, this is a property of the words themselves (there aren't many I could use). I strung those I could into a sentence.

So it's the words, not the sentence. These are all words that display... (that's as far as I get)