(Oh my, they let a kid collect their data for them? It sounds like a grade-school book report. From an earlier grade.)

I'm morally certain that readers of this blog, and people within one degree of separation of them, can account for "well over 1,500 copies" on our own.

Given that, I don't know what the rest of the world has been reading.

Every single entry is objectionable in some way. This has to be a joke.

Surely nobody cares about the actual facts when they look at this kind of stuff!

I believe Jo is referring to the famous passage from the New York Times, frequently cited as an argument for the use of the serial or "Oxford" comma: "By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

This reminds me of the fact-checking story a journalist friend told me ages ago:

"John Smith has the biggest private bug collection in the US." (This could be checked fairly easily, but instead)

-->"The collection, which Smith says is the largest private collection in the US."
--> "John Smith's collection is among the largest in the US"
--> "John Smith has a very large bug collection"

and then, as the story is being sent to press at 2 in the morning, because one of the senior editors heard something interesting at a cocktail party

"The rufous-eared stag beetle [photo below from the collection of John Smythe] can live in hibernation for as long as 270 years."

Thanks for the explanation; I'd never run across that one before. I really do need to figure out how to incorporate it into the Bigglethwaite & Windemere entry on the Oxford comma.

Back to the bibliographical goofs: not only is the Lensman series not "the first set of science fiction novels conceived as a series," it's not even the first series by Doc Smith -- the Skylark books preceded it. (I'm not sure it's possible to say for certain who wrote the first series conceived ab initio as a series.)

Also, "First Lensman was first published as a hardcover book in 1950" is misleading. I'm not sure of its first hardcover date, but it was first published in Amazing in 1931, where it was immensely popular and influential.

I'm aware that I may be criticized for speaking too harshly when I say this, but they didn't even check that thing against Wikipedia.

Wow, must be a shortage of zeros somewhere.

The Fount of All Knowledge has its first release in hardcover in 1950, and notes that (though it was chronologically the second) it was the last of the Lensman books to be written.

As for the list ... so much wrong with it. Painful.

The list of "sources" hurts my head.

(Subtext: "We think we can risk 'Vinge' but 'Haldeman' looks a bit long and hard to spell.")

A year or two ago a colleague showed me an article in a print copy of the New Statesman, an actual print copy. I've read bits of the NS online for years but hadn't handled a print copy since the 90s. This reminded me of how file-sharing was done in the old days: you sat on one of the comfy seats in the Periodicals section of the university library, identified who was reading the magazine you wanted, and read something else for a while and waited to pounce when they put it back on the shelf. NS must have had a readership of 10 or 20 times its circulation. Non-purchasers Getting A Free Ride is as old as print. (Did Morwenna Phelps ever buy a single new book? I forget.)

How do you pronounce leauge? I make it leege (soft g), but arguably the 'eau' should be pronounced as in 'beautiful' except that I can't.

#9 Steve

Ow. Possibly you should take MEAUSRES, though.

Ben Hecht's autobiography mentions journalists (or maybe just him) inventing an earthquake in Chicago. They were giants in those days.

I just read RA Wilson's Email to the Universe which has a great deal about the unreliability of a lot of what's in people's minds. One of my favorite bits from Illuminatus! was about a man who had file cabinets full of material about the first Kennedy assassination, in the hopes that someday he'd find one more piece of information which would make it all make sense. Little did he realize that a great deal of it was people lying to cover their asses, and a lot of the rest was people just making things up.

None of which is intended to say that it's bad to care about statements being accurate or that it's not worth slagging nonsense presented as factual-- it's just that a lot of people don't care about accuracy and a small proportion actively oppose it.

Next question: If so, why are these books in print?

+250 million for LotR isn't that far fetched, as A) they could be including all the various volumes and omnibus editions separately, B) it's been around the block a few times and C) there was a great honking movie trilogy made from it, which tends to bolster sales (Cloud Atlas became a best seller again because of a movie that was, from what I gather, rather lackluster and not even remotely as popular as the LotR films).

LotR readership is easily double that I should think. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to rush out and 'shop an infographic saying just that!

His most recent entry makes a hash of the history of advertising on dust jackets. A couple of entries back, he illustrated a piece called "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll: Collecting the Counterculture" with cover images of works whose first publication dates, near as I can make out, range from 1900 and 1935 to 1976. (Also, if you're going for the sex&drugs&rock'n'roll angle, you don't want the elegantly subdued first paperback edition of On the Road; you want the Pan or Signet covers. Jeez.)

I'm disturbed by How an idea becomes a book: an amusing infographic, which is on the site's shortlist of its most popular entries. First, it's full of errors that no one who knows publishing would make. More on that in a moment.

Second, it appears to me to owe a bit too much to a full-page cartoon about how an idea becomes a book. Does anyone else remember it? It was published some years ago. It might have been by David Macaulay, and if so it probably came out a bit after The Way Things Work. It was rendered in a medium-fine, somewhat wandering line, and IIRC it was printed on newsprint in a tabloid-ish trim size. In one panel, the review copies get sent to Swedish radio stations.

Now back to the errors. The very first decision point in the flowchart is "person is a normal human being," in which case the book goes through all the rigamarole of editing, packaging, and marketing, or "person is Stephen King, Lady Gaga, or reality show star," in which case the book is immediately approved as-is and sent to the printer.

That's a bad sign. The idea that publishers are only interested in books by bestselling authors or celebrities is a vulgar error that's constantly traded back and forth by frustrated unpublished writers, and occasionally by staff at major newspapers. As a marker for ignorance, it's right up there with believing that Obama is a Muslim. The same goes for the idea that books by bestselling authors and/or celebrities get sent straight to press. If you've had any contact with the process at all, you know they always get a lot of packaging and marketing attention.

The flowchart continues as it began. Sales reps are part of the early in-house editing and planning process. (No.) If the book idea is good but the author isn't, the editor writes the book for them. (No again if fiction; mostly no if nonfiction.) The role of the managing editor, the art director, and the marketing department is played by a Creative Director, which in my experience is a species native to ad agencies. Typesetters have no role at all -- the manuscript goes from copyedit to design to first-pass pages. And after proofreading, one of the options is "Intern accidentally deletes entire book while entering corrections," which is simply not possible and may be illegal.

The most remarkable error is the "manuscript goes to copyediting" sequence, which has two possible outcomes: either the copyedit goes well, or the copyeditor declares it the worst book ever and quits. That's so wrong. If you have any contact with professional writers or publishing types, you will sooner or later hear tales of memorable copyedits, nearly all of which will involve the copyeditor not quitting and the copyedit not turning out well.

My rough estimate is that I could write for a solid month without exhausting the comment-worthy errors on that site. I won't. People are always being wrong on the internet. What makes this one worth noticing at all is that Book Patrol is so confidently and elaborately wrong that it's liable to be mistaken for real information.

The thing's not even an infographic. An actual infographic is something like a chart, a visual display of information in a form that shows the relevant data and relationships visually. This thing mixes and matches different types of data (the original edition of Stranger in a Strange Land sold more than 1M copies, the first hardcover edition of First Lensman had a cover price of $3, 2001 A Space Odyssey sold 235,000 copies in Japan, the ebook edition of A Fire Upon the Deep sold over 3,000 copies in the first 24 hours, etc), and doesn't actually do anything to represent the magnitudes of the data, or show relationships.

It's not an infographic, just a bunch of decorated blurbs.

I gave him the 50p anyway.

Jo Walton @13: Which, if seen from very far away, look like insects.

Madeleine @19: The numbers make no sense. I've always loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, but I wouldn't have thought it belonged on an all-time bestseller list. Can it really have outsold Lois Bujold, Anne McCaffrey, Greg Bear, and the traditional Host of Others?

For reasons far too convoluted to go into here, it makes me wonder where Michael Lieberman went to high school.

David Langford @24: Is there an adjectival form of "panopticon"? I might have a word for your judgement if there were.

Steve @26: Mori Phelps does buy new books, but her funds and her access to bookstores are limited.

Lee @27, most sites that do elaborate infographics have more than one person on staff. In any event, it's odd to put that much work into an infographic without first running the text through a spellchecker. MSWord wouldn't have caught the factual errors, but it would have flagged quite a few of the mechanical ones, especially if its grammar-checking option was selected.

Nancy Lebovitz @29: Loog.

Laura @31: It looked like the sort of the people link to and enjoy. I'm not kidding. Quick-on-the-button blogging and tweeting does not reward slow, thoughtful reading.

Dave Bell @34: Legal action would just publicize the misinformation, and "it's on a top ten list" is more memorable than the bad sales figures, which many people won't read anyway. It's better to put the resources and effort into one's own publicity, and trust it will cancel out any erroneous impressions.

I like the delicate sequitur of "The Forever War ,published in 1974 has sold well over a million copies" ... "A Fire Upon The Deep, Vernor Vinge, 1992, covers an equally large array of subjects." Well over a million subjects! Yay!

When contemplating Things There Are a Million of in A Fire Upon the Deep, one wonders whether intentional or unintentional irony is at work here.

Thanks for all the feedback, my apologizes for not being clearer in the post about the origin of the "infographic.'

It was not created by book patrol nor could I find an actual source. I was hesitant to post it at first but felt it worthy for the visual rendering of the information, I titled it exactly as it appears in the image.

An errata coming shortly with link to this thread.

I gather that sales figures are proprietary, so not easy to obtain from publishers.

Not that they'll help much. None of those mention sales figures. However, the first one does have the origin of that "equally large array of subjects" Dave Lanford at #24 mentioned. The paragraph that goes with A Fire Upon The Deep starts with the sentence: "Written in Vinge's usual complex style, this novel covers an equally large array of subjects."

So not only is that infographic poorly done, it isn't even original in its badness!

The first URL, http://www.scifinow.co.uk/top-tens/ten-of-the-bestscience-fiction-novels/, no longer works, but the page is still available via Google cache. The article is by James Rundle. He doesn't say top sellers, just best. Here's his list:

1. The Stars My Destination
2. The Foundation Trilogy
3. A Fire Upon The Deep
4. Childhood’s End
5. The Forever War
6. We
7. Flowers For Algernon
8. A Canticle For Leibowitz
9. Ender’s Game
10. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

Which is respectable.

The second link is at ListVerse.com, Top 15 Great Science Fiction Books by JFrater, with Ryan Sweeney and Fritha Keith acknowledged as contributors.

1. The Time Machine
2. Stranger in a Strange Land
3. First Lensman
4. 2001
5. Fahrenheit 451
6. The Foundation Series
7. Slaughterhouse-5
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
9. Dune
10. Neuromancer
11. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
12. Gateway
13. Ender's Game
14. 1984
15. Brave New World

You can tell that's a group effort.

The third and most interesting list is Mrunal Belvalkar's The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time at Buzzle.com.

It's divided into three sections. The first, "Pioneers of Science Fiction," has bios of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stephenson, and H. G. Wells. The second section is his best-of list. It's unnumbered:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I Am Legend
Ender's Game
Brave New World
Stranger in a Strange Land
Animal Farm
2001: A Space Odyssey
Childhood's End
The Forever War
Dune
Neuromancer
I, Robot
The Book of the New Sun

The third section, "Famous Science Fiction Authors," recommends reading Iain Banks, Stanislaw Lem, Carol Emshwiller, Elizabeth Hand, and Jack Womack, and finishes with short bios of Philip K. Dick., J. G. Ballard, and Jack Vance. Can't argue with that.

The second section, the actual best-of list, is enthusiastically augmented with interesting facts about the books, many of which were plundered by the Book Patrol version. Unfortunately, some of the facts are a bit shaky. Here he is on The Book of the New Sun:

Quick Fact: Many of the words used in the book are not true English words and were, in fact, invented by the author! For example, the word "fuligin" used to describe Severian's torturer's cloak that was "a color that is darker than black", is not a true word!

Some observations. First, there's a great deal of variation in the tone and quality of Lieberman's book descriptions, and some of them read like promo or jacket copy. He's not speaking from personal experience.

Second, none of the source lists are reference-grade sources. Neither Lloyd Curry nor Locus nor the ISFDB is hard to find, and even a grass-green novice can check Wikipedia.

Third, the only title on Michael Lieberman's list that isn't on one of the source lists is LOTR, and the reason it's not there is because it isn't science fiction. Why include it? At a guess, because it's easy to find claims that it's the all-time bestselling work in our genre.

It's the rest of the list that's hard to document, especially if you don't think to look at Wikipedia's unified list of bestsellers. Lieberman didn't. If he had, his numbers would still be highly approximate but they'd make more sense than they do. Also, he'd include A Wrinkle in Time. I find its absence significant.

Fourth, none of the source lists say that their books are the best-selling SF novels of all time. They're personal selections. Good on 'em for including A Canticle for Leibowitz, but its presence is no guarantee that it sold all that well.

Since A Wrinkle in Time wasn't on any of the source lists but should have been on Lieberman's list, I have to think that he didn't do any additional research. He cobbled together the three lists, dusted the result with factoids, and gave it a false new label. It's that misrepresentation that moves his infographic out of the "badly researched" category and into "culpable hackwork."

There are always people being wrong on the internet, but most of them are trying harder than that to get it right.

Maybe you should put that information in your updates about that particular lack-of-info-graphic as well.

Also, "That's not actually my own work"? Undergraduate excuse #1.

However, let's momentarily assume for the sake of argument that you didn't create it.

You lifted an entire article, but you can't recall where you got it? Awfully careless, don't you think?

In fact, you lifted an entire article, put your own name on it, and published it on a site from which you derive advertising income? That's more than carelessness.

Incidentally, congratulations -- this post has now received well over a dozen comments.

Your entitled to your opinion -and may believe what you want to believe- but please-

Your are aware that every time you post something on a blog it has your name on it - regardless of where the content originates. Posted does not = originally created by.

you will find the link to my source for the infographic under the image marked "via". I was hoping to find the original source

oh and I went to Hewlett High School, Long Island NY and graduated in 1980.

I will be happy to send you the $15 in advertising revenue i'll get this month from google

It's a shame that PW has linked to this nonsense.

YOU need a copy editor -- the first thing out of your keyboard on this post is:

"Your entitled to your opinion"

Which should read, "You're entitled to your opinion"

Were you even aware that you're posting on a website owned by folks who are editors at Tor Books? They publish that odd genre known as Science Fiction...

Y'know that thing called "copyright"?

So, "Posted does not = originally created by." Tell me, do you have the permission of the person who did create it? How did you get that permission without knowing the creator's name?

===

PW, New Yorker, if you're reading this, Beth Meacham @57 is Orson Scott Card's editor.

Google NGram Viewer suggests that TDM has been mentioned it books and magazines mentioned more often that TSMD. To be sure, the gap has closed in the past two decades or so, during which TDM's frequency has declined while TSMD's remained about flat. Indeed, the younger book is slightly ahead of the older in Google's most recent data (2008), but I feel the "best-known" claim remains shaky.

I can dramatize this trend using cool new features recently added to NGram Viewer, but possibly at some risk of bewildering my fellow correspondents.

How different my life could have been, all these years.

(Not that I would know 50p if they bit me. Or two-bit me.)

====

Am I the only one who thinks Michael Lieberman might have been only too eager to use the free term paper, free term paper, free term paper?

I can answer that question for you: Nope!

Screenshot anon.

The Ballantines were never fools about marketing. This doesn't pass a sniff test.

And the whole page is indeed a farrago.

The via was added as part of the addenda. I take full responsibility for the lack of attribution in the original post and for not verifying the numbers.

The source was a blog focusing on sfi/fantasy news and reviews whose proprietor has contributed work to "WORLD, Publishers Weekly, Black Gate, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, SF Signal, Sacramento Book Review, Thaumatrope, and at Tor.com." Sounded credible but my bad for not pursuing further. Sci-fiction is not an area I have deep knowledge in, so obviously the inaccuracies were not as apparent.

As for #37's comment that I don't "know nearly as much about books and publishing as he thinks he does."

I founded Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers in Seattle almost 20 years ago and have sat on the boards of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, Friends of the Seattle Public Library and the Book Club of Washington.

I love books and everything about them and once again apologize for the mishap.

Clicking through to the whole chart I'm especially tickled to learn we pitch book ideas to our customers and bring their feedback to the editors before the book is even written. I've apparently been doing my job wrong for the last ten years. Why haven't any of my booksellers called me out on this?

If I wasn't limited to that series, but had the whole of Wolfe's oeuvre to draw from, I'd go with satisplant.

Let me pound my cane on the floor for a moment...I started my career in this business at Ace books in 1980. At that point, our P&L basis for SF titles was 100K copies at 20% returns for midlist. The leads were 200K to 300K, with a somewhat higher return rate, depending on the title and author, but never as high as 50%. And I was told that it was sad that the numbers had dropped so much.

A million copies was really not far out of reach, especially as a shipped number. For writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, those numbers were expected. We have seen a tremendous drop in distribution over the past two decades, as outlets contract and the size of lists, and number of lists, expands.

So, I can easily believe in multi-million copy cumulative sales on a lot of those older titles. I'd be willing to believe that the Dick sold a half-million before Bladerunner was a film. I know that Dune's initial sales at Ace were a couple hundred thousand copies; over the course of decades since, that number has no doubt multiplied significantly.

Our sales levels today are pitiful.

-- Fluvious Proroman, Duty Gnome

Argument against the Oxford/serial comma can, in similar fashion, be shown by this rearrangement: "The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, a dildo collector, and an 800-year-old demigod".

The non-serial comma suggests just one named demigod who happens to be 800 and collect dildoes; the serial comma suggests two people, ie Nelson Mandela - who, incidentally, is a dildo collector - plus an 800-yo demigod. Neither usage unambiguously suggests three separate people: Nelson Mandela; an 800-yo demigod; a dildo collector.

Personally I prefer not to use the Oxford comma, though I use it if it is clearer. But style guides may disapprove of the "inconsistency". And starting sentences with a conjunction.

You are much more directly experienced in the NY publishing scene than I, but I do have some experience. And you and I both support my primary point, I believe: that it sold out all of its edition (even if it was 210,000 copies) in that early a year, when Clarke didn't have the name he did later (they none of them did!) -- that's saying that it broke the basic model for mass market. The really big sales for SF/F start in the 60s, rather than the 50s, I believe -- and we can remember when SF actually started to hit the national bestseller lists, which wasn't until the 70s.

But that's my gut feeling, and I don't have primary sources to back it up. It's well before my time (hey, it was published the year I was born).

Ian Ballantine's experiment with simultaneous HC/MM was his attempt to break into trade publishing. And he did not have tremendous success at first. But the mass market business model he created did indeed call for wide distribution and low returns. All those millions of copies he sent into the military channels, for instance, took no returns at all. Ian didn't reprint his paperbacks often at all; he sent out a big printing and took the returns. Like an issue of a magazine. Then if he wanted to sell more of them, he reissued with a new package. Keeping books in print just wasn't part of the plan in those early days -- that was a later development for paperback, one that Don Wollheim figured out, at Ace.

The non-serial comma version, ""The highlights of his global tour include encounters with an 800-year-old demigod, a dildo collector and Nelson Mandela." is not quite as good - as you could then argue that the 800-year-old demigod is simultaneously a dildo collector AND Nelson Mandela.

As to the serial comma, while opinions vary (I, like Fowler in this, advocate its use), the crux is for a given writer to be uniform in its use or non-use: mixed forms will guarantee to confuse everybody whenever confusion is at all possible.

Not quite fair. In the original Top 10 list, "equally large array of subjects" surely references "Weaving macrocosmic concepts" in the blurb for the previous selection, Childhood's End. It was unthinking removal of context that introduced the badness.

Ian once told me that the first Ballantine edition of Clarke's Expedition to Earth distributed 800,000 copies. Mind you, this was an off-the-cuff remark, but it's indicative of the stunning numbers characteristic of this brief period.

What I find shocking, and still do, is that outfits like Publishers Weekly and the New Yorker's blog would uncritically link to it, without even looking at the numbers closely enough to ask themselves whether it's really likely that Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has only sold 10,000 copies since its original publication in 1870. What this says to me is that the pressure to blog and tweet and general Do That Social Media Thing is so high, at even major and reputable organs like PW and TNY, that they're doing so without thinking, at a million miles an hour.

And what it also says to me is that, even in 2012, for a lot of people who work at places like PW and TNY, science fiction is still a joke. We don't have a documented history, reference works, scholarship, or experts. Someone you never heard of puts up something claiming to list "The Bestselling Sci-Fi Books of All Time"? Hey, it's colorful, kitschy, cute, linkbait. Go with it. Don't waste a second asking yourself if it's plausible, credibly-sourced, or even makes internal sense. That's what torques me. It's not Michael Lieberman who needs discrediting. It's PW and TNY.

2: The numbers cover all sorts of different measures, and it is usually documented what the numbers are.

3: Some of the numbers are unexplained, and just don't make sense as a result.

4: And then it is somebody else's work, and Mr. Lieberman doesn't know who is responsible. Yeah, right.

It is a bit like one of those cabinets of curiousities that includes a genuine mermaid.

I had no idea this place belongs to the editors of tor.

The via was added as part of the addenda. I take full responsibility for the lack of attribution in the original post and for not verifying the numbers.

If you don't mind my asking, are you the author of the other entries on your site? I've been assuming that you are.

The source was a blog focusing on sfi/fantasy news and reviews whose proprietor has contributed work to "WORLD, Publishers Weekly, Black Gate, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, SF Signal, Sacramento Book Review, Thaumatrope, and at Tor.com." Sounded credible but my bad for not pursuing further.

Sci-fiction

is not an area I have deep knowledge in, so obviously the inaccuracies were not as apparent.

(I see he's posted his own version of it while I've been writing this comment. He's faster than I am.)

As for #37's comment

comment that I don't "know nearly as much about books and publishing as he thinks he does."

I founded Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers in Seattle almost 20 years ago and have sat on the boards of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, Friends of the Seattle Public Library and the Book Club of Washington.

I love books and everything about them and once again apologize for the mishap.

Including French!

WEEKEND MAUVAIS GENRES SUR FRANCE CULTURE

Retrouvez l'esprit Mauvais Genres dans les émissions de France Culture du 16 au 18 novembre : science fiction, aventure, érotisme, horreur... et plus si affinités !

'Mauvais Genres'? Looks as though SF is back in the gutter, where it belongs.

Fame, fortune, and a movie deal could be mine any decade now!

Here's the thing about a lot of those "infographics", though: they're just a more visually sophisticated version of those spammy, content-farmed articles whose real purpose is to get links and Googlejuice. I've been solicited for hosting or linking to a few of these on my site, just as I've been offered many more "helpful links" or "posts you can put on your blog", thanks to having a fairly high-Pagerank site.

The creators of these things don't have much incentive to spend a lot of time on research or fact-checking. It's much more important for them to look appealing and linkable. As far as the facts go, a quick troll of Wikipedia and some other sites that come up quickly on search engines is usually about as far as they go; why spend a lot of time verifying accuracy or ensuring your overview is more comprehensive than random trivia, when you could be cranking out and promoting more infographics?

The basic gist was well-expressed by Buzzfeed a couple of years back, who snarkily presented their findings as, of course, an infographic.

If the infographic that's the subject of the article falls into the category I'm describing (and it has signs of that) the original creators won't particularly care about credit or permission, as long as they get the linkbacks they're seeking.

(If my grammar and/or spelling is substandard, I will claim that I'm imitating the original.)

Anyway, I'm English, and they're French, and hence there are limits to my forbearance. My French Language Teacher told me all about the CRS.

Clicking through to the whole chart I'm especially tickled to learn we pitch book ideas to our customers and bring their feedback to the editors before the book is even written. I've apparently been doing my job wrong for the last ten years. Why haven't any of my booksellers called me out on this?

Given that Mr. Lieberman is a bookseller, I think that infographic represents wishful thinking about how he would like the publishing process to work. So that one is probably his original work ;-)

This is actually a pretty common practice among people who use Tumblr and Facebook a lot. Those sites are set up to make it easy to republish ("share") other users' content, with an automatically-inserted attribution.

And, of course, any old cat photo with some Impact on it will get shared around faster than an Oscar Wilde quote.

In any case, I blame Serge.

Mordieu!

(((The Stars My Destination) + (Tiger Tiger)) - (The Demolished Man))/((The Stars My Destination) + (Tiger Tiger))

seems to make a fair difference.

I won't tell you about the ones that change meaning depending on where you put them.

un grand homme --> a great man
un homme grand --> a tall man

Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité: they're the riot police, with what seem to be the common characteristics thereof.

They credit Grasping For The Wind (www.graspingforthewind.com), subtitled "science fiction and fantasy news & reviews", and that post is dated July 20th, and is by-lined John Ottinger III, who credits lovereading.co.uk

For what that's all worth, there it is. I am unable to find the image on lovereading.co.uk, and I looked.

ISTR encountering "panoptic" in my grad school days.

Putting them in that position also follows the same logic as the English rule for order of multiple adjectives: strong modifiers should come early rather than late. The underlying principle in both cases is that you shouldn't force your hearers to stop mid-sentence and recalculate identifications and/or transformations they already have queued up.

Obligatory consumer warning: if you find yourself trying explain why any language does what it does, be aware that there's a greater-than-usual chance that you're on shaky ground.

TexAnne @123: Which fits with my previous comment, since "belonging to oneself" is an integral characteristic, but "clean" is a temporary condition.

Would I be right in thinking that you'd only say "un grand homme" if you were emphasizing there's only one of them, and that normally, in a sentence, you'd say just "grand homme"?

!!!

I...wow. That explains so much! Adjective ordering is one of those things I can do naturally in English (woo, native language fluency!) and almost naturally in Spanish (woo, early childhood exposure!), but find it nigh impossible to explain. The best I'd been able to come up with is "generic and visual stuff comes before specific and non-visual stuff", and then frustrated flailing at the sorts of adjective sets that just don't sound good in English no matter how they're ordered.

It also explains what I had often found peculiar about Spanish: that it put adjectives after the noun (opposite of English!), except for when it...didn't. (Un-opposite of English! For some reason!)

Which is useful when there is more than one one. Once one has one one, one has won.

Said he wanly too?

Bill @66 Trying that ngram with

(((The Stars My Destination) + (Tiger Tiger)) - (The Demolished Man))/((The Stars My Destination) + (Tiger Tiger))

seems to make a fair difference.

A keen insight. Very clever, but not clever enough.

"Tiger Tiger" will indeed pick up references to the UK title of Bester's second novel, which I had neglected-- but it will also scoop up William Blake's poem, contaminating the ratios.

I'm afraid I don't know how to include Bester references in this calculation without also including Blake references.

Perhaps the best we can say is that the gap between The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination is not so large as my first estimates made it appear. Despite these tricky tools, we cannot yet conclude which is the better-known novel, as measured by appearances in the Google Books English corpus.

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

Time flies.
I can't; they move too fast.

And so on.

(I love the places around the edges of a language where things get weird.)

Would you settle for creeks? How about streams?

It's a good reminder to me that there's signal loss in moving from speech to text, and not just in terms of body language and the like.

'je ne sais quoi' -- exactly that!

brotherguy #133:
Which is useful when there is more than one one. Once one has one one, one has won.

My brain hurts. Despite the fact that it makes complete sense. I expect that your copyeditor would have an objection as well.

I've heard the ordering is
Opinion Condition Size Age Color Origin Material

as in

The poor battered little old blue Japanese car

Although it seems to me that

The poor little old battered blue Japanese car

might work as well...or might not.

@135 Jim Macdonald :
There's an ordering of adjectives in English, so that you couldn't say "six very old stone houses" in any other order and have it make sense. (Not that our mad-libs spammers don't try....)

"Very", as noted, is an adverb, which come before adjectives, and "six" is a determiner, like 'the', which must always come before any adjectives or adverbs in English.

I see collections of typed paper in the airports, bound with titles, authors and explosions or bodices on the cover, but I can't say that I'd properly consider them *books*.

For auction today, we have six houses, stone, very old.

Princeton Plainsboro hospital: "We just admitted six very stoned old..." "House!"

Frex: They make far too much money to be real books.

pericat @122: Good summary of the situation. It may be worth emphasizing that Ottinger's July 20th blog post is what Michael Lieberman's celebrated "via" points to. lovereading.co.uk has proven a dead end for all who have searched there, and the ebookfriendly.com instance is much too recent to have been the infographic's source.

But let's take another look at the image itself. The file's EXIF information shows it to date from June 6th, 2012 (what, no one else checked the metadata? Always check the metadata!), and for "software" one sees "Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 Macintosh". The latter tidbit might come in handy if anyone cares to check other image files from some suspect infographic artiste. As for the date, it implies a cut-off point in our searching for the infographic's earliest occurrence. Oh, and how about that -- Ottinger's blog post turns out to be the earliest findable instance.

G00gle Image Search, however, reveals (if I'm interpreting the results correctly) a version dating to July 6 in the directory www.graspingforthewind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/. Take a look: there are three variant images (SCIFIBOOKS-150x150.jpg, SCIFIBOOKS-20x300.jpg, & SCIFIBOOKS-71x1024.jpg) there as well. And although they lack EXIF info, all include jpeg comments reading "CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 90". The "gd-jpeg" refers to the GD Graphics Library and the "IJG" to the Independent JPEG Group, but what if anything this buys us I have no idea.

I suppose someone could simply ask John Ottinger III about all this, but where would be the fun in that?

Finally, it pains me to note that even Tor Books has now gotten in on the act!

?"CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 90". The "gd-jpeg" refers to the GD Graphics Library and the "IJG" to the Independent JPEG Group, but what if anything this buys us I have no idea.

Tells us nothing. That's an extremely common library.

But only while trolling.

Which you should not be doing here.

SF&F readers who treat romance like a literary pariah, particularly in a conversation about how the rest of the world others their own genre, make me want to hit my head on my desk. Seriously, I've heard it all—cover snarks, critiques based on tropes rather than actual reading of the books, contemptuous stereotyping of the readership. And it all sounds so familiar, you know?

Knock it off. Even as a joke, knock it right off.

Also?

They make far too much money to be real books.

Some do. The ones that sell a lot. Which they do because readers find something in them worth reading. Rather than implicitly dismissing those people, you could have an interesting time (and grow a little) by figuring out what that is.

About ten years ago I was being interviewed by Astrobiology, an on-line magazine, who asked me if my religious beliefs were a product of the science I do. I denied it, saying, "I don't believe in God because of my science." Fortunately, they let me see the interview before posting it, so that I could politely ask them to rephrase it (which they did, thankfully) as, "Science is not the reason that I believe in God..."

Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine, earliest edition I found on Amazon is 1987, and there's been a reprint this year. It's an historical romance with an element of time travel: mental rather than physical. I didn't feel I'd wasted my time reading it, but the author then gave me the impression that she was re-using the plot idea in her next book. Libraries were useful then.

Helen McInnes did romance/thriller cross-overs, also worth a look. The romance doesn't overload the thriller element.

It's the hard-core genre romance that doesn't appeal to me, associated (in the UK) with Mills & Boon. Short books, maybe with aspects of the old-style pulp magazines in numbers published and the writing quality. I don't think you have the house names, but you can see some of the repetitive structure. Not Lester Dent, but there is an impression of similar advice.

They rather frown on a man coming in with a gun, but sometimes something with a similar effect happens and diverts the plot from the inevitable happy ending.

It might be one of the places in publishing where that approach to writing still works out, even as the range of the possible romantic activities has widened. Maybe you could even get away with the man with a gun.

I should check those out. I'm a huge fan of Georgette Heyer (in which I'm in very good company, both here on Making Light and in the SF&F community as a whole.) But there's plenty of interesting stuff out there.

There are a couple of romance publishers (Mills & Boon, Harlequin) that seem to be running a pulp model of romance novels. Their audience is looking for that classic same-but-different reading experience. Books in that model rarely rise to brilliance in any genre, but rarely isn't never—look what Mike Ford did (twice! differently!) with the Star Trek novel.

And just as SF's pulp roots are important to where it is now, but don't define and encompass the whole genre, so is romance more than M&B or Harlequin. I agree that there's a difference, in that SF's pulp days are done while Romance's live on, but I'm not sure that this provides any meaningful evidence about the values of the respective genres as a whole.

It's perfectly fine to say that a given work, author, or genre doesn't work for you. We all have things we bounce off of. But I draw the line at (well, actually, well short of) saying but I can't say that I'd properly consider them *books*.

But I digress.

Thing is, people do use "book" and "novel" pretty interchangeably and, crude as it is, that sort of opinion is a first step on a road to discrimination. Though too often that route is by way of the Troll Bridge, they don't have a billy-goat, and they didn't remember to throw the carrot across the bridge.

But I digress.

Thing is, people do use "book" and "novel" pretty interchangeably and, crude as it is, that sort of opinion is a first step on a road to discrimination. Though too often that route is by way of the Troll Bridge, they don't have a billy-goat, and they didn't remember to throw the carrot across the bridge.

Why is that? A book is a book, and so is a novel although a book isn't necessarily a novel, and it amuses me when I go to the bookstore's fiction section and there's a book with "- a novel" in its title, possibly to reassure us that this is an Important Work and not trashy pulp. (Sorry for the rambling, I didn't get much sleep last night, thanks to the smell that emanated from the oven in its selfcleaning mode and I think that, next time, I'll do it the old-fashioned way, on my knees and with fine steel wool.)

Typical romance plot?
Yes.
Also the plot of "The African Queen".

Or, the other way up in "Heaven Knows, Mr Allison".

Sometimes novels are published with titles that might legitimately be thought to be non-fiction. Similarily some non-fiction books have novel-like titles and so also have subtitles. To (probably) make up some examples:

The History of Robots in Classical Music - A Novel
Cyber Symphony - a history of robotic orchestras

The first still sounds a little pretentious, but one can't always come up with a perfect title that suits the book and unambiguously defines it.

It was, in fact, the classic "three-volume novel" as lovingly eulogized by Kipling in "The Three-Decker."

brotherguy @157 ...oh, yes. YES. I have occasionally, when studying other languages, wished that English had a little more clarity in negating conditionals; the ambiguity between "because NOT X" and "not because X" can get so fun!

I still find it clearer than dealing with Latin's habit of negating an entire phrase and then trying to figure out where to stick the Not in the English translation. (Or working out which variety of "quod" I'm dealing with this time.) But I wish for the one Japanese form of "because" that I got a chance to learn, sometimes.

As an aside, I miss the old-fashioned type of romantic suspense. (Mary Stewart, Elizabeth Peters...) The modern kind is all serial killers. Those can be good, too, but not as a steady diet, not for me.

Also, "little" forms stock phrases separately with both "poor" and "old", so you've got phrases like "poor little thing" and "little old man" just to make things more complicated.

(And try explaining to a non-native speaker that the phrase "poor little old man" does not necessarily refer to an impoverished, short-statured, senior citizen, but that the actual meaning is more likely to be "elderly male for whom the speaker feels a certain amount of sympathy.")

Somewhat more recent books that carried the same "feel" to me are two by Caroline Llewellyn in the late 80s, The Lady of the Labyrinth and The Masks of Rome.

Also, Steven Gould's Blind Waves had that vibe.

Time flies.
You cannot.
They come and go so quickly.

I especially like this because it could be poetry, and because it gives you brain whiplash twice, as the word flies does triple duty -- "is fleeting", "move through the air" and finally the insects. I also like it because if you give it to somebody unexplained it can be a koan.

For example, I complained here about the ending of the first Heyer I attempted, and was told that was pretty much the convention of that subgenre. What I drew from this was "I probably won't enjoy other books in that subgenre," not "that subgenre is trash."

To quote the source itself (or at least, the Note on the Text that appears at the front of recent UK editions): LOTR is "... a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes"

My website is the original publication source for this infographic. I am in complete agreement with all of your issues with this poorly rendered graphic.

Some background:

I was contacted by the creator of this infographic and asked if they created an "original" graphic for me, if I would post it. I agreed.

They sent me the graphic. I could see obvious errors in it (spelling mistakes, calculation errors, or gross mistakes). I pushed back in that an asked them to check their facts.

I then received and email saying their "fact checkers" had looked through the numbers and claimed they were all correct. I was dubious, but in good faith I had to do what I agreed, so I posted it.

Perhaps I could have rejected it entirely as editor and proprietor of my blog. Yet, I had made a written agreement to post what they sent me, so I did. I knew people of intelligence would see this for the farce it is, but I did not comment in the post directly or by commenting, because I felt that would violate the nature of my contract with the creator.

That being said, I will not fall for one of these inforgraphic scams (which is a blatant attempt merely to gain backlinks for an online store in the UK) again.

I thank everyone for showcasing the glaring inaccuracies in the infographic - as I could not in good conscience do as a party to an publication agreement.

(Not to give the wrong impression - there was nothing other than an email exchange - no written contract - but I am a man of my word.)

It is Lady Helen who knows how to fly, and Charlie lets her get on with it.

The Ninja assassins travelling with the circus come later.

Anthony Burgess suggested that choosing a title was such a chore (problems of originality and appositeness) that it might be preferable to refer, music-style, to opus numbers instead. Or we could just refer to books by their ISBNs. Complete anonymity for the author till you googled it, just like in Practical Criticism.

If fresh titles are scarce, obviously we need to set up proper namespaces (Waugh's WWII::Men At Arms and Pratchett's SF::Men At Arms.)

Where does the frightening part come in? Even more importantly, at what point, if ever, does it acquire a plot?

I haven't made it very far -- while I did have a very long wait, I only managed to pick out that a) Emily's mother died, b) Emily's lute mysteriously moved in a should-have-been-empty cottage, and c) she and her father are going to go on a journey. All this nearly buried in very nonspecific blather about the scenery and a TON of very specific but tedious tell-don't-show about emotional states.

Seriously, this is what was giving Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland all sorts of delicious shivers? When does it start doing that?

Novels have obviously come a very long way.

Isaac Asimov's evil child? Wait, what?

In regards to the New Yorker linking to the graphic, as of about 10 minutes ago, all of the comments are about the graphic, and all are one or another variety of "SHAME! SHAME!" (note -out of 6 different items limked to, *all* those comments were about the graphic)

Mary Aileen @141: Got it. It's like believing the Outerbridge Crossing is called that because it's the city's outermost bridge.

tnv @144:

I've heard the ordering is
Opinion Condition Size Age Color Origin Material

as in

The poor battered little old blue Japanese car

Although it seems to me that

The poor little old battered blue Japanese car

might work as well...or might not.

For example, apply that template sequence of modifiers to "His granny sent him a semtex-filled traditional plum pudding and a tin of frosted thermite Christmas cookies." Adjectives of condition, size, age, and color are not going to displace "material" in those sequences. And "frosted" doesn't come first because it describes condition or color; it's there because "thermite frosted cookies" would be cookies frosted with thermite, not cookies made of thermite.

Our syntax and grammar are strongly influenced by the informational content and internal logic of the text in question. You can't say what order adjectives should be in unless you know which specific adjectives they are, and probably the sentence in which they occur. A rule won't cut it. What that needs is an AI.

Here's another example: what differentiates a statement that takes the subjunctive from one that's merely conditional -- that's "if he was the one who threw that switch" vs. "If she were to come in and see that" -- is whether the statement either (a.) is contrary to known fact, or (b.) takes place in hypothetical virtual spacetime. If yes to either, it's subjunctive.

I love English.

The main reason "The poor battered little old blue Japanese car" doesn't feel right is because some of its constituent adjectives are in longstanding committed relationships. "Poor little" and "little old" are both customary pairs, as in poor little thing and little old man. It feels uncomfortable to separate them, which is why you found yourself trying out "The poor little old battered blue Japanese car." Watch what happens if you try to fix that by dovetailing them:

She went on vacation in that poor little old blue car of hers.

"In spite of our entreaties, she obliged us to drive a poor small antiquated ill-kept blue Japanese car over the Andes," Stephen said peevishly. "My sloth was entirely distressed."

"Very", as noted, is an adverb, which come before adjectives, and "six" is a determiner, like 'the', which must always come before any adjectives or adverbs in English.

I believe in Formal Navy that should be ...we fucking hit six fucking armadillos... vice ...we hit fucking six fucking armadillos.....

A great deal would depending on whether the fucking armadillos were fucking fucking when we fucking hit all fucking six.

At this point Formal Navy becomes quite the tonal language, for it is obvious to the native speaker that fucking fucking armadillos are quite different from fucking fucking armadillos.

But I digress.

So ... this was just a viral marketing/link-back scam thing?

Help me understand here ... these guys approached you out of the blue and said, "If we give you a graphic (to be named later), would you post it on your site"?

For anyone--is this sort of thing common? Does that particular site have pots of infographics (or anything else) pointing back to them?

Ahem. Anyway, for easier reading, may I recommend The Gothic novel, 1790-1830 : plot summaries and index to motifs, by Ann Blaisdell Tracy?
As the author admits, summarising the plots of the genre leads to considerable unintended humour, and is much faster going.

Now I'm off to find some Horrid Novels for my Kobo. Thanks for the tip!

That sounds like an absolutely delightful job. But then, I have been observed to wistfully note multiple times to all my classmates that I wish they'd give classes explicitly on translation techniques, where they assume already have the skills to know what is being said in a text, and can instead spend a lot of time discussing how we want to render that in English, and what choices we're making, for what effects, and why...

*stares off into the distance wistfully*

...anyway. At one job, I did a great deal of customer service email response, but wasn't the only one who did so. As the only person in the department at the time who spoke more than one language, I was often called upon to read email written technically in some form of English, and explain to other people what it meant. It actually surprised me the first time it came up that I could do that and other people couldn't, or at least couldn't do it as well; a lot of the unEnglish errors followed very common patterns that made them easy to untangle again.

All: I cannot thank you enough for brightening my afternoon. This is a Great Thread.

Adjective fans, passim: I seem to recall that J. R. R. Tolkien reported that he became fascinated with language scholarship as a child when he began to wonder why "a great green dragon" sounded so much better than "a green great dragon".

I took that class while studying Japanese. It was called "Problems of Translation", and was one of the two most interesting classes in my academic career.

so much depends
upon

a dead
armadillo

one of fucking six
we fucking hit.

(With sincere apologies to Mr. Williams.)

The first occurrence of profanity is obviously an intensifier, but the second one is ambiguous -- is it also an intensifier, or a statement of contempt, or a simple description of what the (paired) armadillos were doing when hit?

... and I see Jim got there ahead of me, and more amusingly, @197.

Actually I think that can be explained by phonemic stress, which is a phenomenon in the larger language of American English of which Formal Navy is a dialect. Intonation (as opposed to tone) is part of how stress is expressed in English (of all varieties). (While the above is true, I hope you realize that I'm mostly being tongue-in-cheek here.)

One of my favorite weird facts is that Proto-Indo-European was a tone language, but no modern Indo-European language is. The nearest thing is Swedish tonal accent, where sometimes the tone of a stressed syllable is distinctive; the rest of the IE family have alternation phenomena (like the o/e alternation in Russian) that are remnants of old tones, but no actual tone distinctions.

One of my less-recognized but more time-consuming roles at the moment is Englishing our systems documentation. I'm learning a lot about other languages doing it.

(Dutch native speakers use adjectives for adverbs, because they aren't separate forms in their native language. But their word order is good. Poles omit definite articles, and need more reordering.)

Fade Manley @200 et seq.: I once took a similar sort of class, on verse translation from Doug Hofstadter. It wasn't really precisely an ideal class on learning how to translate poetry as a professional skill, but I expected that going in, and it was the entertaining intellectual exercise that I expected it to be. Mostly what we had for texts were the (six or so) English translations of Eugene Onegin. There's a little of Hofstadter's thought process on the subject in Le Ton Beau de Marot, but again it's more the explorations of an amateur in the subject who's interested in what it reflects about human minds than about professional translation.

Meanwhile, your comment about TNH's description of "Englishing" reminds me of what I did for most of the yearbook class in my senior year of high school. (Did you know that "swift" can be used as a verb, and means something like "to send on an erratic and wandering path"? Neither did the teacher or I until we found it in the big unabridged dictionary, and neither did the author who wrote a headline of "A Swifted Kick" for the junior football team, but we didn't let that stop her.)

So I said something about the less-than-competent programmers in a weekly rush to produce badly-tested code, with management ignorant of what effect it had on paying customers, and rushing off every weekend to drink pina coladas in their hot tubs.

It might have sounded like an imaginary Abi who had served in the US Navy.

Incidentally, one of the stress points in Agile development, and the like, seems to be in the definition of "customer". If you get that wrong, and the "customer" is perhaps a higher lever manager, you risk things shooting off in sub-optimal directions. In a sense, Google's customer is the advertiser not the user, but there is a symbiosis.

This is just to fucking say

I have fucking hit
the fucking six fucking armadillos
that were fucking in
the fucking road

and which
you were probably
saving
for a discussion on linguistics

Forgive me
they were intriguing
so crunchy
and so syntactically ambiguous

"I can't fucking believe we hit six fucking armafuckingdillos on one fucking stretch of highway."

...featuring expletive infixation

I had occasion to ask one of the Elders of Publishing about which covers of the old Ace Double were returned for credit.

"Either ... or both."

Hence the discrepancies in royalty numbers - in those particular titles.

Formal Navy!
It's one of many dialects!
Formal Navy!
It sounds like it's obsessed with sex!
Formal Navy!
But that's a fucking fallacy!
Formal Navy!
Formal Navy!

(You're welcome.)

Umberto Eco once recommended that every novel should be titled simply with the name of its protagonist. Cuts straight through the question of appositeness (though originality is a different matter, as the makers of John Carter have perhaps discovered), but Eco was actually thinking about a different issue at the time.

The problem, he said, is that a title produces in the reader some idea of what the novel is about, which may be accurate or inaccurate. If accurate, it gives away something the author might have preferred to hold back until its proper moment in the story; if inaccurate, the reader will blame the novel for being other than expected. Naming the novel after the protagonist straightforwardly tells the reader nothing more or less than that it has a protagonist of that name.

He goes on to explain that the publishers wouldn't let him name his first novel Adso of Melk, so his backup plan was to give it a title invoking so many possible connotations that it would be impossible to form any solid preconceptions. Hence The Name of the Rose, which could mean just about anything and so means nothing.

(We may note that The Name of the Rose is not the only one of Eco's novels that fails to follow his own advice -- indeed, there is only Baudalino that does -- but it is the only one he'd written at the time, so we don't get to hear his excuses for the others.)

I love this theory; it's the sort of thing that's fun to argue with. For example, the assumption in the "if accurate" part where it assumes that the title's information is something that the author doesn't want to give away, as opposed to, say, something that the author does in fact want people to have in mind during the reading of the book. (God knows I title my poems with exactly that in mind.)

Or! The assumption that a book will have 1) one protagonist, 2) who has a single, known name, 3) both of which the author wants people to know from the start. I've also read books where anything from one to three of those points weren't true. (And a few in which different halves of #3 were false.)

The only conclusion I can come to is that authors should title books in such a way that the title conveys the title-based information the author wishes readers to have when reading that book.

But then we start getting into marketing...

And then you have to start thinking about Amazon thumbnails.

When do we go back to just the title?

Back when Whoopi Goldberg really started to become well-known, a lot of people were put off by her swearing. One of the criticisms levied was that it rendered her speach "unimaginative." It was obvious to me from the start, however, that she was using swearing very eloquently, but connotationally, rather than denotationally. There's almost a music in the way she uses profanity.

Paul A. @219: re: titles For some reason, titles and names have always been my favorite part of writing. For many years, I actually kept a file of possible character names.

Whatever other merits he might (or might not) have as a writer, J. Michael Straczynski has a truly inspired way with titles. They manage to be descriptive, but also simultaneously poetic and evokative.

Fade Manley @220: 2) who has a single, known name, 3) both of which the author wants people to know from the start. I've also read books where anything from one to three of those points weren't true. (And a few in which different halves of #3 were false.)

Bujold's Brothers in Arms leaps immediately to mind.

Conversely, I'm absolutely dreadful at titling things. The only time I ever come up with a title that I like, it's something I got before the rest of the story came to me, and even those tend to be derivative. (My favorite short story title, "Tuesday Nights Are Ghost Nights At Slick Willie's Bowling Alley", can be fairly easily traced back to a more famous, actually published story title.)

What makes it all the more amusing to me, as I argue against Eco's title suggestion, is that my working titles... are just the names of my protagonists or a brief summary of the main plot point. (Which let me realize I was naming far too many characters some variant on Nicholas, but I digress.) And then when I need to submit the stories, or show them, I end up flailing for something to call it.

But it's an amazingly versatile word -- a dessert topping and a floor wax! My favourite version being "the fucking fucker's fucking fucked", in which one word is used as four different grammatical objects in one sentence (pronoun, noun, adverb, verb).

In PIE and a few of its descendents, only the stressed syllable has distinctive tone. This kind of system is called "pitch accent". The Ancient Greek system and the Sanskrit one were inherited from the common ancestor, and form part of the evidence that allows us to infer PIE's pitch accent system.

But the pitch accent system of Swedish does not descend from the Proto-Indoeuropean system. Its ancestor, Old Norse, did not have pitch accent, but a simple stress accent (like English). The pitch accent of Swedish emerged when different stressed syllables were stressed differently based on phonetic context; then, language change sometimes eliminated the contextual triggers, leaving the distinctive pitch behind. (Probably all pitch accent systems emerge in this way, but we have no evidence for the pre-pitch-accent stage of PIE.)

I can't figure out whether the similar pitch-accent system of Serbocroatian is a true descendant of the PIE system, or if its heritage is more recent like Swedish.

However, I also didn't know Serbo-Croatian had a pitch accent system. I think I really was taught that Swedish was the only IE language that had it, and I doubt it's acquired it in the past 30 years. Since the professor who taught me that was a Slavicist, I wonder how he missed it.

(To be absolutely clear, I'm not doubting what you've said. I'm bemoaning the aging of my knowledge and the (lack of) quality of the original facts.)

Re: titles, using the protagonist's name works for a wide range of books, but seems especially appropriate for the bildungsroman. Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens and Jerome K. Jerome (whose Paul Kelver I am reading just now) all seem to agree with Eco to some extent. It breaks down when you have a series of books about the same protagonist, but one can easily form an open-ended series of titles of the form "[protagonist's name] and the [noun phrase denoting some entity the protagonist becomes involved with in this book]".

Some while ago I tried to analyze the titles of a bunch of stories to figure out patterns, and came up with the notion that a book's title can be based on its characters, its plot, its setting, or its theme. This thread has provided lots of examples of character-titled books; others include those where the title character is described but not named, e.g. most of Steven Brust's Dragaera novels. Jane Austen provides examples of character (Emma), setting (Northanger Abbey), and theme (Pride and Prejudice). Some titles combine character and plot reference, e.g. Trent's Last Case or The Westing Game. Most titles seem to fit one of those categories; a few refer to the time the book is set (e.g. Brust's Five Hundred Years After and the Dumas to which it alludes), which I boldly assert to be a subtype of setting-title.

May I present: the "FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK" t-shirt?

(I saw this for sale on NYC's St. Mark's Place a few years ago, but I have not yet seen it being worn by an actual person.)

Would you believe that I've been engaged in doing something akin to that recently? It's been among the most interesting jobs I've undertaken. I will say that certain errors are committed in English by native speakers of Spanish, there being certain faux amis lurking for them in English (or, I would have to say, falsos amigos). The one I am rapidly coming to detest is "scenario".

Escenario is used in Spanish where scenario, scenery, scene, or setting would be used in English, depending on the context. In most of the cases I've been editing, "scenario" is being used for "setting". Very rarely is is it being used in the sense of "dramatic setting", or "scenario" tout court. It's been interesting to see how minds brought up in Castilian are struggling with English expository prose.

Yes, that is basically what it was. And yea, I get those kinds of requests often - usually for sites that are selling shoes or something. I had done it once before with no ill effects and a decent infographic but after this second experience I am off the notion for good.

Or just the noun phrase, without "[protagonist's name] and the" prefixing it. Although that can get confusing if the entity denoted by the noun phrase is another character. Eco's essay on titles mentions The Three Musketeers as a title that can mislead about who the protagonist(s) is(are) if you don't notice the implicit "D'Artagnan and the" at the front.

That duty was one of the many collateral duties I performed as a US Navy officer stationed in Bella Napoli, attached to NATO Staff. My office-mate was a Turk, and he saw me as a living, breathing translator.

The two official languages of NATO are English and French -- and all correspondance that left NAVSOUTH was in English. Unfortunately for we 'native speakers', the English in question was British English. I had to learn all over again.

But when I was tearing my hair out stuck for a title for Among Others it never occurred to me to name it after the protagonist, whose name is in any case fluid. But I'm trying to think whether it would have worked as a book called Morwenna Markova, and like most of the wrong titles I thought of for it, it would have been a statement about the wrong thing. Interesting.

How else is one supposed to find out that jumpers are different items of clothing depending on which variant of English is used?

Shielding delicate American e/y/e/b/a/l/l/s/ sensibilities from different terminologies and spellings isn't exactly world-enlarging.

I agree, adapting books into or out of American English is a bad idea. (I once came across a version of the Hardy Boys, I believe, that had been Britainized... it was as brutal an experience as the American Harry Potters.) I first learned how to do inclueing (as a reader) from my childhood favorites, the Arthur Ransome books. Granted, his whole universe was as exotic to a mid-1960s American child as any fantasy novel.

I write a monthly column for a British periodical, The Tablet; I do try to write it in British, but it's a rare month that the editor doesn't have to correct one of my Americanisms.

On the other hand, in 2009 when I edited our Observatory's coffee-table book for the Year of Astronomy (The Heavens Proclaim, still in print and available at Amazon, etc.), about a third of the chapters were submitted to me in Italian. I was not only able to translate them into English to my satisfaction; in the process, since I was also the editor, in some cases I was able to substantially rewrite the text under the guise of "translation" into a style that was more pleasing to me. When the book later came out in an Italian edition, they re-translated my translated versions of the chapter back into Italian.

However, I think it's just as well they changed "jumper" to "sweater", because that's a false cognate with hilarious effect.

I have been working out of my my field (in one case not really far out of it, in the other way out). The benefit is that I've learnt quite a lot.

Of course, editing gigs are good for humility too. In one case, a while back, the person for whom I was doing the job, balked at my suggestion that they adopt the orthography for certain localisms indicated in the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, preferring older conventional spellings.

Those images (they're used as thumbnails) were automatically generated by the wordpress when the large image was uploaded there for the blog post; that's about all the info you can get out of them.

How can this be, perhaps you ask? Well, written English, even in America, is a somewhat different dialect, in a sense, from any spoken English; and documentation written by people who have immersed themselves in "languages"* like C++, JavaScript, or Python is often...odd.

Also, there are (and this part I know everyone here knows) people who can communicate perfectly well in person, but who are incapable of putting together a coherent and comprehensible sentence in writing (of whom dyslexics are only the best-known example); and others who are so carried away by the possibilities of the written word that they write complex, formally "correct," but utterly undecodable prose. One of many reasons I curse† the name of Noam Chomsky.
_____
*Scare quotes because they're certainly not languages in the same sense English or Tosk or Rotokas or Nahuatl or Hausa or Tiwi are.
†No, not literally! That would violate my oath.

I have on occasion assisted mainland-European colleagues with making their scientific writing colloquially correct English as well as scientifically correct. Sometimes took several back-and-forths.

As a fellow fan of A Canticle For Leibowitz, I thought you might be interested in a new reading/dramatisation, which will be broadcast on Radio 4 Extra starting next Monday.

Please ignore the subbing if you know any French or are planning on learning it...the subber tries, but even I know he's getting it wrong. And no, not every comic song out of Canada is done by the Arrogant Worms.

I'd thought James Morrow's recent novel The Philosopher's Apprentice was so named as a play off of the re-titling of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, but when I asked Morrow about this, he said it wasn't.

(Stir fresh cranberries with enough Karo syrup or equivalent to make them sticky; roll in confectioners' sugar until heavily coated; let dry. Easy and fabulous! Do not try to use cranberries which have been frozen for this.)

The earliest cite I've found for it so far on Google Books is in the Wireless World and Radio Review, vol. 19, p426 (1926)-- Google seems to've done somethiing to its interface again, so some search combinations will pull that up but others won't. "If there is anything better than a 'Knickerbocker Glory' at the soda fountain for making the average American gurgle with delight, it's a genuine pat on the back. He likes it laid on thick."

So the "Knickerbocker" part of the name may've originated to emphasize its NY origin?

This ref from 1903 seems to establish the origin of the Knickerbocker "fountain chocolate" company as a successor to another company, JH Barker?

Is that The One Where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are caught in a conflict between the natives, and near the end at the native feast they serve them egg creams, and Kirk realizes that these are the ragged descendants of the lost colonists of New Amsterdam, and he bursts into tears, and then everybody sings "September Song?"

Yes, we live in an age of carbon-fibre hulled aerofoil-driven catamaran hydrofoils that can do over a hundred kilometres per hour.

(Yes, it's off-topic, but I thought Jim might be interested, and it's no more off-topic than the etymology of the Knickerbocker Glory. Which was a special treat of my childhood and I always associate with the cafe in a particularly dusty 1970s department store in Dewsbury.)

The current America's Cup boats are wing sails:

http://www.americascup.com/en/about/boats

Also: Her high-heeled boots went clattering down the Knickerbocker line.

May I present: the "FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK" t-shirt?

Oh, how dearly I'd love to make something like that shirt at Zazzle, but they're a little prim there; I've had to settle for the likes of "Swive ye!". Guaranteed to offend a somewhat different crowd.

Naturally, when reading of such things one can't help but recall joke #640 in Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor....

paxed @259: As I'd suspected, more or less, but it's good to have confirmation. So evidently it's Wordpress that's a few versions behind in their IJG libraries.

Just askin'.

*Also, is it swive, swove, have swiven?

And is that pronounced swyvèd, like that?

Also, I was playing. I know your information is real, but I hope you don't mind my continuing to play.

And yeah, I think swyvèd.

I don't know that I've ever seen "A and B swyved" (together); I've seen "A swyved" (in general, as it were) and "A swyved B". But my experience with Middle English was limited, and a long time ago, and has since been superseded by several layers of other kinds of jargon.

Richard of Alemaigne, whyl that he was kyng
He spende al his tresour opon swyuing"

(I just listened to my CD of Planxty singing that very song yesterday....)

You know, I'd never thought of "Fuck Me" as being particularly gendered. I use it fairly consistently, but then, I use many curse words fairly consistently (I do try to moderate the impulse in mixed company).

Though I'm coming to believe that just about anything you do frequently and unapologetically can be made to blend into the background over time.

HelenS @246 Working in a secondary school in Kent I found it hard to maintain the proper attitude for telling off girls for telling people to "suck my cock".

Not an expression I've ever been comfortable using, but it can lend piquancy to a good story.

I used to know a guy who added "'til I bleed" to the end. And of course there's the famous line from Heathers "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw! Do I look like Mother Theresa?" No, Heather, you definitely don't.

Re: the "Fuck me..." series of utterances - the one I'm most familiar with is "Fuck me sideways."

anime settings: high school, space ship, secret organization, rural Japanese country town, big Japanese city, etc

and another of Stock Characters: the tall imposing dark-skinned guy; the crinkly-faced tiny old man; the crinkly-faced tiny old woman; the boy everyone thinks is a girl; the girl (often a bandit-queen or similar) who dresses in porno versions of men's clothes and is Stronger Than Any Man; etc

... and then a separate check-off list (or bingo card?) of

stereotypical plot twists/Stuff That Happens: the unrequited crush That Dare Not Speak Its Name; oh hai sudden nakedness!; leading two separate lives; OMGharem; etc

... so we can watch for them and appreciate their typicality when they happen.

Or maybe that's too organized to actually happen, but it's a sweet thought. :-> We could characterize each title we watch by listing off the things that apply to it, possibly leading to some interesting insights across titles.

Suggestions welcomed.

Some anime that use their cliches use them straight-faced, and some (Ouran High School Host Club for one; I'm certain I've seen others but I'm blanking) are deliberately satirizing their genres, which is hard to 'get' if you don't have the underlying assumption explained before you see it.

I'm thinking there may be some pause-requests coming from each of us -- from her when we hit a JAPAN IS WEIRD moment (thank you, Moviebob)/strange-to-Westerners narrative assumption, or from me when something very characteristic happens, so I can lampshade it and provide context.

Almost as useful is "... a biography", where that isn't obvious.

One of my editors proposed to enact grievous bodily harm on my ass if I did so. Then pointed out exactly what was likely to happen when that title hit Amazon's database (not to mention all the other booksellers), which was a lot harder to argue against -- I enjoy eating, y'know?

I got my revenge: what I handed in was SATURN'S CHILDREN. The sequel is NEPTUNE'S BROOD. And if the third in the trilogy ever gets written, it will be named something like SPAWNING URANUS (with British pronounciation, not the American bowdlerised version).

--E @18, and here I thought we more commonly ran out of ones.

Serge @95 made me laugh hard enough that I am very glad I wasn't drinking anything while I was reading this morning. Merci, I needed that.

Nancy Lebovitz #312: I actually read her Bloodring trilogy first, and was all "no way is that the author's real name, it's just too convenient!" Not that I actually know one way or the other....

Here's the thing about a lot of those "infographics", though: they're just a more visually sophisticated version of those spammy, content-farmed articles whose real purpose is to get links and Googlejuice.

And he is not alone in this assessment.