Coincidence or conspiracy? You be the judge:
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/69241.htm
BOUNCER IS OFF THE WALL
CLUB 'KILLER' IS CRAZY FOR CHAUCER, KUNG FU
...At first, Sakai, 30, appeared normal, but the longer the 40-minute interview went on, the more he grew deceptively unhinged.
The 5-foot-11, 180-pound he-man claims to be a student of philosophy - particularly Taoism - and loves Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," but admitted dropping out of high school.
"Um, Ms. Nielsen Hayden, just a few questions, strictly routine...Um, I understand that when you're under the influence, you claim to write like this, uh, Chaucer guy? But you claim you've never met Mr. Sakai? Uh, you can account for your whereabouts the night of the murder, I'm sure...?"
Graydon writes: No Islamic nation has a navy. Everyone on the planet put together can't take on the USN.
The second statement is quite likely true, but, just for the record, the first is not true at all.
"The zealous protectress of the missions obtained from De Monts, whose fortunes, like those of Poutrincouirt, had ebbed low, a transfer of all his claims to the lands of Acadia; while the young King, Louis the Thirteenth, was persuaded to give her, in addition, a new grant of all the territory of North America, from the St. Lawrence to Florida. Thus did Madame de Guercheville, or in other words, the Jesuits who used her name as a cover, become proprietors of the greater part of the future United States and British Provinces. The English colony of Virginia and the Dutch trading-houses of New York were included within the limits of this destined Northern Paraguay..."
--Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World
Obviously, this is all part of a carefully laid Catholic plot that his been kept hidden for centuries...
As I recall, Jack Williamson described an early correspondence with an engineer about rocket designs. Sadly, it came to an abrupt end when the man was killed in an explosion. Williamson was relieved to learn, through L. Sprague de Camp, that at least it had nothing to do with rocketry. Just a co-worker being a little careless with picric acid.
This sounds like it must have been Jack Parsons. He was a fascinating figure, a pioneering rocket scientist as well as a dabbler in the occult, and was acquainted with many sf people, including Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard, who supposedly ran off with his girlfriend. I've heard various descriptions of the fatal explosive; the bio I read said it was an entire coffee can full of mercury fulminate.
My high school chemistry teacher, Harold F. St. Aubin, used to say, in his deep Kentucky accent, "People, always remember: Just 'cause a little'll do a little good, don't mean a lot'll do a lot o' good." I recalled this advice many times in the 1960s, and even heeded it sometimes.
One time when I didn't heed it was when I was alone in the h.s. chem lab and decided to follow the experiment where you made iodine crystals by heating up some compound, producing iodine vapor that you condensed onto ice. Only for some stupid reason I doubled or tripled the proportions, resulting in my filling the lab with beautiful violet vapors. Fortunately they dissipated without too much trouble.
Teresa: You have "by enlarge" in your last ¶ twice.
--Your friendly neighborhood copy editor
Language is in a constant state of flux, so a lot of usages that were once considered incorrect are now so thoroughly accepted that few people even are aware they were once considered substandard. Somwhere I have a grammar book from the 1930s decrying the use of "fix" to mean "to repair." I can't think of anyone who wouldn't use that word in that way now.
"Nauseous" to mean "experiencing feelings of nausea" hasn't advanced quite that far, but I think it's almost there. When I was a boy I was taught to say "nauseated" instead of "nauseous," and to reserve the latter to mean "inspiring nausea" ("A nauseous odor issued from the slaughterhouse.") Now, I know more than one person who says, "It made me nauseous," and I often don't bother to correct such usage when I'm editing fiction (depends on context).
Somehow in all this talk of eggcorns and malapropisms, I am also reminded of the list that Ellie Lang used to have of titles of books that customers had requested at some bookstore or other. I've forgotten a lot of them, but the two that stood out were those great classics of African American literature, Color Me Purple and The Autobiography of Malcolm the Tenth.
Oh yes: At least one of these has more or less entered the language now: "butt naked."
enjay: As someone who speaks Spanish well, I'm not fond of that pronunciation either, but it is acceptable per Web. 11. I console myself with the thought that it did inspire the great song by the Monochrome Set, "The Jet-Set Junta."
Teresa: This brings back those halcyon days (which I'm tempted to call Halcion days) when mystery novelist Nancy Atherton used to freelance for us and I'd get a call from the receptionist: "I have Nancy African on the line."
L. Pullers: Now that's a malapropism; some eggcorns would qualify, some would not. A lot are just mistakes involving homonyms. A malapropism involves a words that is similar in sound, but different, like "professional" and 'professorial."
Of course I see this sort of thing all day long, but I can't recall a lot of good ones right this minute. There are a bunch of homonyms such as leach/leech and sheer/shear that even good writers have trouble with.
Oh yeah--I do see:
He poured over the textbooks for hours.
all the time.
(Well) Now, I'm Sick, Sober and Sorry
Broke, disgusted and sad
Sick, Sober and Sorry
But look at the fun that I had.
The jukebox so loudly was playin'
Each couple havin' a ball
But of all of them gals, their sweethearts and pals
I bet I'm the sickest of all.
Drink all the water you can stand before you go to bed. It's OK if you have to hurl some; don't look for it, but don't fight the feeling either. (I would write more Chaucerianly, but I don't think I could pull it off.) Club soda is good too, being mildly basic.
Feel better. This too shall pass.
Another one for the annals of self-publishing:
http://www.beckysweb.co.uk/beckysblog/2006/03/conversational-ebonics.asp
This reminds me of the old joke about the footrace between the Soviet and the American. The American wins. The next day Pravda reports, "The Soviet runner finished second, while the American finished next to last."
In other words: Rummy, you're doing a heck of a job.
Wasn't near a computer yesterday, so...happy belated birthday. And many more to come...
I've had good success with freezing paperbacks, even totally saturated ones. Freezing can warp the boards of hardcovers, though.
That story now strikes me as some sort of ultimate fantasy for the hard-working author: You write one story and live comfortably off it for the rest of your life. I can really Garrett--who no doubt wrote it to take a break from pounding out another Mark Phillips serial + 3 or 4 other things--coming up with the idea...
Dave Langford: Yes, that's it! Thanks so much! And I remembered it as being by someone I'd never heard of before or since--figures it'd be another Garrett pseudonym...
Scott: I will slit the throat of anybody who tries to deprive me of my CD collection
"This CD is loaned for promotional purposes only and may be reclaimed at any time by the copyright holder." At least, that's what it says on a lot of my CDs.
Teresa: I wish I could remember the title and author of an sf short story I read back in the day. I think it was in Analog in the 1960s. Somebody either wrote something or invented something--something relatively minor. The galactic whoever-they-were liked it, and paid to license it. So the writer or inventor or whoever thought, cool, I made some money. But what happened was, since this bunch of galactic folks had bases all over the galaxy, and it took time to travel farther and farther away from Earth, effectively the guy was set up for life, from this one small thing: The licensing fees would keep trickling back to Earth in greater amounts as his intellectual property exanded outward like an enlarging ripple in a pond...
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