HD&Q, ugh! As a child of perhaps 9, I was traumatised by graphic depictions of 16th/17th century English justice in a history book my parents bought me*. It wasn't just the butchery of it that got me but the deep-down unfairness of the whole system: you were there to be convicted, and if the prosecuting counsel didn't do a good enough job, the judge was liable to take over. I was particularly haunted by peine forte et dure in that regard.
* This was the 1970s, and there was some unwritten rule that history books had to be gruesome. The same book featured woodcuts of (IIRC) Dutch atrocities against English settlers in the East Indies. Rats were involved: also, large quantities of water and a funnel...
Sebastian @288:
I immediately thought "Time Lord technology! It's bigger on the inside!".
Which made me think, The Last Battle, published 1956; Doctor Who, first broadcast 1963. I'd never really thought of the two as being so close together. Spatial discontinuities are common in the Narnia books: wardrobe = Tardis, anyone?
Come to think of it, TLTW&TW has a hint of Einstein in Chapter 5, in the conversation with the Professor:
If ... she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own.
Distorted space + time passes at different rates = relativity? The mind boggles...
Roz @ 208: That part of The Silver Chair (Green Lady vs the pro-Narnians, with Puddleglum sticking his foot in the fire) struck me the same way. If anything, the imagine-something-better argument is more powerful against religion than in its favour: a godless universe could quite plausibly be sub-optimal, but if God is perfect and He made me, I shouldn't be able to imagine obvious improvements, should I?
Lee @ 249:
Disney has done us an enormous disservice by wrapping everything up in cotton candy until people can't deal with "children being exposed to" real life any more.
Yes, whatever happened to the people that gave us Old Yeller etc?
On Narnia and Christianity, I read all the books the first time through without spotting the allegory: I was eight when I read Dawn Treader, so figure a year either side of that. I adored them all except The Last Battle, which was rather too dark for me. (I think the dwarves shooting the horses was the real tipping point.)
I re-read them a couple of years later, got the allegory immediately, and felt bitterly disappointed. There was Christianity everywhere! I made it all the way to The Last Battle again, to this line:
"Yes," said Queen Lucy. "In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world."
and gave up in disgust.
It's probably just projection on my part, but in the foreword to LOTR, when Tolkien says:
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence
I still can't help thinking he was having a little jab at Lewis.
Marmite really is powerfully polarising stuff. I don't know I'd go this far* but I'm definitely with Mary Dell on the subject, despite having been exposed to the stuff as a child. Family Marmite anecdote: we once had a French exchange student, Jean, who mistook the stuff for chocolate spread and made himself a good thick tartine of the stuff, despite my mother's earnest attempts to warn him. In retrospect I think his self control was admirable - bordering on the superhuman, even - but he did not take a second bite.
As for ways of cooking people, I seem to remember C. S. Lewis mentioning baking them into pies, though I don't think he ever gave the specifics of the recipe.
* WARNING: link probably** SFW but not at all suitable as mealtime viewing.
** For cultures that don't have problems with breastfeeding, at any rate.
Chris Sullins @ 31: curses, I missed that one and I actually live in Brittany! Having said that, you hardly ever see the word "Breton" here: the locals prefer the autological "Breizh", although hardly any of them actually seem to speak it.
John Mark Ockerbloom @ 37: Mountains of the Moon certainly left me with a highly favourable impression of the lady in question (or possibly just of Fiona Shaw: it's always hard to tell, though I should stress that I have no similar regard for Harry Potter's Aunt Petunia).
It's a sad reflection on internet culture that all this circumlocution should be necessary. Why must every civilised discussion about Bruton descend into trollish sniggering? Okay, it's an unfortunate name for a school, but surely we're mature enough to see beyond that?
Ah, alto parts: I had two years of singing all those beautiful baroque alto lines ("In Tears of Grief", anyone?) before my voice finally hit its natural level. I was hoping for tenor, would have settled for baritone, but what I got was right down at the bottom of bass. *Sigh*
Xopher @ 578: I believe what you have there is a paradox of set theory. I wonder if it's not even a version of Russell's paradox: that always seems to rear its head when you start talking about sets of all sets which don't have property X. (Personally I prefer Grelling's paradox, but only because "autological" and "heterological" are cool words.)
MD² @ 243: Just because they were significant to the general public at the time they were published doesn't mean they still are.
This reminds me of Milan Kundera's argument in Le Rideau about the importance of context to a work of art: he says that a work of Beethoven, if newly created today, would be "perceived as ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstruous"*. In other words, anyone who didn't recognise the Austen would be perfectly right to reject it anyway.
Dave Luckett @ 241: Bending over backwards to give the reporter the benefit of the doubt, he may have missed the obvious explanation simply because the slush reader's behaviour (ignoring a loony so as not to encourage that kind of thing) is the exact opposite of standard UK journalistic practice. I mean, if you ignore lunacy and it really does go away, what are you going to write about instead?
* "ressenti comme ridicule, faux, incongru, voire monstrueux" - that man's French is a continuing admonishment to me on my own clumsiness. Still, I can honestly say that I never thought I'd be able to read him in the original: of course, it helps that he changed languages sometime in the 90s. :)
Russ @ 236: Yes, that one's been pulled off many times before (and has been covered here, I believe, if only my Google Fu were up to the task of tracking down links). The question is, do the journalists writing these things really think what they're doing is original or meaningful in any way?
A thought: perhaps they're doing it as an exercise in Godel-Escher-Bach-style self-reference. They submit the story to their editors, who are too ill-versed to recognise the blatant unoriginality of the idea, so they print the stupid thing. Our expressions of outrage here then neatly mirror the ones in the story and voila, the circle is closed. Anyone want to say "I was staggered" to start the ball rolling?
All the talk of cornichons immediately brought this song to mind. Fantastic with saucisson sec and good crusty bread.
Curiously though, I've never seen them served with raclette. Round here (Brittany) customs seem to vary, but the basics of a soiree raclette are potatoes boiled in their skins, mixed charcuterie (chorizo, different kinds of ham, French bacon - supermarkets sell packs specifically for raclette) and the cheese itself. Good solid winter food: we generally drink red with it.
Incidentally, "raclette" is also the word for the thing you use to scrape ice off the windscreen of a car: after you've spent enough time trying to get burnt-on cheese off the little grill pans, the association of ideas becomes quite powerful.
Soon Lee @ 816:
Pronunciation of scones: I'm getting a Goodies flashback.
Wow, I'm so glad someone else gets those too: I thought it was just me. Could I just point out (picking up on a theme from way upthread) that Patrick Troughton (Dr Who #2) and Jon Pertwee (Dr Who #3) both had guest starring roles in Goodies episodes?
Fragano @ 757: The thing that throws me is the French "quinze jours" for two weeks, even though literally that's fifteen days, not fourteen. (The programmer in me tries to visualise this as fifteen days interleaved with fourteen nights, like some variant of the fencepost problem.)
Mary Dell @ 765:
I've actually been living in the land of 3d for years now
After all that discussion of LSD (monetarily speaking) I parsed this as the land of thruppence the first time through.
Abi @ 781:
I have friends over that age line who claim traumatic amnesia.
At 43, I was old enough to use LSD currency (not quite 7 on Decimalisation Day) but still too young to have to do serious arithmetic with the stuff (7 items at 4/3d each = ???). This may explain why I look back on the old coinage fondly. Then again, I've done a lot of hexadecimal since then (0x7 * 0x43 = 0x1d5) so maybe those particular neurons just got re-purposed.
Peter@244:
Yes, that's what the Shorter OED says. I'd always taken it to mean outside events figuratively smacking *you* in the gob, which would perhaps suggest a higher level of surprise. (To me, if you've still got the presence of mind to clap your hand over your mouth, the events in question might be appalling but they can't have been truly mindbogglingly unexpected.)
Earl@243:
The "gob" of "gobbed on the carpet" means "spit" rather than "mouth", as in the old Spike Milligan sketch:
OUTRAGED HOUSEHOLDER: Oy! You can't come in here and gob on the floor!
DIPLOMAT: Is diplomatic immunity.
O.H.: No it's not, it's gob!
As for "wanker" (aeons ago upthread), for my money it only *really* works as an insult when delivered in a S.E. England style, with a glottal stop in place of the K. (I've been trying to track down a YouTube of the "Call me Wanker" sketch from the old Harry Enfield show, but to no avail.)
I always loved the opening sentence of the Dashiell Hammett short story Flypaper:
"It was a wandering daughter job."
which sums up the case and the protagonist in one go. It's fragile though - the French translation comes out as:
"Il s'agissait d'une affaire de fugue."
("It consisted of a case of [unspecified person] running away") which is rather a damp squib in comparison. On the other hand, I bought Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines on the strength of the opening sentence alone:
"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea."
and that loses nothing whatever in translation. (Of course, French readers might have preferred the adventures of a self-propelled, voracious Paris, but that would have been an entirely different book.)
Spoke too soon: googling "canal plus mouton" did the trick. Here's a direct link, assuming I don't screw the tags up. (Crosses fingers.)
On the viral penguins ad, Canal Plus have got another one of those out now on French TV. It's the exact same structure only with Brokeback Mountain as the film being described/imagined, so instead of emperors swapping eggboxes you get an interspecies romance in a tent on top of a rollercoaster. Can't find a video of it online though.
TexAnne @ 65
Yes indeed, if by "dwarf" Del @ 61 meant "small"; but "bread made by/for dwarves" would be something more like "pain de nain". And if they made it with some of that centuries-old sourdough starter, it would be "pain de nain au levain" (or possibly vice versa). And, if they made it by hand, in a bathtub,...
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