The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Vance Maverick:

Show all comments by Vance Maverick.

Posted on entry The Tay Bridge Disaster ::: October 06, 2009, 06:16 PM:
@35: now I do.

The thing about anapests in English is their association with light verse. (Hard to overcome -- credit to Byron for "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold".)
Posted on entry The Tay Bridge Disaster ::: October 06, 2009, 03:34 PM:
In rebaptizing Scott I was thinking of the music publishers. But the international Scottish fad (including for the Waverleys) was real. Think of the dance called the "schottische", pronounced in my day shaTEESH.
Posted on entry The Tay Bridge Disaster ::: October 06, 2009, 03:10 PM:
@13 - nothing's irremediable. I recommend Saintsbury -- he doesn't make the principles clear, but the examples are copious and well-chosen. (Plus he taught at Edinburgh.)
Posted on entry The Tay Bridge Disaster ::: October 06, 2009, 02:45 PM:
Schlegel and Tieck, sure. Also Ossian (e.g. Mendelssohn's "Fingal's Cave"). Walter Schott.
Posted on entry The Tay Bridge Disaster ::: October 06, 2009, 02:31 PM:
Fontane is certainly far more competent than Macgonagall -- the meter deviates from regularity only for effect. ("Tand, tand". Coleridge does this same slowdown in Christabel.) I think the mythological/dramatic framework doesn't work very well, though....
Posted on entry Damn, they're good ::: November 03, 2008, 01:02 PM:
Can you spell out what you're admiring here? One interpretation would be that the campaign is invoking the beginning of the Civil War, and a defeat for the Union. From that page:

Today will be known as BLACK MONDAY. We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped by secessionists.
Posted on entry Open thread 114 ::: September 25, 2008, 03:49 PM:
#24, 26 -- And the joke was around before Ferguson (Language Log, of course, via Wikipedia).
Posted on entry Open thread 114 ::: September 25, 2008, 03:40 PM:
Rob #24: apocryphal, traditionally attributed to Ma Ferguson.
Posted on entry Open thread 114 ::: September 25, 2008, 01:09 PM:
The elided verb in the first line threw me for a bit. It's a prozeugma.
Posted on entry The Ball of Kirriemuir ::: August 14, 2008, 12:05 AM:
Should that perhaps be "She will nae"?
Posted on entry From correspondence: Top this! ::: August 14, 2007, 01:22 AM:
#38 -- how right you are. I looked up "Harmony", and it's pretty pathetic. The discussion of "tensions" is especially lame, but the stuff that comes before the quality disclaimer is no great shakes either.

Part of the problem here is that of composing a short article as a first point of reference to a deep and complex topic. Not easy for a single competent author, and evidently even less so for a tag-team of dabblers.

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