JVP (April 16): huh??
Both Snopes and the Straight Dope both scoff at the "verre ← vair" theory, fwiw.
Hm. Snopes says the word vair was dead by the time Perrault wrote verre; but it is still a standard word in heraldry (denoting fur of a specific pattern), and so might well be used for an old-timey touch. Snopes also says "the glass slipper is peculiar to Perrault's telling of the story"; how this is evidence against the vair theory is not obvious to me.
I find the Straight Dope's argument more persuasive: "As the French folklorist Paul Delarue pointed out in a 1951 essay, "‘one can also find [glass shoes in Cinderella stories] in other countries where there is no homonym which permits the confusion.’"
The graal in one version is a severed head; in another it's a big green stone.
"It needs more to make a king than a piece of [green] elvish glass ...."
La Gioconda (La Joconde) is a personal name? Here I've always taken it to mean "The Happy One". We learn something every day (if we're not careful).
LeGuin noted some time back that people will buy bestsellers (and go to hit movies) because they can participate, through the Law of Contagion, in the money involved.
Paul Fussell made a similar conjecture about t-shirts (&c) adorned with brand-names. (Class: a guide through the American status system, 1983)
Mary Sue can be the writer's wife rather than the writer; see The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller, in which Clark Gable and, er, the other guy spend at least the first forty minutes going on about how wonderful Marilyn Monroe is.
I have heard that people tend to have [Knuth's] checks framed rather than cash them.
Mine got lost in the clutter on my desk before I had finished gloating about it.
. . . the Johnson of Johnson Solids (all edges the same length, don't care about angles or faces being the same).
A Johnson solid (of which there are 92) is a convex nonuniform solid whose faces are regular. Norman Johnson, by the way, is currently active on a polytopes list hosted by Magnus Wenninger.
Yes - but when I do it, it'll work.
Isn't that one of the key principles of politics?
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