Copyright (for Mother)

Contra my own literary blunders, Wendy Cope's views on copyright are actually a matter of record. Oops.

Dictionary.com - bizarre stats

Common Misspellings of 'dictionary'*
* in order of decreasing regularity/idiocy, apparently.

dictionar
dict
dic
dictonary
diction
dictionnary
dictionery
dictinary
dicionary
dicitionary

I'm sorry, but I feel I have to ask: who's looking up 'dictionary'? And when someone types in 'diction', how do They know it's a typo?

Five-and-a-bit Dials

Numero huit-b.

Ici.

Feeling the Roth (p.3)

They decided to avail themselves of the facility reserved to people in our own century when they don't know what to do - they went to the cinema.

- The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Feeling the Roth (p.2)

The nuts and bolts of a miracle have nothing miraculous about them.

- The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Feeling the Roth (p.1)

'I see,' said the clochard, 'that you have understood me and my sense of honour perfectly. I give my word that I will keep my word.'

- The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Lateran thinking

Yr 7 History exam

Source B: Peter Connolly, 1978

Hannibal tried to bring 34 elephants to Italy. All but one died crossing the Alps.

Source C: Mike Corbishley, 1989

Hannibal astonished his enemies by marching to Italy across the Alps. His huge army of 40,000 men also had 37 war-elephants with them. Hannibal reached Italy with 26,000 men and 12 elephants.

Q5 Sources B and C were both written by experts on Roman history. Do the differences mean that one of them must be wrong?

[A Of course not. They could both be wrong.]

Hauteur! Hauteur!

I find my name listed in the program of the Edinburgh International Festival among those of writers invited to take part in its Writers Conference.... Needless to say that I am supremely indifferent to "the problems of a writer and the future of the novel" that are to be discussed...

- Vladimir Nabokov, letter to The Times, May 30, 1962

American history wtf?

The New Press has a category entitled World History/WWII.

Everything you need to know about the American isolationist mentality...

Hearing voices

A great authority on singing once wrote that when Everyman sang in his bath, it was Caruso whom he fancied he heard.

- Frank Johnson, Best Seat in the House (not actually about music, ironically enough)

Which invites the question: when Everyman reviews his day's blog activity [ahem... - Eds.] whose work does he imagine he is reading? Nabokov? Fitzgerald? That idiot Joyce?

Lock up your children: 1

Examining the portrayal of African social customs, religious philosophies, and political structures in fiction for young people, Maddy and MacCann reveal the Western biases that often infuse stories by well-known Western authors.

- from the blurb for Neo-Imperialism in Children's Literature About Africa

InDefinition - 9

impostropher, n. One who puts apostrophe's where they do not belong.

Jane Austen couldn't spell

It's true.

I found a reference to 'Jane Austen's Love and Freindship' in With Chatwin by Susannah Clapp and - my apologies to Ms Clapp - looked it up.

Strange rhetoric

I've read and reread this paragraph several times, and I still can't work out what it means:

When asked whether he had forgiven and forgotten the public lampooning of his derisory decision to carry an umbrella on the touchline, he means to reply with a rhetorical question but in a Freudian slip said: "I won't forgive or forget."

From here.

Captions of the day so far - 2

From Colombo's glossy celebrity monthly, Hi!!:

• "A Girl doing her best in the hearing impaired long jump event."


• "A rear treat for these differenty able children."

This last, readers will be relieved to know, accompanied a totally innocent photograph of children on a merry-go-round.

Graft

Over the last thirty years or so, it has become almost a Parliamentary rule that disgrace visits the two main parties in different ways. Tories are busted for sex, and Labourites are busted for graft.

- Julian Barnes, writing for The New Yorker... in March 1990)

Apart from Barnes' telling prescience (or, at least, his accurate analysis of the cyclical inevitability of political sleaze) I am reminded that, thanks to the many and various evils of the English language, 'graft' can mean - as a noun, in the political sense - 'rifling the public petty (and not-so-petty) cash box' and - as a verb, in the rugby-playing, gruff-Northerners-tilling-the-fields kind of sense - 'working hard and (implicitly) earning legitimately and (for added virtue) by the sweat of one's brow'.

But, because this is English, though the word simultaneously has these two meanings, it cannot, (of course) mean them both at the same time.

Status anxiety

I finally figured out how to change my Facebook settings from English (Pirate) to English (UK). I was having trouble understanding the Piratespeak. So much so that I couldn't figure out how to change away from it. I was, in a way, held captive by Pirate.

I am now having trouble understanding English (UK). Which, in another way, is a lot scarier.

Hollywood brings its A-game

The A-Team is/are moving to the big screen in a production rumoured to include actor Liam Neeson (not playing BA Baracus), actor Woody Harrelson (not playing BA Baracus), actor Bradley Cooper (not playing BA Baracus) and rapper Common.

The movie remake will see the Team meeting in Gulf War I - as opposed to Vietnam - and apparently will be "grittier" than the TV version. Says one source in The Metro, "The tone will be closer to the film versions of Mission: Impossible and Ocean's Eleven. People might die, but it'll be the fun kind of dying."

Dying of laughter, presumably...

Thought for the day

Was Shakespeare actually a woman?

"I and my bosom must debate awhile,
And then I would no other company"
--Henry V, 4.1.31-32

(Thanks to Dee Dee for the question)

Chatterday Night Live

"Don't take what I'm going to say as a reason to disagree with me..."

- Dominic Hilton