Professor Arnold Zwicky at Language Log - see Inflected Adj/Adv - commented recently on the phenomenon of people objecting to superlatives on certain adjectives. That is, they'll say that adjectiver and adjectivest aren't words, and that more adjective and most adjective must be used. In some cases, this reflects genuine rarity: constructs that are totally unidiomatic. More often, though, it's an arbitrary judgement going against solid evidence of usage. Professor Zwicky offers the following list of words about which this complaint has been documented...
... and asked for more examples seen in the wild. I just ran into one on Yahoo! Answers:
Fierce, Fiercer, Fiercest, are the last two even words?
Fiercer and fiercest just don't sound right to my ears. Shouldn't it be "fierce, more fierce and most fierce"? I heard these words used on the history channel and it is bothering me, they don't sound right.
It seemed so weird that I couldn't resist debunking it, along with a response that "fiercer" and "fiercest" are down to recent decline of the language. Actually, both words come with the highest credentials and a long history.
"Secure from Flames, from Envy's fiercer rage" - Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism "The fiercer the fight, still the fiercer we grow" - Robert Southey "But what can shield my heart from fiercer love?" - James Boswell "The storm grew fiercer and fiercer" - Defoe, Robinson Crusoe "And hurl her thunderbolts with fiercer hand!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge "This continued, growing fiercer and fiercer" - Ulysses S Grant, Personal Memoirs "wilder and wilder, and fiercer and fiercer" - Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad " I dealt too flippantly with the fiercer kind of Suffragette" - GK Chesterton "The wind came through the tree fiercer and fiercer" - DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers "a Kanga was Generally Regarded as One of the Fiercer Animals" - AA Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh "and the sun was fiercer every minute" - George Orwell, Burmese Days
"the strongest and the fiercest spirit" - Milton, Paradise Lost "strike terror even into the fiercest creatures" - Robinson Crusoe again "Madness - fiercest madness" - PB Shelley, Zastrozzi "In one of the fiercest of these repeated assaults" - Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire "At length the fiercest heart will quail" - Thoreau "put on their fiercest looks to stare all comers out of countenance" - Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby " his temper was of the hottest and fiercest" - Dickens again, The Mystery of Edwin Drood "He had the bluest, fiercest, most pointed eyes" - DH Lawrence, The Rainbow
Whatever his social messages, Charles Dickens was a solidly commercial writer, and followed up on the success 1 of the 1843 A Christmas Carol, he followed up with a series of titles with a similar mix of social campaigning and good cheer. As the Christmas Books page at David Perdue's Charles Dickens site says:
Although subsequent Christmas books sold well at the time of their initial release, they have not enjoyed the staying power of A Christmas Carol.
They were: The Chimes: a goblin story of some bells that rang an old year out and a new year in (1844); The Cricket on the Hearth: a fairy tale of home (1845); The Battle of Life: a love story (1846); and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848). Dickens stopped the series at that point, but continued to produce shorter-format Christmas works for magazines: see Project Gutenberg for the collection Some Christmas Stories, which includes A Christmas tree, What Christmas is as we grow older, The poor relation's story, The child's story, The schoolboy's story and Nobody's story.
1. One should say qualified success; as Why A Christmas Carol was a flop for Dickens explains, it was popular and sold well, but his demanding requirements for the binding and artwork consumed most of the profits.
Click to enlarge - Scrooge's third visitor, John Leech illustration for 1843 first edition of Dicken's A Christmas Carol. I don't think I'll have that pudding at the back, that's been in contact with a dead pig and someone's foot.
A Devonshire Christmas
I
How goes it, Father Christmas?—
Oh picking—picking—along!
But give me a piece of crumple-cheese
And you shall hear my song.
Ay, settle your chestnuts down to roast,.
And fill me a cup of ale;
Then kiss the girl that you fancy most,
And you shall hear my tale.
Chorus
Froth him a cup of the home-brewed
That is both old and strong!
How goes it, Father Christmas?—
Oh picking—picking—along.
II
From Adam and Eve to the Magi,
The ghosts of the old time fade;
And I, myself, would be laid on the shelf
If it weren't for the mirth I've made :
And yet, tho' our youth in Paradise
Be a fable past recall,
We have seen the glory of sinless eyes,
And we have watched the Fall.
Chorus
So fables may be fancies,
And yet not very far wrong!
How goes it, Father Christmas?
Oh picking—picking—along!
III
I walked last night on Dartmoor,
The wind was bitterly cold,
My crimson cloak was a thread-bare joke,
And my bones were brittle and old.
I had forgotten the world's desire
And all the stars were dead,
When I sank right up to my knees in mire,
At the door of a cattle-shed.
Chorus
I saw the oldest oxen
That ever knew goad or thong;
Their sweet breath smoked in the frosty light
Of the lanthorn that I swung.
IV
I saw those oxen kneeling,
So gentle and dumb and wise,
By a child that lay in the straw and smiled
At their big dark shining eyes !
While a woman breathed "lullay, lullay,"
The Magi need not roam
So long ago, so far away,
When heaven is born at home.
Chorus
Then all my heart sang "Gloria"
I lacked no angel throng,
As over the lonely moor I went I
Picking, picking along.
And over the farm on the whistling fells
I saw the great star glide;
And "Peace on earth" rang Modbury bells,
And Ermington bells replied. How goes it, Father Christmas?
Was the burden of all their song;
And what could a Devonshire pedlar say
But "Picking—picking along."
Chorus
He needs a cloak and a pair of shoes,
But his heart is young and strong!
How goes it, Father Christmas?
Oh picking—picking—along.
This comes from the anthology The elfin artist and other poems (c. 1920) by Alfred Noyes (1880 – 1958). Although he had no particular connection with Devon - he was born in Wolverhampton, spent much of his working life in the USA, and lived his final years in the Isle of Wight - Noyes wrote a number of poems on Devon themes, including A Devonshire Christmas, A Devonshire Ditty, A Devonshire Folk Song ("about Drake and his Tavistock lass"),A Devonshire Song, and Drake, an English epic. He was a highly prolific poet, and many of his works are online at the Internet Archive.
- Ray
I found a very nice little curiosity, the map of the Isle of Wight and Solent area pictured in part above:
Bacon's Large Scale Map, 1 Inch to 1 Mile . Fully Coloured . Index to Place Names . 20p
The curiosity aspect is the strange cartographic mix. The price obviously places it post-decimalisation (i.e. post-1971) and it features routes for the Isle of Wight car ferry and hovercraft ferries; yet much of the cartographic detail is pre-1850s. For instance, Gosport (above) is shown prior to much of its suburban development, as well as the building of its railway (disused by the 1970s, but the track still prominent) and the line of Palmerston forts from Stokes Bay to Elson, dating from the 1850s. The area of Newport, IoW, is likewise way out of date, showing an area between Newport and Carisbrooke called New Village that was completely swamped in the late 1800s surburban development of Newport. All the cartographers appear to have done is drawn modern ferry routes, red lines on roads, and a few location names (note the amateurish typeface on the "Harb." representing Portsmouth Harbour Station) on a map over a century old.
The makers of the map are credited as Johnston & Bacon (a division of Geoffrey Chapman Ltd), and a glance at Google shows Bacon's Large Scale Map of the Isle of Wight to have been in print at least as far back as 1900. I can imagine the financial motive in avoiding unnecessary revision, but I can't fully imagine what was going through their heads, cartographically and commercially, to carry on doing so well beyond the point of the map becoming weirdly and obviously inaccurate. Johnston and Bacon were absorbed into Bartholomew's shortly after: one might say not before time, if that was their idea of mapmaking.
I guess there's a lesson there in not believing historical data points without corroboration. he proverbial "New Zealander" finding this map in the ruins of London 500 years from now might well believe it to represent accurate geography.
This celebrated or (to collectors) notorious firm of map-publishers ... reissued OS mapping, photographically copied, and with some cosmetic alterations, notably added emphasis to railways and stations, rewriting of town names (often in bold lower case rather than the OS’s capitals) and colouring of main roads ... Perhaps the firm were enabled to ‘get away with it’ because they invariably used superseded OS mapping.
YouTube browsing can lead in strange directions. I was looking into the origins of the Diva song from The Fifth Element; as explained in Who is the Opera Singer in the Film Fifth Element?, the Diva Plavalaguna is played by French actress Maïwenn Le Besco and voiced over, with minimal instrumental overdubbing by operatic soprano Inva Mula-Tchako. This track, based on Il Dolce Suono (the "mad scene") from Lucia di Lammermoor, is on YouTube isolated from the movie. This led me in turn to the version of Il Dolce Suono by Vitas, the Latvian-born Vitaliy Vladasovich Grachyov - see official site - who is best known for his remarkable use of falsetto register (he is not a "yarbleless like eunuch", as Alex from A Clockwork Orange would put it). The duo of violinists with Vitas on Il Dolce Suono are Вибрация (Vibration), who specialise in modernised classical tracks, especially Vivaldi, and at Зима, their take on Vivaldi's Winter, I found the above weird animation in the related videos.
In the video I found - now removed due to copyright - it was a bit of an enigma: the sole upload by user pskovmail, it's completely uncredited, the poster merely saying "Супер-музыка супер клип! Наслаждайтесь!" ("Super-music, super clip! Enjoy!"). The imagined instrument is beautiful and ingenious, but sinister too: its Giger-style claw-like 'fingers' have no actuators, so it presumably is part-magical. Given the Russian origin of the clip, I suspect that it might represent the Wonderful Self-Playing Harp in the Russian folktale of Prince Astrach. Astrach gains the harp by killing the evil Коще́й Бессме́ртный (Koschei the Deathless), who has concealed his soul in a hard-to-find egg. See The Story of the Most Wonderful and Noble Self-Playing Harp as retold in The Russian garland:
As soon as he arrived and told her that he had found the egg, the Princess said : "Now fear nothing; come with me straight to Kashtshei." And when they appeared before him, Kashtshei jumped up, and would have killed Prince Astrach ; but the Prince instantly took the egg in his hand and fell to crushing it gradually. Then Kashtshei began to cry and roar aloud, and said to the Tsarevna Darisa : " Was it not out of love that I told you where my death was? And is this the return you make?" So saying he seized his sword from the wall to slay the Tsarevna ; but at the same moment Astrach, the King's son, crushed the egg, and Kashtshei fell dead upon the ground like a sheaf of corn.
Then the Tsarevna Darisa led Astrach into the palace, where was the Self -playing Harp, and said to him: "The Harp is now thine take it; but in return for it, conduct me back to my home." So Prince Astrach took up the Harp, and it played so gloriously that he was struck dumb with amazement at its sounds, as well as its workmanship of the purest Eastern crystal and gold strings. After gazing at it for a long time, Prince Astrach left the palace, and mounting his gallant steed with Darisa, set out upon his return. First he carried the Tsarevna back to her parents, and afterwards went on his way to Egypt, to Tsar Afor, and gave the Self-playing Harp to his betrothed, the Tsarevna Osida. Then they placed the Harp on the table, and it fell to playing the most beautiful and merry tunes.
I turned out, however, to be completely wrong. But I'll keep the original speculation for the nice directions it led. The animation wasn't Russian at all, but a piece called Resonant Chamber from Animusic, a US company specialising entirely in DVDs of music produced by fanciful animated instruments (there's a nice multi-view, showing what each component instrument does). There are many other clips on their YouTube channel: Pipe Dream and Aqua Harp are other particularly good ones.
Addendum 2: Clare just got an e-mail that Mr Know-it-all instantly spotted as a hoax:
Read this first, then watch.
AMAZING!
Turn your sound on for this.
This is almost unbelievable. See how all of the balls wind up in catcher cones.
This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa ... Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft , Iowa ...Yes, farm equipment!
It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort. It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.
The accompanying clip was Animation's Pipe Dream, minus the Animation credit. I didn't realise, however, how ubiquitous the e-mail is: enough to be mentioned on a number of debunking sites such as Snopes. Needless to say, the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa do not exist. The discussion at The Blog of Phyz - Fooling our elders... - is enlightening if depressing; I know well the syndrome described, where the person who spots a hoax becomes cast as the bad guy:
The person who sends the hoax is regarded as a happy-go-lucky victim with a positive outlook on life, but the person who responds with the truth is regarded as a curmudgeonly killjoy.
In this case, however, the hoax is doing down a remarkable piece of work. As the Hoaxslayer entry says:
There is no need to malign this fantastic animation by tacking on a foolish and totally fictitious cover story. Such clever work speaks for itself and needs no embellishment. Moreover, the real creators of the animation deserve credit for their genius. If you receive this email forward, please let the sender know the true origin of the "farm machine music" video.
The UK papers, such as the Guardian - James Gillray cartoons discovered in Ministry of Justice clearout - variously mention the discovery of a volume of the "Suppressed Plates" by the political satirist James Gillray, works seized as obscene in Victorian times, stowed in various offices, and now rescued from a bin liner by the astute policy adviser David Pearson.
Some of his prints are rather more personal: his The Gout is clearly drawn from the heart. I'm surprised he isn't in the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, a rather excellent collection of annotated references to medical conditions in art, literature and other media.
- Ray
Sidetracking from Sydney Whiting's Heliondé: or, Adventures in the sun, I find he wrote a variety of slightly eccentric reflective works: an anthology of poems (Poems, 1873); A Literary Mélange of Prose and Verse (1846, volume 1 / volume 2); and Memoirs of a stomach: written by himself, that all who eat may read (1853).
The last is quite readable, the stomach being used as a vehicle for Whiting's droll heavily-footnoted excursions (reminiscent of Cecil Torr's) into a variety of topics: diet, history, medicine (such as mainstream v.s homeopathy) and more. It's also quite unusual, as stomachs usually only get bit parts in fiction, such as the chapter About Sir John Fastolf's belly and his rat in Robert Nye's brilliant Falstaff. This got me looking for more, and I found two strange books on a theme long pre-dating its appearance in the film Fantastic Voyage 1, its Asimov novelization, and the spoof Innerspace.
Travels in the Interior, Or, The Wonderful Adventures of Luke and Belinda (Luke Theophilus Courteney, Ward and Downey, 1887, Internet Archive travelsininteri00courgoog) is a didactic adventure in which two medical students and the sister of one get shrunk (or possibly think they do, in a mutual hallucination induced by a Baghdad sweetmeat given them by an old woman) and travel down their Uncle's alimentary canal, with a side excursion to his inner ear, down into his stomach and as far as his duodenum, finally escaping via a vein through a pimple in his neck. The pseudonymous Courteney introduces the story through the fiction of a London physician having found the manuscript in his waiting room. The Athenaeum reviewer didn't think much of it: "One can hardly tell whether the writer's object has been to temper instruction with jocularity or to heighten waggishness by professional details".
No one who has ever stood where Belinda was, will have any surprise at her delight at such a sight after emerging from the long, dark passage. The room, or cell, was of an irregular shape some thirty yards long, twenty high, and only about ten broad. It was lighted by a huge oval window, which occupied nearly the whole of one side, glazed with some semi-transparent material that admitted a " dim religious light." On the opposite wall were two very pretty windows, one oval and the other round, each about eight yards across.
The special feature of attraction, however, was a most remarkable chain of bones that, suspended by slings from the roof, stretched right across from the huge window in the outer wall to the oval one in the other. These bones were most curiously shaped (one of them being a perfect stirrup), and were incessantly shaking and rattling as if they had the palsy. Picture these, entirely covered, together with the whole cell, with an exquisitely delicate shade of pink velvet, having a very long, silky pile, which, in constant motion, kept incessantly reflecting ripples of silvery light from Luke's lamp, and we shall have some faint idea of what this Robinson Crusoe and Lady Friday were gazing upon.
But if what met the eye was lovely, the sounds that reached the ear were enough to fill the listener with awe. The heavy thud (which had attracted Belinda's attention at first, and sounding like a huge steam-hammer) continued with perfect regularity on the roof overhead, and the roaring rush, like Niagara, beneath their feet, sounded absolutely overwhelming.
"Explain these awful noises. Pill."
"The thumping overhead is the pulsation of uncle's brain, which beats just like the heart, and the rushing under our feet is the sound of the great carotid, which is one of the four arteries by which the whole brain is supplied with blood."
" How wonderful ! " said Belinda. "Now tell me about the cave."
Rather more surreal, there's Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera: a fascinating trip to the interior (George S Chappell, Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York, 1930). Chappell, followers of JSBlog may remember, is the author behind the Walter Traprock exploration spoofs - see South Sea shenanigans and To the poles! - and Through the Alimentary Canal etc is altogether funnier than Travels in the Interior. Unfortunately it's too recent to be online in full, but a solid excerpt can be previewed in JB Mussey's The Cream of the Jesters
1. Itself almost certainly inspired by Joseph W Skidmore's story A World Unseen (Wonder Stories, April 1936) in which the brilliant millionaire scientist Donald Millstein uses his "atomic reductor" to travel inside the bloodstream of his girlfriend Joane Cromwell to remove from her spine a bullet fired by a minion of his nemesis, the mad scientist Verensky. (Science-fiction: the Gernsback years: a complete coverage of the genre magazines ... from 1926 through 1936, Everett Franklin Bleiler, Richard Bleiler, Kent State University Press, 1998).
One of the many excellent ambient tracks from Sunshine.
Right from the myths of Prometheus and Icarus (and probably earlier) stories have tinkered with the idea of visiting or approaching the Sun. It's a long-standing mythological motif that the eagle is the only creature that can fly to the sun. Seeing Sunshine, which recently premiered on UK television, prompted me to look for more examples.
There are a few literal landings on the Sun in literature. For instance, Satan in Milton's 1667 Paradise Lost lands there: being a kind of supervillain, he's unharmed but finds it, unsurprisingly, "beyond expression bright"
So wonderously was set his station bright. There lands the Fiend, a spot like which perhaps Astronomer in the sun's lucent orb Through his glazed optick tube yet never saw. The place he found beyond expression bright, Compared with aught on earth, metal or stone; Not all parts like, but all alike informed With radiant light, as glowing iron with fire;
Cyrano de Bergerac's 1662 Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Soleil (Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun) is more of an allegorical/satirical Sun. The narrator, Dyrcona, travels there in a flying machine powered by solar reflectors and finds it to be a world of "burning snowflakes" and abundant plant life; he is captured and put on trial by sentient birds (description from p.21, Different engines: how science drives fiction and fiction drives science, Mark Brake & Neil Hook, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Sydney Whiting's 1855 Heliondé: or, Adventures in the sun - online in full at Google Books - is in the same fanciful vein, though with less philosophical subtext and considerably more weird: Science-fiction, the early years describes it as
Essentially an erotic dream in very veiled terms, told as a collection of extraterrestrial curiosities with, very oddly, a heavy increment of mid-nineteeth-century Classical scholarship.
(An example of the much-complained-of weird metadata: Google Books classifies it as "political science").
I can't find anything much about it, but Hyman Kaner's 1946 Llandudno-published The Sun Queen, in which a couple are transmitted to a planet inside the Sun, sounds to be much the same. Surprisingly, older fantasies of this form were not necessarily as far-fetched in their time as they seem now; a number of perfectly serious books argued from the (comparatively) darker appearance of sunspots that the Sun might have a cooler inhabitable core. See, for instance, The complete works of Thomas Dick and Popular astronomy, both referring to astronomer William Herschel's "habitable sun" theory.
Mostly, however, now that we know the Sun is a giant nuclear fusion reaction, fiction is realistic about its nature. Any creatures there are assumed to be very different from any life we know (this Technovelgy article mentions several works tackling the idea). But this doesn't preclude a variety of treatments of the theme of humans visiting: the lyrical, as in Ray Bradbury's 1953 The Golden Apples of the Sun; the gently comic, as in the 1985 Journey to the sun in a glacier ship; the poetic, as in Edwin Morgan's Golden Apples (which actually refers to the Bradbury story ); the epic, as in Samuel R Delany's 1968 Nova; and the ludicrous, as in this Weekly World News story, which recycles the old joke about the safest way to send a mission to the Sun.
Yes, I know Nova isn't about the Sun, but the Promethean myth is central to its plot ...
We have to go to the rim of chaos and bring back a handful of fire
... to collect a precious superheavy element direct from an exploding nova, an aim achieved at great cost.
Which brings me back to Sunshine, which recently premiered on UK television. If you haven't seen it, do (I'm hoping it'll turn up some time at the local independent cinema). Despite any number of technical/scientific implausibilities and overt allusions to other SF movies, it's a vastly impressive film, one of my favourites from the last few years, helped along by stunning visuals (informed by the latest SOHO images) and a moving ambient soundtrack by Underworld and John Murphy. One of its unusual elements is its reversal of the Prometheus myth, it being about a mission to take fire to the Sun. I thought I might be the first to think this, but I see Walter Chaw's review at Film Freak Central beat me to it in describing how the whole voyage of the Icarus II appears to be a conception metaphor:
Visually, the Icarus II looks like a sperm cell (its giant spherical "payload" trails a long ship behind it), while the sun, in scale and shape, looks like the egg, making the inevitable union of the two, giving nothing away, something clearly meant to evoke either a successful or unsuccessful act of reproduction.
Jumping from the sublime to the commercial, seeing Sunshine finally explained to me what the Carling "Space" advertisement is alluding to. The music from the ad is actually part of the Elegia movement from Christopher Rouse's Flute Concerto, to which the main theme from Sunshine, John Murphy's Adagio in D minor, has something of a resemblance.
I've been meaning to follow up London ruined yet again, which mentioned the ubiquity of Macaulay's "New Zealander" visiting a future ruined London. This meme made it to the top of the list of peeves in Punch, 7th January 1865, which published a Proclamation demanding the consignment to limbo of "used up, exhausted, threadbare, stale and hackneyed" constructs. I thought more of the list deserved posting, along with analysis of the objects of complaint, some now obscure.
Macaulay's New Zealander: The retirement of this veteran is indispensable. He can no longer be suffered to impede the traffic over London Bridge. Much wanted at the present time in his own country. May return when London is in ruins
The Needy Knife-Grinder: "Having been in active use since the days of Mr Canning, may now resume his original part at the wheel".
This refers to a 1786 poem, "The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder" by George Canning and John Hookham Frere, in the style of the Poet Laureate Robert Southey. Printed in The Anti-Jacobin, a newspaper hostile to the French Revolution, it ridiculed Southey's temporary attraction to the French revolutionary cause. Topically, it was fine - see Bartleby. But by 1865, despite the political context being long obsolete, it was still being trotted out as a poetic allusion at every opportunity (eg. a book about Canadian/US industrial relations, the works of Thackeray, a zoology journal...) Enough already, Punch said.
The Coming Man: "Has caused constant disappointment by not arriving when he was expected, especially by the parliamentary train".
This was a cliché that kicked off in the early 1800s for someone destined for greatness, and rapidly took a foothold in the political sphere. Punch ridiculed it in 1848 - see The Coming Man - but it was still going strong as a catch-phrase in 1865 (possibly revivified by Marmion Wilard Savage's 1852 novel Reuben Medlicott; or, The coming man).
Shakspeare and the musical glasses: "No objection to WS, except as a performer in a duet with the musical glasses, which have long ceased to be the novelty they were in O. Goldsmith's time, when the town rang with them".
Village HAMPDEN. Mute inglorious Milton: "The BISHOP OF HEREFORD will be glad to see his country cousin. A presentation to a deaf and dumb asylum should be obtained for the mute".
This allusion to Gray's Elegy ("Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast / The little tyrant of his fields withstood / Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest") became another clichéd pairing, to which even Dickens wasn't immune. "The Bishop of Hereford" refers to Renn Dickson Hampden.
The gentleman who has been talking prose all his life without knowing it: "May now receive his passport, and return to his own country. WESTBURY, C., will be moved to apply to the Imperial Law Officers to issue a writ ne exeat regno".
Miss Parker. Mr. Crawley. In any future novel or work of fiction, if it shall be found necessary to introduce a lady's-maid, it is particularly requested that she may bear some other name than that of Parker. Likewise, in any forthcoming drame or drama, if a merchant villain is essential to the plot, it is suggested that it would be an agreeable novelty not to call him Crawley.
I'll take their word for this one: it'd be more work to confirm the frequency of such names than I care to do at this instant.
The bull always being taken by the horns, the camel whose back is broken by the last feather... The present address of Edmond's (late Wombwell's) Menagerie is Crystal Palace. Sydenham. The Zoological Gardens would be glad to have the British lion.
Evidently a complaint arising from an overload of zoological metaphors.
Macedon and Monmouth: Have been allowed far too much latitude. No well regulated atlas can be considered complete until they are restored to the use of the Globe.
This week there was a rare showing of Jonathan Miller's adaptation, the film that started the former Christmas Eve ghost story tradition on British television, of MR James' Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad (part 1 (also above)/ part 2 / part 3). As the BFI Screenline commentary says, MR James purists didn't like some aspects, but it does bring a nice ambiguity by portraying the protagonist as evidentally mentally fragile.
The Colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.
- and Project Gutenberg has the anthology from which it comes, Ghost Stories of Antiquary (part 1 / part 2). The title, incidentally, is borrowed from that of a Robert Burns poem. - Ray
