On this day in 461 AD, a man named Hilarius became Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
And, for the life of me, I cannot think of a way to articulate this as a joke.
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From The Cultural Life of the American Colonies
Not all seventeenth-century readers confined their interests to solemn treatises, but one should always remember that the prevailing attitude toward literature was so distinctly purposeful that many of our ancestors made themselves believe that they could gain instruction even when reading romances … Continue reading
skimmington /SKIM ing ton/ n A ceremony in which a man whose wife beat him or cheated on him was publicly ridiculed.
The skimmington had its heyday in English villages several hundred years ago.
–Depraved and Insulting English
Forensics is just archaeology without the wait.
HISTORICAL FICTION BACKGROUND
Underwater archaeologists in St. Augustine, Florida, have discovered a small, highly decorated, and surprisingly well-preserved pistol in a shipwreck believed to date back to the 1700s.
The dig has also produced several hand tools, a 15-inch tall cauldron, and a navigational divider. Experts analyzing the artifacts hope that a maker’s mark on the pistol will help date the wreck.
Okay, so today is not the real birthday of the paperback, but it is the birthday of Sir Allen Lane, who gave us the paperback as we know it today.
Legend has it that (not yet) Sir Allen got bored waiting at a train station in 1934, and came up with the idea of printing paperback editions of already successful hardback literature which could be sold from a vending machine. Soon after, when he founded Penguin Books, these paperbacks appeared in the aptly named “Penguincubator.”
Of course, paperback editions quickly moved from the vending machine to racks and newstands, and are now an integral part of the publishing business.
i like if wrote that poem bet
some cummings next point me the would
but woulding didn’t could see where
today tomorrow can’t
Author Suzannah Windsor Freeman of the Write It Sideways blog comes down on the side of the serial comma, occasionally attributed to Oxford or Harvard for some reason. She quotes Mignon Fogerty (AKA “Grammar Girl”), who points out that the alternative to the serial comma standard is really no standard at all because you still occasionally need it for clarification.
I’m with them. It is much more reasonable to simply have a rule rather than justifying every pre-“and” comma on an ad hoc basis.
And, the argument that you don’t need the serial comma before “and” because the commas are stand-ins for the other “ands” is, to be blunt, ridiculous. Next time you see or hear a series of items, try imagining “and” between each one and see how literate it sounds.
WHARFINGER, the person who has the charge of a wharf, and takes account of all the articles landed thereon, or removed from it, into any vessel lying alongilde thereof; for which he receives a certain fee called wharfage, which becomes due to the proprietor for the use of his machines and furniture.
– Wm. Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine (1780).
Les Edgerton recently explained the difference between what “action” and “problem” mean in lay language and in literature, to show how the confusion about terminology creates problems in writing education.