The Reading Room

12:22 AM

Just received: my second Socratic badge, after 207 questions.

12:40 AM

!!! Nice!

You sure that's the proper placement of exclamation points?

Yessssmam

Q: Interpretation of a Camus Quote

1:39 AM

In The Plague, Rieux, the main character of the novel, claims that I've seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. What does he mean by that? How exactly is seeing a lot of patients make one averted to the possibility of collective punishment? One line of reasoning ...

albert-camus

DVK-on-Ahch-To

2:11 AM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr I don't have the answer posted yet, but I have a 30,000K long answer draft to a super-narrow question "When did events in 6 books in a series happen". Been sitting in my drafts for a couple of years

Geez

1 hour later…

Q: Why did Gandalf not have the Eagles simply transport Frodo almost straight to Mount Doom and drop the ring in there?

3:17 AM

While thinking about "holes" in the wonderful, epic The Lord of the Rings story, I had a thought: Why did they go through all this trouble of very slowly sneaking around with a whole fellowship, when they could have simply had Gandalf call for his Eagle friends and have them transport Frodo, carr...

j-r-r-tolkien the-lord-of-the-rings the-hobbit

1 hour later…

Q: Is there a "moral-index" of fables?

4:30 AM

There is a motif-index for folk-literature composed by Stith Thompson. I wonder if there is a similar index regrouping fables by the moral they convey? As a rough example G. Blinded by greed G.1. "The labours of others it is often another who profits'' Aesop's The Lion, the Bear and the Fox ...

moral

7 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

11:03 AM

@Tsundoku Congratulations!

Since Socratic can be awarded multiple times to the same user, this site has almost as many Socratic badges as Inquisitive badges. I wonder if any site has more Socratic than Inquisitive?

1 hour later…

Napoleon Wilson

12:07 PM

@Bookworm What a brilliant idea!

<yawn>

1 hour later…

1:24 PM

@Bookworm Don't we have that like three times on Sci Fi already?

Oh yeah, Glorfindel already answers that.

Q: Looking for famous scientist that gave quote: "keep ten problems in your mind.."

I have a vague recollection of a scientist sharing a problem solving strategy. The content of that quote/strategy, which I do not recollect literally, can be summarized as: Keep a list of 10 unsolved problems (that you would like to solve) in your head, and every time a mathematician/physicist c...

quote-identification

@Bookworm I don't understand why people so often use "/". What's wrong with the good old "or"?

Q: What did Tolkien mean by this quote?

2:19 PM

I'm very confused by this quote, found on: http://www.sean-crist.com/personal/pages/eagles/index.html "The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the...

meaning j-r-r-tolkien

Q: How many people Pushkin Alexandr Sergeevich did killed, before d'Anthès stopped him?

3:08 PM

I'm wondering, if such practice was popular in Russia in that times, 37 - is a great number of years and Pushkin should did shoot many humans, before was shot-downed by d'Anthès... I'm trying to grep ru.wikipedia.org with "дуэль" - and there is only one... and it is only little paragraph about hi...

biography alexander-pushkin

@Tsundoku It's too simple

3:36 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Five empty tag wiki excerpts are waiting for you...

Five ?!

Since when?

Holy crud

Geez, I'm on it

also, alexander-pushkin has been used to be about the author's life, instead of just his works (as the excerpt would indicate)

@bobble Well it could be for both his works or his life

so update the excerpt, is what I am suggesting

Ohhh, I see. Thank you

3:44 PM

Yesterday, I gained 28 reps on SFF SE by fixing typos. I simply searched for "doesnt" and found a few dozen answers with typos and other issues. There's still a lot to do there. The same trick doesn't work on Lit SE, though; we are better reviewers.

Hehe

1 hour later…

4:54 PM

@Tsundoku Or maybe we on Sci Fi don't bother to fix those errors when the post itself isn't interesting enough.

@Tsundoku 41 results for "tolkein"

@GarethRees Yeah, that one even I fix on sight. scifi.stackexchange.com/posts/170020/revisions

@GarethRees Not that Lit is any better in that respect, they just have more variety in what author names they typo. literature.stackexchange.com/posts/613/revisions

5:43 PM

@b_jonas 2 instances of "shelly"

@PrinceNorthLæraðr, some author tags that aren't in the standar form: stuart-turton peter-carey t-h-white henry-fielding john-lewis-stempel

Thank you

do you want me to stop with the tags?

No, I actually really appreciate it

It helps me out a lot with fixing tags

And helps Tsundoku out with his gold badge :P

once I see those have been approved, I'll go hunting for more then :)

Q: In "the" heaven and in "the" earth, but in hell

5:54 PM

Okay :)

Eddie Kal

There is this famous short-story by Poe called "The Tell-Tale Heart" in which a man tries to convince the reader he is not mad by narrating the way he killed his master. My question has to do with the very first words of the story that read as follows: True! --nervous --very, very dreadfully ner...

meaning prepositions difference definite-article

This wouldn't be on-topic on Lit, would it?

Hmm

@Tsundoku @GarethRees @other users Opinions?

I'm not sure what to make of it

I am happily lurking to try to figure out the customs & rules here

I would say it might be on-topic

6:16 PM

@EddieKal In my opinion it would be on topic at Literature—it's a wording-choice question, of which we have a few. Of course, it might also be on topic at ELL.

Eddie Kal

Fair enough. If it doesn't get good answers I will migrate it here.

Q: What's meant by "drag him along a piscatorial road" in The Just Men of Cordova?

7:14 PM

In chapter 11 of The Just Men of Cordova (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing an old man who was changing the topics of talking very quickly: he old man had a trick of striking off at a tangent; from one subject to another he leapt like a will-o’-the-wisp. Before Horace had framed h...

edgar-wallace

1 hour later…

8:21 PM

@EddieKal I would accept it if it were migrated here.

8:36 PM

@bobble I don't' know if we have a standard form. We tend to use GivenName-FamilyName, but T. H. White is known is T. H. White rather than Terence Hanbury White, because that's the name he had on the book covers (and hence the name used as the title for his Wikipedia entry).

I meant in the wiki excerpt - some were talking about the author's biography extensively, one had the word "literary", etc.

Oh, I think you can edit the tag wiki excerpts without end. Some excerpts have some biographical information and best-known works to make them more interesting. I don't see why we would need to delete all that.

ok sorry

No need to apologise :-)

By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if Lit SE had the highest tags-to-questions ratio of the entire SE network.

2.26 questions/tag for here, 102.02 for Puzzling. I don't know how to use Stack Exchange data-query system, but I can look for more stats manually if anyone's interested.

8:45 PM

Oh, don't let that comment of mine distract you from that answer about Ender's Game :-)

I promise, I'm working on it!

Yesterday I got distracted with Puzzling's current Fortnightly Topic Challenge :)

I got 2 rep from a edit! Woohoo!

matt

9:06 PM

@bobble happily lurking

@GarethRees Are they all wrong? Because the My Little Pony movie has a character called Shelly (one of Princess Skystar's friends).

9:29 PM

@b_jonas This answer is referring to Percy Bysshe Shelley and this answer to Mary Shelley.

The spelling has now been corrected :-)

I'm trying to write my question on name significance and I'm unsure what to put in it. There are three points in the book (which I remember) where the fact two characters have names which mean the same thing is explicitly noted. Do I need to include notes on those sections? Or just state that they have the same name-meaning and I'm curious why?

(am I overthinking this?)

matt

wdym by "name significance"?

yesterday, by bobble

I have an idea for a question - one of my favorite books has two main characters with names that mean the same thing (in different languages) and I've always wondered why. Could I ask that here? And if so, what to include in the question?

@EddieKal I suspect that Poe is alluding to 1 Chronicles 29:11

9:36 PM

@matt We have a tag for that: name-significance, with currently 59 questions.

My write-up currently has name-significance, as well as author and book tags (both of which would be new)

@bobble Here's a question about a book with multiple characters with the same or similar names — you'll see that a question like this doesn't need to be long or complex

matt

@Tsundoku didn't know. :)

Eddie Kal

@GarethRees Wow seems right on the nose!

Would you care to write an answer on ELL? Since there has been a fairly good answer the Q&A will stay on ELL.