The Reading Room

@Bookworm this dude's questions skate perilously close to being ELL level. They're almost as elementary as the spate of questions we got about Swimming in the Dark. Another such is the person who asked all those questions about In the Midst of Alarms and has now moved on to The Markenmore Mystery.

@Alex I know passing muster is correct; I was riffing off verbose's earlier bit of wordplay.

On the one hand I'm glad that ESL speakers are diligently working their way through novels and asking pertinent questions when they're unsure of what something means. On the other hand, I am not sure whether those questions add value to this site or whether we should just be directing them to ELL. The SitD questions came so thick and fast that it seemed wise to redirect them, but these others seem at least reasonably spaced out.

@Randal'Thor You haven't yet the question about "No Mayonnaise in Ireland". I do want to point that story out to Gareth Rees, since it actually is pertinent to his answer about when people began treating "No man is an island" as a poem. So I hope you do ...

Latest Randy rep-league prediction: verbose will overtake Matt Thrower in the first week of April.

@verbose Oh right! I was trying to remember which questions were on my to-ask list recently.

@Randal'Thor your last one was off by a few weeks, wasn't it? It took me a bit longer to overtake EJoshuaS than you had anticipated.

8:22 AM

@verbose That particular question is odd because the Q is worded as if it's an ELL question ("does it have to be used sarcastically? can it also be used literally?") but some literary context might actually help to answer whether that particular usage is sarcastic or literal.

It's like a Lit question disguised as an ELL question but asked on Lit.

@verbose Well, first I predicted April, but after he lost a bunch of rep from that robo-voter being deleted, I revised my prediction to "early March, possibly the first week of March", and it took until the second week.

@Randal'Thor yep, that's why I hesitate to just direct all such questions to ELL. But the bulk of them I think ought to be ...

@Randal'Thor oh okay. You were closer than I remembered, then.

quote-source wordplay john-donne

9:37 AM

@verbose Done. Hope the question is posed in a sensible way.

Bookworm

9:50 AM

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Q: No mayonnaise in Ireland?

Apparently there is some kind of running joke about John Donne's famous line "No man is an island", prose sometimes quoted as poetry, being misquoted as "No mayonnaise in Ireland". It's mentioned here, for example, as a "classic misunderstanding", and here someone mentions a specific source which...

11:19 AM

@Randal'Thor Answered!

12:18 PM

@verbose Let's see if we can take it to the HNQ list.

Btw, congrats on your Whunk & Strite badge.

Oh, and on 12k reputation!

Tsundoku

1:42 PM

Milton Jones: I'm reading a book at the moment. It's called The Anticlimax. The first part is good.

2:16 PM

I'm glad to have summoned an @verbose answer :)

Also managed a Tsundoku one last topic challenge with the last Fontane book question

At least you've ended your streak of accepting Rand answers :-)

Ah, there's a question ready-made for you coming up

It is both a Redwall question and a Watership Down question

hehe

I just need to do perhaps 15 minutes of "research" (read: clicking through the wikia)

2:48 PM

Anyone want to do a welcome comment for this answer?

5:41 PM

@Bookworm There might not be mayonnaise in Ireland, but there's some on the HNQ

Gareth Rees

6:51 PM

@verbose My opinion is that (in the current state of the site) straightforward questions from second-language speakers are a net good. When they are easy to answer they provide a starting point for people beginning to write answers. And when they are not, they are often interesting conundrums like Ahmed Samir's What does “if the court knows herself” mean?

Soyuz42

@GarethRees I realized I didn't respond to this recommendation, and the input on the Hector question. So, a belated thank you.

Alex

7:07 PM

@Randal'Thor After all the courage I mustered to post that....

9:26 PM

@Bookworm Should the tag histories be renamed as histories-herodotus? Even if we don't have any questions about other works of literature called Histories, it strikes me as a tag name that would be very easy to misuse (people might start using it instead of historical-context, if they aren't familiar with our site's tagging system).

@bobble Colour me intrigued.

And you reminded me that I have another kinda-sorta Redwall-related question to ask.

It's weird that I'm not finding any Google hits for the phrase "as good as Brian Jacques or your money back".

^ I'll leave you with that tidbit to digest until I ask it

Hello @PeterShor! I haven't seen you in chat before, just appreciated many of your contributions on the main site.

Hey, Peter!

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor I also wondered about that, especially since Tacitus's Histories are at least as well known.

@Randal'Thor I wondered that as well, but went with histories as it was the plain name of the work, and I just wanted a tag created. Perfectly fine with making a minor exception to the work-tag names here.

Tsundoku

@Soyuz42 A bit late, but see also, for Shakespeare: Robert S Miola on Shakespeare’s Sources. Miola is the author of Shakespeare's Reading.

Q: How can "Salamandastron" be considered "In the Tradition of 'Watership Down'"?

@Randal'Thor posted

Bookworm

9:35 PM

0

I dug up a copy of Salamandastron and noticed something about the cover: On the U.S. PB cover is: In the Tradition of Watership Down I know the definition of "in the tradition of" having characteristics similar to a particular person or thing Now, I've dug through every single cover of every...

intertextuality richard-adams watership-down redwall-series brian-jacques

hey, Bookworm was fast with that one!

I've reached Book 2 on my Salamandastron re-read

Hmm, interesting.

Now I have to try and remember the plot of Salamandastron to see if it bears any resemblance to that of Watership Down.

As far as I remember, the main plot is a siege?

If you click on the cover image, it brings you to the wiki's plot summary

Is that also the one where a mysterious epidemic affects Redwall Abbey, and an otter and a Dibbun have to go somewhere with a bird to get a cure?

Yep

Well at least the Dibbun. Not sure about the otter, but the species mix together for me sometimes

I hope it's not too broad of a question

9:41 PM

FWIW, the specific phrase "in the tradition of Watership Down" seems to be thrown around for pretty much any story about anthropomorphised animals. Sometimes even "in the tradition of Watership Down and Redwall".

> I was hooked on the Brian Jacques Redwall books at that age, and they all said, "in the tradition of Watership Down"

Oh, huh, Watership Down predates Farthing Wood. Maybe it really was a genre creator/populariser then.

for goodness sakes, why did I not find anything on the covers then?

Now I'm worried the question is stupid as well as broad

oh well

> In the tradition of "Watership Down", comes the enchanting saga of "Redwall." This is Book Five of that series.

> In the tradition of Watership Down, (only not quite as bloodthirsty)

wtf

I spent so long clicking through all the cover images and apparently it just was inside?

oh your link is to a Salamandastron thing

9:45 PM

@bobble Because I Googled for "in the tradition of Watership Down" Salamandastron.

cheater :P

I'm still not sure enough yet to post an answer that it's a general descriptor that could go for the entire Redwall series, because there might be a specific story as to why it ended up on the cover of Salamandastron in particular. When I do an image search for "in the tradition of Watership Down" Redwall, most of the images are for that specific book.

If you could answer why it was just that cover, I would also be interested

> the fourth installment in Jacques's Redwall series, which narrates epic events among the animals in the manner of Watership Down

Btw @bobble, have you also read Brian Jacques's Castaways of the Flying Dutchman series?

I have not, though I've nearly grabbed them a few times

9:50 PM

Quite a different feel to Redwall, but also great.

But my mom put a strict limit of only as many books as I could carry per library visit

More melancholy and bittersweet.

Alex

10:14 PM

Maybe that was just the book they were up to when someone had the idea?

10:32 PM

@Tsundoku This seems a good reason to change the tag to histories-herodotus @bobble. Though I suppose it takes mod powers [aka mad powers] to change a specific tag after it's been created?

If there's just one question, it's as easy as editing the tag out and adding the new one in

The old tag will die a sad and lonely death, with no questions to sustain it

We also have emma-austen to disambiguate from a hypothetical emma-kenyon so ....

@bobble done

The only problem being that someone has to copy the tag excerpt over, but you can do that easily

@bobble "The histories tag has no usage guidance, can you help us create it?"

Ah. Then no problem at all!

10:50 PM

This answer provides useful info and is interesting, but doesn't actually answer the question the OP has.

I suggest a poke via comment

Wait, PeterShor was here and I missed him? Too bad. He writes nice answers.

Flagging milestones are a weird thing to track. After 4 more, I will have 100 total helpful flags. Not sure whether to hope that comes faster (for nice numbers!) or slower (because I don't want to have to flag anything)

By definition, if I'm flagging something it shouldn't be there.

11:08 PM

Like the conversation I had with my stepdaughter once:
- How's Earl doing? How's his job?
- Oh! He's flagging now.
- I'm sorry to hear that! I hope he regains his usual energy soon.
- What? No, I mean he has a job on a road crew, flagging down cars when there's construction.

Please, don't use your daughter as a step-stool

Nor vice-versa

Does History SE do identification requests? Since this question is about a nonfiction work regarding WWII, the OP might have better luck there. The work is probably OT for us anyway. But I don't want to direct OP away from here if History doesn't do ID requests