The Reading Room

Q: Difficulty understanding the meaning of the word "attitude" in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

3:44 AM

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought I am having trouble understanding Keats's use of the word "attitude" in these lines, and the explanation given by the editor of my Penguin edition of Keats's poems is not satisfactory. He (the editor) thinks that att...

meaning poetry john-keats

4 hours later…

verbose

7:48 AM

It took me a fair bit of self-control to refrain from informing this user that I'm neither in need of English lessons, nor intending to alter my practice based on their opinion of what constitutes correct usage.

2 hours later…

Q: Have Bertolt Brecht's plays been influenced by Goldoni's "La guerra"?

9:50 AM

Even if it seems that Goldoni's play La guerra ('The War') has never been translated into English, according to the translator Alexander Gross, the play was translated into German no fewer than five times and was performed again and again in Germany throughout the Eighteenth Century. The last of...

german-language italian-language bertolt-brecht carlo-goldoni la-guerra

10:32 AM

the difficulty here is that SE often makes it just so hard to add tag synonyms, or to rename a tag

in theory tag synonyms should be simple, but in practice it somehow never works

I need upvoted answers for a tag in order to suggest tag synonyms, and that's hard with lots of books that have just a few questions each.

And even then the synonyms need vote from four users with answers in that tag to come into existence. This only ever happens for large popular tags.

Is there some way around this? Like, can I post a list of suggested tag synonyms onto meta and hope a diamond mod sets them? Are diamond mods even allowed to do that?

2 hours later…

12:28 PM

@verbose One could always adopt the practice of putting both the original title and the translated title into the tag. One problem is that this might result in long tags — for example, is À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) too long?

Mithical

12:48 PM

@b_jonas yes

@PeterShor Tags have a 35-character length limit. When Lit first launched, we managed to instigate an expansion from 25 characters (which was then rolled out network-wide), but I don't know if we'd be able to get it expanded even further.

1 hour later…

Rand al'Thor

2:02 PM

@b_jonas Yes, diamond mods have workarounds to create tag synonyms without needing more users or upvoted answers in the tag. We'll happily do so in cases that are either obvious or have a clear meta consensus.

1 hour later…

Q: Why are songs no longer performed as part of Shakespeare's plays?

3:10 PM

Having studied Macbeth extensively during a course I took as a younger man, I was astonished to learn recently that it is thought to have contained two songs, which are also present in a related play called The Witch. They are referred to in stage directions. Music and a song inside: 'Come away,...

william-shakespeare theater music english-renaissance-theater

1 hour later…

4:16 PM

drat. the limit for tag names is 35 characters, and that includes the hyphens, even though I think matching tags or searching them ignores the hyphens. that means for long titles we're incentivezed to make the tag synonym (just not the primary name of the tag) unreadable by omitting hyphens so it fits under the limit.

3 hours later…

Q: Please explain "It is the ego, demanding its feed"

7:44 PM

From John Le Carré's Smiley's People: I need you, thought Smiley, watching him gyrate. I love you, I hate you, I need you. Such apocalyptic statements reminded him of Ann when she had run out of money or love. The heart of the sentence is the subject, he thought. It is not the verb, least of all...

john-le-carre smileys-people

8:31 PM

@b_jonas Please, leave the hyphens. I'd be much happier with the tag The-Curious-Incident-of-the-Dog than TheCuriousIncidentoftheDogintheNightTime (which doesn't fit anyway).

8:41 PM

@PeterShor I will keep the hyphens for the canonical tag names, but if we're making tag synonyms, it's better to have one that you'll find if you type any part of the title as a tag when asking a question or searching.

1 hour later…

9:48 PM

@Bookworm So if a question was asked (with the wordplay tag), but its answer involves wordplay, should you add the wordplay tag to the question? Similarly, if there's an identification question, and the answer involves an author we already have a tag for, should we add the tag to the question?

I suspect the answer is "no", but what do people think?

9:59 PM

Oops ... my message above should read "without" and not "with".

10:32 PM

@PeterShor probably shouldn't add those tags, but I don't have a strong opinion here