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12:13 AM
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Q: Do academic papers have to be necessarily grammatically correct?

John GreerI don't know if academic papers such as research papers and essays constitute literature so I'm sorry if I am asking in the wrong section. There was not another StackExchange section dealing with grammar or writing. I hope you can let this pass. The following is my question. I notice that a...

 
@Randal'Thor Many thanks, but I've had good teachers
And the site was behaving very well lately
 
 
3 hours later…
3:40 AM
I have seven pending tag wiki edits, whenever someone wants to look at that.
Done for today, I'm going to sleep.
Feedback would be helpful if I'm doing anything really wrong.
Also any ideas on how to define [roman-literature] as a tag? I first thought it should be a synonym for [latin-literature] but looked at the question and realized it wasn't :/
 
 
3 hours later…
6:42 AM
That's strange. It says "orphan wiki", and the tag doesn't actually exist. Did the system kill the tag while an edit was pending on it?
@NorthLæraðr Looking at that question, maybe it should be just tagged ? We use the [xxx-literature] tags for languages specifically, not countries/cultures. Although the answer mentions Aristotle's Rhetoric which of course was Greek not Latin, the question only mentions Roman writings.
 
7:30 AM
Another big-tag wiki that might need improvement is .
 
1
Q: Dante's Inferno reference in Much Ado About Nothing

Chris LeeMy professor asked me this for an assignment. It was to identify a Dante's Inferno reference in Much Ado About Nothing. I don't know what he meant by this. Where is this reference? Does not have to be a long statement, just a statement or a phrase.

 
@Randal'Thor and @Tsundoku congratulations on your election
 
7:44 AM
@BobTway Thanks! :-) Btw, your name is different in chat - I only recognised you from the avatar.
 
8:05 AM
@Randal'Thor Weird. I decided to feebly "anonymise" my other SE accounts a while ago but I changed it back on lit. No idea why it's not changed for chat
 
Because your chat parent site is Stack Overflow. Probably by default if it's your oldest account, but you can change the chat parent to anything you want.
 
@Randal'Thor Yeah, done
 
Welcome back Matt ;-)
 
Good answer to the Marlowe question
@Bookworm As written, this seems like quite a cruel assignment from the professor (since there are no references to Dante's Inferno in Much Ado)—but maybe the OP hasn't explained the assignment very well
 
8:13 AM
Glad you enjoyed the Marlowe answer, it was fun to research
I think I have one for Much Ado as well, although it's sketchier :)
 
@MattThrower The history of the accusations of atheism against Marlowe is bizarre. There was a spate of seditious graffiti in London in 1593 signed "Tambulaine", and for some reason the Privy Council ordered a raid on the playwright Thomas Kyd, and a mildly heterodox manuscript was found in his house, and Kyd was arrested and tortured and said that the manuscript belonged to Marlowe
 
@GarethRees As I hinted at in the answer, I think a lot of this hinges on the religious and political paranoia of the age. People were terrified of civil war and the threat of foreign invasion, all based on religious dissent. So "atheist" took on a very sinister meaning
 
9:06 AM
There's a good discussion of early modern ideas about "atheism" in this essay by Ada Palmer -- she suggests that there is a sense in which Christian theologians created atheism by constructing stronger and stronger straw men to show off their powers of refutation, until they succeeded in creating straw men so strong that they couldn't refute them
 
9:26 AM
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Q: In what ways does The Moviegoer echo Kierkagaardian existentialist principles?

Bob WangHow does the plot of The Moviegoer show the influence of existentialist authors, specifically Kierkegaard, on Percy's writing. I've also noticed some similarities between the "leap of faith" between Kierkegaard and Walker, but it's too abstract for me to put into words.

 
10:12 AM
@MattThrower Reminds me of how the word "terrorist" is used a bit too easily nowadays.
 
11:04 AM
@GarethRees That's very interesting, thanks for sharing. There's a surprising amount of questions about meaning that can be answered by invoking historical context: so many words had quite distinct meanings in ages past compared to modern usage.
@Tsundoku The mutability of language is both a blessing and a curse
 
@GarethRees "until they succeeded in creating straw men so strong that they couldn't refute them". Isn't that just delicious? :-D
 
@MattThrower By the way, I wasn't sure about your adding the tag to the Marlowe question. The answer is about historical context, as you've shown, but is it obvious from the question that it will involve historical context? Tags should describe the question independent of the answer(s). I didn't want to re-edit without checking with you, so I was going to just leave it, but now that you're pingable in chat ...
 
11:30 AM
Four days after the last vote was cast we are at 4.1 QPD. This is still marginally higher than the 3.1 - 3.6 QPD we had at the time when the majority of the votes were cast.
 
It seems to be a combination of active users asking more questions than usual (like me and you) and more new users asking good questions.
I wonder if chat becoming more active has helped main-site activity. Some of the questions, like from North and Alex, seemed to derive from discussion in here.
 
There seems to be a correlation, but I don't know in which direction (except for questions inspired by chat). If the increased chat activity led to more questions, what led to increased chat activity? The election? Lockdowns in response to Covid-19?
 
Gareth blamed coronavirus.
But it just takes a few present and chatty people to keep a chatroom active enough to encourage newcomers to join the conversation. That snowball effect is much stronger in chat than Q&A, I think.
 
@Tsundoku Most likely the election.
 
I found the sudden increase in chat activity at the start of the election very striking. But I also had the impression that the subset between voters and new (or newish) question askers was very small.
 
11:44 AM
1
Q: How might Shakespeare have become familiar with Dante's work?

TsundokuA recent question on our site asked whether Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing contained a reference to Dante's Divine Comedy. In his answer, Matt Thrower mentions Beatrice, the name of both a character in Much Ado and the woman who inspired some of Dante's writings. However, the Divine Comedy...

 
There were also about 5 million N.K. Narayan questions, but they came from the core user group.
 
@NapoleonWilson The questions came from active users, but many of the answers came from newer users, which is great.
 
@Randal'Thor No, that's fine - I actually had a similar thought when I was adding it. I realised after answering that I'm not sure it's actually what the OP was asking, but as the comments underneath showed it's a pretty vague question. Historical-context is just my interpretation of it
@Tsundoku I just came here to say congratulations and people seem to be talking to me :D
As for the answers I posted recently, as always it's just particular questions that pique my interest and that I feel I can answer. Often a fair few weeks pass without me seeing any, but two came along on consecutive days. Which was nice.
 
12:00 PM
@MattThrower There's that snowball effect :-)
 
:-) People won't be saying congratulations forever, though. Life goes back to normal after a while.
 
But if enough of us stay here to keep the room active ...
 
@Tsundoku I'm going to have to have a pop at your follow up question now, aren't I? I really ought to do some work instead.
 
I've seen that before in other chatrooms. Even one person who's there all the time, and a few popping in and out, can be enough to increase activity, draw newcomers into the conversation, encourage on-and-off visitors to be more on than off, ...
 
@Bookworm There's a survey of the evidence for Shakespeare being able to read Italian in Naseeb Shaheen (1994), ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian', Shakespeare Survey 47 which you can borrow from the Internet Archive here
I read it when I was trying to figure out if Shakespeare could have read Castelvetro's Italian translation of Aristotle's Poetics for this answer but it probably has some relevance for the Dante question too
 
12:12 PM
@GarethRees It's also cited in some interesting speculation on the subject. Do you want to have a go at an answer?
 
@MattThrower No, I'm busy at work, so I suggest you go for it
 
@GarethRees I ought to be busy at work ....
 
I ought to work at work
 
I ought to work at being busy.
 
That is the worst part of work, having to fake that you actually have work to do.
That is why I love SE and chat. I am typing something, so it sounds like I am working.
 
12:48 PM
@Randal'Thor I'm going to try this in the Language Lab (Language Learning SE), which has been very quiet for very long.
@GarethRees Thanks. I'll take a look at that.
We have a tag for the poem , which is really too short to qualify for a tag; see the Spanish text El rey de Harlem.
 
Right, answered. I'm now going to do some actual work.
 
"actual work"? Pffft.
 
Chat fight! Chat fight! Chat fight!
 
1:03 PM
If both Matt and Gareth can sacrifice a little productivity to post good answers there, maybe the question will go HNQ.
 
I'm a bit skeptical about Roe's The Shakespeare Guide to Italy but the other references look fine. One important contemporary is missing in Matt's answer, but if Gareth looks into the question, I'm sure he will figure out whom I have in mind.
We don't tag questions with titles of poems unless they are book-length works (e.g. Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost). I think we have never tagged questions about poems with the title of the collection in which they were published. ("El rey de Harlem" was published in Poeta en Nueva York, which was an important collection.)
 
1:32 PM
@MattThrower Curiously, I can't find Naseeb Shaheen's Shakespeare's Knowledge of Italian on WorldCat, the catalogue of the Library of Congress or on Amazon (.com or .de). Do you know when and where that was published?
 
@Tsundoku It's mentioned on Wikipedia, and appears to be a journal article in the CUP's Shakespeare Survey.
 
Right, I found that just a minute ago.
 
Google Scholar lists it only as a citation; I can't find any page where the full text is linked, not even behind a paywall.
 
See my comment above for a link
 
Oh, duh, I hadn't realised that was the same thing.
 
1:43 PM
By the way, we have tags for (2 questions, no tag wiki excerpt) and (1 question, with tag wiki excerpt). Should one be synonymised with the other?
 
2:02 PM
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Q: Why are some recently published book available on paper format but not on ebook?

ÆlisI recently came across this promising book and while I did find several online shops who sell it as "paperback", I was unable to find an ebook version of it. Even though the website clearly sells ebooks as well as paper books. Example of library selling the paper version but not the ebook: Bar...

 
@Tsundoku I used that link from @GarethRees
 
I had obviously overlooked that.
 
 
1 hour later…
3:18 PM
I have replaced with on two of Aza's questions, only to discover that we also have , whose description unhelpfully blurs the line between metafiction and literary criticism. Pfff.
 
@Tsundoku I mean, I'm not going to lie, the election is the main thing that brought me back to Lit. SE, though I'm most likely going to be staying for a while
Eyyyy I passed 500 rep and now can vtc
 
@NorthLæraðr Oh, please do!
@NorthLæraðr Congratulations! Use that wand wisely.
 
I shall indeed
Ooh, I have two good questions regarding fairytales, with one planning to be a self-answer
I'll probably self-answer the other one too if no one answers it (but that means I have to research, blech)
 
@NorthLæraðr Have you noticed? There's another tree in town.
 
3:54 PM
@Tsundoku Harumph...
Avazula... @Mithical Didn't they also design your profile picture once?
 
yes, that's the avatar that's currently at linktr.ee/superplane39 + my GitHub account
 
Ah hah! I don't know how I remembered that....
 
@Mithical Oh, you're also on Chess.com? I haven't been there for ages.
 
Ah, Chess.com
 
4:19 PM
Ahhhh
There are no more empty tags as of now, I believe
Ah nope never mind I found some more
 
Check the two lists I posted a few days ago.
 
Noooooo there's so many more left
 
@NorthLæraðr FYI.
The TL;DR is we use individual-work tags for long works (like novels or plays) but just or if the individual work is too short to merit its own tag.
 
Oh okay, thank you
 
Also, congrats on 500 rep!
Did you check the Close/Reopen review queues? :-)
 
4:24 PM
Ah, I didn't see there was a review task
 
@Tsundoku There is at least one exception for a particularly infamous poem: literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/the-raven Poe's "The Raven"
 
@b_jonas True, but that one's a) fairly long for a poem and b) like poe's most famous poem
 
@b_jonas "The horror, the horror". Sigh.
 
@NorthLæraðr Yes, it's one of the most famous short poems in general, not only of Poe.
Apr 25 at 17:43, by Rand al'Thor
It seems every country claims one of their great pieces of literature as the best-selling / most translated / most reprinted after the Bible.
^ The Raven might be the most translated short poem after the Bible.
There are, I think, eight professional Hungarian translations of it.
 
@NorthLæraðr I wouldn't describe "The Raven" as a "long" poem, especially from the point of view of that meta post on tagging poetry and short stories.
I would argue that Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 is more famous than "The Raven" but we wouldn't create a tag for it.
 
4:32 PM
@NorthLæraðr Not "fairly long" when compared with something like Don Juan or Aurora Leigh or the Iliad.
 
@Tsundoku Does shakespeare poems like "The Rape of Lucrece" or "Venus and Adonis" still not considered a tag of its own?
 
Not even long when compared to "The Waste Land".
 
@Randal'Thor good point
 
I always knew was inconsistent with our tagging policy, but never brought it up because, well, I'm a fan ;-) Now I guess I should be more responsible.
 
@NorthLæraðr Those are book-length poems. In addition, they were published as individual books in Shakespeare's lifetime.
 
4:34 PM
@Tsundoku Btw, tag merging with mod tools can be a good way of retagging without manually editing.
 
@Tsundoku Ah okay
 
Say if we merge into , then all Raven questions would automatically get the tag instead, but nothing else would change and nothing would be bumped.
@b_jonas The Bible is a short poem now? :-)
 
@Randal'Thor I know but I didn't do that on the odd chance that someone might come up with a reason for distinguishing between metatext and metafiction. I thought I had read somewhere that you can't unscramble two tags (or eggs).
(I can't type anymore.)
 
@Randal'Thor Sorry, I mean after any short poem parts of the bible.
 
Odd chance or off chance? I guess both make sense in a way.
 
4:36 PM
But Tsundoku may be right that some of Shakespeare may be more translated.
 
@Randal'Thor I need to unscramble my brain as well.
 
@b_jonas I mean, like the Psalms?
 
@Randal'Thor If you want to merge it, I'd suggest merging it into [edgar-allan-poe] instead, since that's more specific.
@NorthLæraðr Probably. I do not wish to make an opinion on what is a poem and what isn't in the Bible.
 
@b_jonas eh, the Psalms are pretty much all hymns to God, but I'm not sure what one considers a poem
I think they were considered poems when written, though
 
@Randal'Thor Hmm, should we tag literature.stackexchange.com/q/1390/139 this Raven question with [poetry]?
 
4:42 PM
@b_jonas I was going to say that, but all those questions already have the EAP tag while one of them doesn't have .
@b_jonas Yes, if we're going to follow the general policy and abolish .
 
So the raven, which symbolizes death, will meet its symbolic death. RIP.
 
@Tsundoku actually it symbolizes life and gried according to this post
14
Q: What does the raven symbolize (besides death)?

Matrim CauthonWhenever I ask a friend about the symbolism of the Raven from The Raven, they always seem to say death. Is that the only thing the Raven is meant to symbolize?

 
OK, I'll dig up some more empty tag wiki excerpts.
 
The first Dante/Shakespeare question is now HNQ. Waiting for the second one to follow after the 8-hour threshold.
It's a good day for @MattThrower.
 
4:57 PM
For anyone that cares, the Pachinko tag doesn't need a Korean-literature tag, since it was first published in english
 
@NorthLæraðr It doesn't have the Korean-literature tag, so no need to change anything :-)
 
Well the Pachinko tag doesn't have any excerpts (I added one), but just in case someone was curious
 
oh gash
 
And, uh, make sure to do research before putting info in.
 
5:05 PM
Oh, my bad. Sorry
That was a typo, I should've double-checked
 
Also, works "about or related to"? Surely it's for works by them?
 
oh...
?
Oh i see. My bad.
 
@Randal'Thor ooh, that's exciting. I wonder why they keep making HNQ? I presumed the algorithm was just based on popularity.
 
Just recreated a few tags that has gotten swallowed by the system, as well, if you're interested @North.
 
@Mithical What do you mean swallowed by the system?
Oh, got deleted. I see
 
5:17 PM
@MattThrower The algorithm is based on the number/score of answers and score of the question as well as age. So when you manage to post a good answer fast (meaning within 8 hours of the question), it's likely to go HNQ.
At least assuming the votes reflect that "good".
 
Nvm I did some research and it makes more sense
 
Basically... not fitting well into either of the categories of "male" or "female". "queer" is an umbrella term for anyone not heterosexual or cisgender, "trans" is an umbrella term for anyone who does not align with the gender they were assigned at birth, and "nonbinary" is a term for someone not fitting clearly into either "male" or "female" categories.
 
Ahhh
I was confused on how someone was nonbinary and trans, but that definition makes sense
 
Although now you deleted the question, so my answer looks odd out of context. ;)
 
oh oof
 
5:22 PM
Unlike on the main site, you can delete an answered question ;-)
 
So much to wrap my head around
 
I think a good rule of thumb is, if a work has been published on its own in a book then it can get a tag, but if only in collections with other works, then not.
Under this theory "The Raven" deserves a tag, because it has been published on its own (with illustrations by Gustave Doré, no less)
 
@Mithical Is agender different from nonbinary?
 
(This is in no way a principled distinction but it's easy to apply)
 
....yes, although not necessarily.
"agender" is specifically no gender, or totally outside of the spectrum. It can be defined as a subset of nonbinary. Nonbinary (enby for short) can be no gender, or a third gender, or demi, etc.
 
5:27 PM
@GarethRees I think what came out of the meta discussion was to use the quotes/italics dichotomy. Short works with "Titles in Quotes" don't get their own tags; long works with Titles in Italics do.
Probably in many cases that's equivalent to your suggestion. Short stories in anthologies; novels published alone.
 
@Mithical After growing up for so long with being taught that there are only two genders, and having very little information about LGBTQ, this is all very hard to wrap my head around
 
0
Q: Is artists leaving their art forever a significant theme in R. K. Narayan's writing?

Rand al'ThorWhile reading the 1982 collection Malgudi Days of R. K. Narayan short stories, I noticed a common theme appearing in several of them, namely that of an artist who leaves their creative work behind forever. All of these are stories reproduced from the earlier collection An Astrologer’s Day and Oth...

 
Sorry if I seem slow
 
@NorthLæraðr Eh, you don't necessarily have to understand it, especially at first. It can be kinda confusing.
 
5:29 PM
The advantage of your suggestion is it can also extend to series tagging, since we use e.g. and and instead of individual tags for each book within those series.
 
I don't think there are any empty tag wiki excerpts that I haven't listed in the last few days. The best place to catch them is usually the "New" tab.
 
(Sorry, that's a continuation of my previous message and not related to the messages in between. Seems I'm the slow one.)
 
@Mithical Yeah. I was really confused when my best friend first told me she was panromantic but asexual. And then she had to explain the whole concept.
 
@Tsundoku I would recommend that people check through older questions to look for vanished tags, as well, when they've got time.
@NorthLæraðr :)
 
@Tsundoku Actually I just manually look for them under "popular", and then have to work backward from the last page
@Tsundoku Most of the tags are already filled now in the "new tab", at least for me
 
5:34 PM
@NorthLæraðr Well, I meant "usually", i.e. when I am not hunting them down like a bulldog ;-)
 
@Tsundoku Lol
@Tsundoku You mean when all the tags get piled up without having been editted
 
@NorthLæraðr Exactly. When people ask questions that require new tags, the "New" tab becomes the place where those empty tags pile up.
 
27
Q: Did Lenore merely leave or is she dead?

Cahir says Reinstate MonicaEdgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven has the narrator mourning the loss of his love Lenore. But it's actually not entirely clear to me if Lenore merely left the narrator (for whatever relationship-related intricacies) or if she is dead altogether. When the eponymous raven appears, the narrator repea...

 
@Tsundoku True
 
^ This one is funny by the way, because most of the Hungarian translations make it pretty clear in the second verse that Lenore is dead.
 
5:41 PM
Is there a way to do a strikethrough in chat?
 
---message---
 
Ah, I'm going to use that for the lists of tags I posted.
 
or you can do "<s>"message"</s>"
<s>like this</s> wait
 
In chat? I don't think so.
 
5:43 PM
I tried both <s>sss</s> and <del>del</del> but the tags remain visible.
 
hm okay maybe not
How do you do that tag
 
[tag:tag]
 
6:40 PM
Whew, posted my question
And answer
 
7:01 PM
0
Q: Why are so many fairy tales so similar?

North LæraðrIn Europe, fairytales have various different names of the same story, or variants. One example of this is Charles Perrault's Cinderella ("Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre") and the much darker, violent version of Cinderella by the Brother Grimms ("Aschenputtel"), where the latter story ...

 
7:24 PM
Oh, and congratulations to @Randal'Thor for reaching 40k reps. I've noticed only just now :-)
 
Thanks! It happened late last night in a flurry of upvotes on my Narayan questions.
@Bookworm @North Hmm. The question is interesting (a bit broad, but not overly so IMO), but a lot more could be said than is in that answer. There must be lots of studies about this, probably people have done whole PhDs just on sub-aspects of the issue.
 
7:47 PM
0
Q: This is an attempt to get my writing juices flowing

RasputinI’ve experienced many times when they did not seem to be flowing. And many times when they have. Every time the reason it’s working or not working might be different. But this time I think the reason might have to do with an issue I’m struggling in my life. Am I making a big deal out of nothin...

 
Yes, there's a whole academic field of folklore, which includes the study of common features — take a look at Stith Thomson's Motif-index of Folk-literature for an idea of the scope of the field
 
@Gallifreyan Do you reckon this has had enough time/votes/consensus?
 
@Bookworm I asked in Writing SE's chatroom where people can ask to have their writing reviewed. It's also off-topic there.
 
8:24 PM
Writing Codidact is trying to get the ability to support that up and running, I believe.
 
9:12 PM
@Mithical Done, but it's very basic ;-)
 
November 2017... fair play
Which reminds me I should look into getting Finna.
 
9:28 PM
@Randal'Thor Yes, positive
 
@Gallifreyan You were waiting for new mods to do it, weren't you ;-)
 
@GarethRees Right. We even have half of a SE for it: mythology.stackexchange.com has been renamed to "Mythology & Folklore" for a while.
 
9:55 PM
@Bookworm My Shakespeare and Dante question is now HNQ.
@b_jonas I didn't even know that that SE existed.
 

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