@NapoleonWilson He'd like people to stop making assertions about him or his opinions that he can neither confirm nor deny. He said he hasn't posted anything in two years, and only viewed the site because of a conversation with someone. He is not interested in participating on the site at this point.
At some point during the n-th revision of my "Caged Bird" answer, part of me started wondering why I'm spending so much time working on content for a literature site. English is honestly one of the subjects I like the least. But I like how here I can only deal with works that I enjoy, which is I think why I am, again, spending an hour re-writing this answer.
@PrinceNorthLæraðr "Some myriad of these, with deliberate rhymes, if not metre or reason, perpetrated facts, have established that a copy of verses, consisting of exactly fourteen lines, is an English Sonnet."
In the story The Portrait of a Lady, written by Khushwant Singh, there are sentences which I couldn't understand properly (highlighted bold in the following excerpt):
One day I announced that we were being given music lessons. She was
very disturbed. To her music had lewd associations. It was th...
See also S September: "I've been getting a bit stressed out with my PhD and SE had become a great way to procrastinate and not think about the problems I need to deal with :P So, I just decided to step away for a small while to sort things out."
So far, we have had at least two questions about the early history of the English sonnet:
Who introduced the sonnet to English literature? Wyatt or Shakespeare?
Why are Shakespearean sonnets called Shakespearean sonnets?
While researching and writing answers to both questions, I found that many...
Well @Tsundoku in deference to your Victorian sensibilities I went with "[nobody tf knows how to pronounce, let alone scan, Wyatt](https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16439/289)". I hope yer happy. @Randal'Thor I hope yer happy as well, coz you asked a [great q](https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9024/289) that I've been meanin' to answer for, like, 2 fooken years and I finally got around to it.
H'm I wonder why the links aren't rendering as expected in those.
Like, I thought [foo](bar) where bar is a link turns foo into a link to bar, but that didn't happen
It's not silly if people are mostly discussing programming, as they were in the early days of Stack Overflow (note that the linked answer is from 2010).
It's silly for chat rooms for other subjects (like Literature), but these other subjects didn't exist in 2010
I expect the downvotes are from people who got caught out by the "feature"
@verbose Your answer is great, but I want to take issue with the idea that we don't know how to pronounce and scan Middle English -- we have the Ormulum to guide us
@verbose So you assume that Wyatt's pronunciation differed significantly from Shakespeare's (as described, e.g. by Kökeritz) because of the effects of the Great Vowel Shift. (Not that I'm claiming that Shakespeare's pronunciation can be reconstructed beyond doubt.)
yup. I took a class with him on 16th C poetics, which was also what my dissertation would have been on if I ever completed my PhD (not at Stanford, that was decades earlier)
In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Sethe's husband Halle ,never came back to Baby Suggs' house after planning to run away from Sweet Home.
After Paul D arrives ,he later blurts out to Sethe of what he saw of Halle, who had butter in his mouth
Here are some screenshots of relevant paragraphs:
S...
@verbose Well, it's a question touched by various questions and answers on various SE sites already. Maybe just asking it straight up for once isn't the worst idea.
@Tsundoku I'm not altogether happy with that answer, because 1873 seems rather late and a school textbook an unlikely first use. But I did try eight different spellings of "Shaksperian"! I might try again at some point with more corpora.
@GarethRees I was trying to keep it more tightly focused on that line specifically - do you think that detouring to a general metaphor would improve my explanation of that line?
@bobble Anecdotally, a lot of people seem to dislike literature because their school made them study something that didn't interest them. Especially Shakespeare, at least in the British school system. This site doesn't have that problem :-)
@technastic_tc Brahadeesh wrote a lot of nice answers, especially during the Narayan topic challenge. It was sad to lose him from the site.
@Tsundoku I once got away with "shit" in a meta post. But that was in response to the death of a respected user.
@verbose Thank you for the answer! I can already see it's a great answer, but it's going to take me a while to find time to read it in full.
@verbose The answer is from someone who was at that time an employee/spokesperson of SE, so probably the downvoters were holding her responsible for the disliked feature.
@bobble If you're happy with the answer, then don't put yourself out on my account!
But what I have in mind is that in an extended metaphor, every part can be read two ways. So it's not so much a case of the poem being about a bird in a cage, and then a separate metaphor where the bird stands for African-Americans; but rather, every line is simultaneously about both subjects.
See this question and its answer for an example of taking a simile and trying to figure out how each part of it can be read both ways.
Huh. If someone wants a project less daunting than "enter image description here" I just noticed there are well over a hundred posts that misspell "Millennium Falcon." :)
What exactly is the message that George Orwell tried to communicate through Animal Farm. What exactly did he mean by
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and
from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was
which.
Or with how the name "Manor Farm"
German Language SE currently has a moderator election, or rather, the election period would have started already if they had had sufficient candidates. The nomination phase has been extended until Sunday evening.
@GarethRees slight problem with this approach: I don't see any metaphor. I guess I could try to look harder, but the straightforward interpretation in my answer is the one that I saw, and it makes sense to me.
So far, we have had at least two questions about the early history of the English sonnet:
Who introduced the sonnet to English literature? Wyatt or Shakespeare?
Why are Shakespearean sonnets called Shakespearean sonnets?
While researching and writing answers to both questions, I found that many...
In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Sethe's husband Halle ,never came back to Baby Suggs' house after planning to run away from Sweet Home.
After Paul D arrives ,he later blurts out to Sethe of what he saw of Halle, who had butter in his mouth
Here are some screenshots of relevant paragraphs:
S...
