The Reading Room

4:18 AM

Oh dear that blows. I'm sorry @PrinceNorthLæraðr

Meanwhile, this really belongs in ELU but I don't know anybody there, so Imma put this right here. The judge in one of Trump's WI cases challenging the election results edited something she was quoting just to put in an Oxford comma.

[,] is gonna be on my coat of arms when I get one

As is right and proper

yes, people who eschew the Oxford comma are obvs serial killers.

I accidentally left one out in one of my answers and I'm *dying* to go back and edit it but if I do so, it'll get bumped to the top of the Active Q list and @NapoleonWilson will slaughter me

Q: Can a "poem" mean something else than its usual meaning? (A sentence from Lovercraft's work)

You could always add some more to the answer

4 hours later…

Eng Lit Learner

8:14 AM

The story is about a marble villa, which is in the following sentence referred to as a poem: Lone and shaken mourned the humble courts and the lower walls, for upon the sumptuous greater peristyle had fallen squarely the heavy overhanging bough of the strange new tree, reducing the stately poem ...

1 hour later…

Q: In the mini-series "The Queen's Gambit", the character Jolene is black. Is this also the case in the novel by Walter Tevis?

9:28 AM

I'm somewhat embarrassed to pose this somewhat off-beat question here--among serious chess enthusiasts. But I seem unable yet to find an answer through the web. (Perhaps it's not "p. c." [politically correct] to ask this.) In the highly popular Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit", an important ch...

queens-gambit fiction film

^ is this really on-topic at Chess SE? seems to be a question about literature, not about chess

I don't have an account there to comment or see if there are any close-votes.

1 hour later…

Bookworm

10:49 AM

Q: In Macbeth, why is Fleance 'scaped?

I've always been curious about the precise phrasing of this line from Macbeth, spoken by the First Murderer: Most royal sir, Fleance is 'scaped. The meaning of this, and as far as I can tell the meter and rhythm, is exactly the same as: Most royal sir, Fleance escaped. Indeed it even sounds a...

william-shakespeare wording-choice macbeth

Napoleon Wilson

11:19 AM

@verbose I absolutely don't understand why you would say this. Yes, it's obviously a joke, but what is remotely the basis for that? If you thpught I was opposed to edits, you couldn't be any more wrong, so I would be really interested where that is drawing from.

11:51 AM

@NapoleonWilson It was just a joke, since you were the one who told me that I shouldn't edit an answer merely to correct a typo or do similarly insubstantial things. Sorry if that didn't come across right.

1 hour later…

Napoleon Wilson

1:18 PM

@verbose I got that it was a joke, don't worry. But still a joke needs to be footed on a base and that was what I was wondering about. And in fact I didn't actually tell you that at all. You asked what you could do to avoid questions getting bumped too often. That was the premise which I gave advice under. There was no reason to question that premise, though.

And in fact I gave that adivce based on the fact that others could potentially worry about bumping too often, which is also the reason why I try to avoid that too, but not under the assumption that I would necessarily see that as a problem myself.

1:34 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr I know the feeling. I recently missed the Fanatic badge on French Language meta... (Yes, meta sites also have Fanatic badges.)

@NapoleonWilson Well, I reiterate my apologies, since you've evidently taken what I thoughtlessly tossed off as an intended witticism far more seriously than I intended. I do in fact worry about editing my own answers precisely because I don't want to bump them. The fact that I blamed you for my own neuroses was just meant jokingly. I'll be more careful about such jokes henceforth.

@Tsundoku Is this a bad time to say that I earned the Fanatic badge on Lit SE just today?

I believe I have it on StackOverflow as well.

@verbose It's never a bad time for a true Fanatic.

how true a fanatic could I be, though, if I've been on this site since it started (like, really? I've been here since early 2017) and it took me till now to snag this badge

1:49 PM

It's easy to visit the site for 100 days in the course of a year but much harder to visit it 100 days in a row. Especially without a smartphone.

Edith Hall: Classics for the people / Why working-class Britons loved reading and debating the Classics.

@Tsundoku Oh wait I lied anyway. The badge I got today was not the Fanatic badge, it was whatever one gets for 30 days in a row. Enthusiast, I think. I'ven't ever gotten a fanatic badge. But do you not have a smartphone, then?

@verbose A spyphone? No, thanks.

@Tsundoku Good for you.

2:09 PM

I don't know any way of tracking the number of percentage of unanswered questions over time, but today is the first time in years that our unanswered-question percentage has gone below exactly 25%: currently 4028 questions and 1006 unanswered.

Partly thanks to @verbose reviving old unanswered questions with good new answers.

Napoleon Wilson

@verbose It's fine, it's not a big deal. I just wanted to make sure I'm not misunderstood.

b_jonas

@verbose You can be a true fanatic without the badge.

.oO(Only early 2017? You youngsters. … Oh wait, new Lit is that young actually.)

2:27 PM

@Randal'Thor The number of unanswered questions is barely growing. In fact, it was at 1010 a few days ago, so it has gone down in the last two days.

2:58 PM

It's been hovering between 1000 and 1020 for the last month or so.

3:16 PM

@Randal'Thor I have never seen a number higher than 1012 in the last few weeks. But I haven't checked every day.

Q: Is there a term for stories that act to teach the reader (not the characters) a lesson without the use fantastical elements?

3:27 PM

I want to help with the Unanswered questions but I'm having trouble finding one I feel I can answer...

Bookworm

4:22 PM

For example, take a Raymond Carver short story. His characters are often self-absorbed and incredibly flawed, and a large portion of them do not learn anything by the time the story ends. To me, it feels similar to a fable in that the characters become something of a cautionary symbol for whateve...

genre

Gareth Rees

4:35 PM

@bobble I wouldn't worry too much about the number of unanswered questions. There are a lot of questions that are all but unanswerable — they are asking for something that does not exist, or they are too broad, or too vague, or too specific.

Gareth Rees

4:46 PM

I think this question should be straight-forwardly answerable.

1 hour later…

Mithical

6:14 PM

@Tsundoku Or with religious holidays where you can't use electricity...

2 hours later…

7:58 PM

@Mithical Recommended reading: "Is Electricity Fire?" from Richard Feynman's book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

Q: Why is the narrator the one leaving in "Streets of Gold"?

@Bookworm This question 'scaped the bounds of our site to reach the HNQ list.

Mithical

8:30 PM

@Tsundoku I've read "Tuva or Bust!" but not that one

In any case, fire isn't necessarily the issue

Closing a circuit constitutes building

Bookworm

The song Streets of Gold by Needtobreathe contains the following lyrics: I want you to know I'm leaving to let you go And someday we'll walk upon The streets of gold I don't remember seeing fear in your eyes When you were fading The day we said our goodbyes ... Running through your veins was a ...

song-lyrics needtobreathe

Q: Does Jonathan Culler view literary theory itself as a historical construction?

Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler has the following quote in it: Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notations, and further, an attempt to show that what we take fro granted as "common sense" is in fact an historical construction, a particular theory...

theory literary-theory-short-introduction jonathan-culler

8:50 PM

I have an idea for how to answer this but can't express it in words.. agggggh