@Tsundoku Yes, puns about pencils usually go down like lead balloons, but yours are pretty sharp.
@bobble I owe @Mithical an apology for my previous response to this comment; I realize in hindsight it came across as my attacking them, which wasn't my intent. I was genuinely puzzled why what struck me as an obviously homophobic answer (where "gay" is literally unspeakable) was not pointed out as homophobic, and since they had commented on that answer I was curious about their thinking.
I admire Mithical as much as I do anybody on this site, and I didn't mean to be a dick. Sorry I framed my comment so antagonistically.
@GarethRees Hadn't seen it before, wondering why anybody would vote to delete it in the first place, glad it got undeleted. Thanks for making it so!
Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction contains the following slightly puzzling quote in chapter 7:
In principle at least, the performative [utterance] breaks the link between meaning and the intention of the speaker, for what act I perform with my words is not determined b...
I'm new here, and not completely sure if I'm asking this question in the right place, but I seem to have a vague memory of a story where a tribe of some sort lives in a cave for generations, and never leaves because they have access to food and water. One time, someone (it may have been a child; ...
In a story by A. Blackwood (http://algernonblackwood.org/Z-files/The_Prayer.pdf), I cannot infer the meaning in the following sentence:
He did not notice their somewhat close attention because, in his turn,
he was closely watching—somebody else. He ate and drank soberly, but
drew his dinner out....
@verbose Don't worry about it. To answer the original question: I didn't want to get dragged into a discussion about it in the comments there, and I didn't think it was explicit enough to warrant a R/A flag. Since it was already deletable for being NaA, that's what I went for.
It stands for Atomic Energy Commission, commonly known as A.E.C. In the real world, Edward Teller was an early member of the Manhattan Project, sometimes called "the father of the hydrogen bomb", and he was involved with the Atomic Energy Commission including proposing projects and testifying aga...
^ @verbose @PrinceNorthLæraðr @bobble ^ I didn't want to leave 3 comments and ping you all, but I've improved this answer with some links and background.
The answer was given in comments more than a year ago, and I've been bugging people since then to turn it into an answer, so I'm glad someone finally did.
Twelve steeds unmatch’d in fleetness and in force,
And still victorious in the dusty course;
(Rich were the man whose ample stores exceed
The prizes purchased by their winged speed;)
Extract from Pope's translation of the Iliad.
Have I correctly identified the bold verb as a subjunctive?
@verbose Whew. I finally got around to reading through your masterpiece on iambic pentameter, as well as opening a dozen other tabs for the things linked from that answer for further reading, so that I can accept it.
Having read that, I'm now buzzing with more follow-up questions (like, if iambus was originally a genre not a metre, then how does its literal meaning of "cripple" refer to the long and short feet? were Sidney and Marlowe widely recognised in their time as the greats of contemporary English literature, enough to be the movers and shakers who decided what English poetry should look like? maybe more questions about the specific works cited)
I'm trying to get a grasp of a poetical image of being "packed in furnace", found in Ted Hughes' Crow's opening poem "Two Legends":
Two Legends
I
Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
[...]
Black the blood in its loud tunnel
Black the bowels packed in furnace
[......
An excellent verbose answer says that:
Etymologically, the word iambos is related to the Greek word for cripple, with the short syllable representing the lame leg and the long the strong one. Deriving from this Greek origin, a foot of one short and one long syllable was called an iamb in Latin p...