The Reading Room

@Randal'Thor Thanks! yeah that's why I think close reading matters. Wanna ask a question about babies in Macbeth?

7:42 AM

@verbose Someone already did :-)

@Randal'Thor My understanding is that actors refer to it as the Scottish play because saying the actual title out loud runs you the risk of getting kilt.

Ha!

@Randal'Thor haha

Also, @Randal'Thor, it's your fault that I asked the katydid question so I hope you'll answer it

@verbose You've just inspired me to ask a new question.

@verbose I'll try.

@Randal'Thor nice q

Ngaio Marsh has an interesting novel about a production of Macbeth

Q: Since when is Shakespeare's "Scottish play" considered unlucky?

7:58 AM

1

In theatrical superstition, Shakespeare's play Macbeth is considered to be unlucky, to the extent that even saying its name more than necessary may bring bad luck: hence the tradition of actors referring to it as "the Scottish play". According to Wikipedia: One hypothesis for the origin of this ...

We've had questions on here about Conan Doyle, Christie, Allingham, and Sayers, but none that I can recall on Marsh. I like Marsh. I think she and Sayers are the best prose stylists of the classic mystery genre.

Q: A question about multiple narration

9:11 AM

0

If every chapter of a novel has as its narrator a different character, is it an example of a metafictional novel? I presume it is not specific to metafiction to have multiple narrators, but can a metafictional novel have multiple narrators?

metafiction

b_jonas

9:29 AM

xkcd.com/2428 Mars Landing Video => I'm reminded of Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker, the first book in the Alex Rider series. In that book, there's a ceremony where the president has a ceremony where he's announcing something to the presses that they mostly already know, then the protagonist comes with a parachute crashing through the glass roof to interrupt the announcement.

1:52 PM

(sigh) Though I get that we should encourage new users, people should not post and upvote obviously wrong answers.

3:27 PM

@verbose please enlighten me as to how the answer is "obviously wrong"

3:46 PM

@bobble FWIW, a deleted comment on that answer (not from verbose) says "The page you link to was written in 2018. I think we can probably find older evidence for the superstition."

ah, makes sense

I actually upvoted the answer, thinking the RSC would be a reliable source.

stupid n key

But on second thoughts, that page looks more like "fun Shakespeare facts for kids" than a serious study.

3:59 PM

Answer's been edited, you could retract your vote

@verbose Uh...well, to help casual readers, who by assuming good intentions and natural instincts first and foremost tend to believe what the answer containing a link to the Royal Shakespeare Company says to be the truth, you could add a comment to the answer pointing out why it is wrong, since wrong as it may possibly be, that fact seems anything but "obvious" to me.

If you've done the legwork of checking the linked source to realize the answer is wrong, pointing that out helps anyone not bothering to read through every single source an answer uses to back itself up.

Even more so if the Royal Shakespeare Company themselves are wrong and you know that by external information not accessible to everyone reading the answer.

4:48 PM

@NapoleonWilson and @bobble there was a comment there, not from me, that pointed out why the answer was obviously wrong. But even reading the RSC webpage, it was clear that the page said "The folklore about Macbeth is that ... ". The page never says "the idea that Macbeth is accursed dates back ... ". The page says nothing about when the idea might have originated.

So it's not exactly wrong as much as it isn't a direct answer?

@bobble but it is wrong; the answer implied the RSC page says the idea that Macbeth is cursed dates back to when the play was first staged. The RSC page doesn't say that. The RSC says, specifically, that folklore says the play was cursed from the very beginning. It says nothing about when that folklore originated, which is what Randolph was asking.

I mean, I quoted the RSC page quite extensively in my own answer too, just to show what the folklore surrounding the play is. It is a good page. It just doesn't say what that answer says it says.

okay, I think I get what you're saying now

Perhaps comment on the post?

Also, I'dn't've made the comment I made in chat about the answer's being obviously wrong if I'd known that the person who made the comment on the answer itself, pointing out it was wrong, was gonna delete it.

@bobble I think my alternative answer is comment enough. Besides, I feel like enough of a dick for having made that snarky comment in chat, and I ain't gonna go dunk on the poor new contributor by saying, "yo, your answer is wrong, mine is better." Especially since, as Gareth points out in his comments to my answer, my own answer also needs some more work.

5:10 PM

@verbose I guess I extrapolated from the answer saying that bad things happened during the first performance that it was posing this performance as inciting the superstition. But yes, a clear statement along these lines is somewhat missing.

It's a bit incomplete at that indeed.

@verbose But that again assumes people actually check sources, which I don't think is a particularly realistic requirement for voting. There's responsible voting and there's scrutiny, the latter of which ought to be reserved for über-meticulous users who then share their insights in comments.

@NapoleonWilson you're right. I should chillax, as they used to say in the early 2000s. How anybody could "chillax" after an injunction whose very wording set one's teeth on edge I never quite figured out.

@verbose You don't have to word the comment like the chat message. ;-)

'course most of you weren't yet born in the early 2000s so you'll've to take my word for it.

@NapoleonWilson haha

A comment certainly would free you from being frowned on for wondering why people still uvpote it.

@verbose Like "I'dn't've"? ;-)

@NapoleonWilson oh well, if after reading the longer answer people still want to upvote the shorter, wrong-er one, that's fine.

@NapoleonWilson 😁 'm all about multiple contractions, yo.

5:24 PM

@verbose That assumes they have read the longer one before. Even if your answer proves it wrong, a comment pointing that out can't really hurt. But you don't have to comment, of course.

@NapoleonWilson But what would I say? I tried explaining to @bobble, with whom I've had prior interactions, why that answer was wrong; but I think I still wasn't clear enough even in chat. I'm not sure how I'd succinctly, nicely, and clearly explain to a new contributor in a brief comment why their answer is incorrect. Maybe you could take a stab at the comment?

Maybe something like this?

> The RSC page is a good find. But it describes what people now believe about the play, namely that it was unlucky from the first performance. It doesn't say when that belief originated, which is what the question is asking.

Is that clear and nice enough?

> While your answer quotes the RSC's statements about the unlucky events connected with the play, it doesn't seem to adress when the specific superstition actually started.

Something like that maybe?

@NapoleonWilson Great! So why don't you post your version? It's clearer than mine.

@verbose That sounds resonable, yes.

@verbose It's pretty much the same. Also, you're the one with that sentiment. ;-)

But I can, if you feel better when it's not from someone with a competing answer.

You're the one saying that sentiment needs to be expressed in a comment.

@NapoleonWilson Yes, especially since it's a new contributor. I did recently comment on one of Mary's answers that I thought was wrong, and provide a competing answer, but Mary is not going to be put off the site by that. She knows she's valued here, because we've all upvoted her answers.

How odd that the metafictional q went HNQ. I'd've thought the unlucky Macbeth q would've done so simply because it has multiple answers rather than just the one.

Also, how odd that I beat @Tsundoku to an answer about metafictions. They're kinda his bag.

5:34 PM

Oh, so it's just the HNQ bot that's been turned into this weird dismissable feeds thing?

@NapoleonWilson I assumed

wait I was today years old when I realized @NapoleonWilson and @CahirMawrDyffrynæpCeallach were the same person

Q: Visual design changes to the review queues

107

The Public Platform team would like to announce another release in a series of planned work for the Review queues. This release focuses on refreshing the queue user interface in preparation for further improvements to the user experience. Starting today, we will roll out these changes in three ph...

discussion featured review announcements

This finally shipped to us; the queues have changed

@verbose They both did. The Macbeth one with two upvoted answers, and the metafiction one with an answer receiving several upvotes fast.

You might reach 10k sooner than you thought :-)

@verbose Do you contract "shall not" as "sha'n't" too? I've seen that in some older literature.

I also completely missed that I hadn't upvoted the question before.

We're at 10.7 Qs now!

5:41 PM

@Randal'Thor I don't. I have seen it, but it just isn't in my fingers the way I'd've or you'dn't've are

@Randal'Thor well, if multiple answers with multiple upvotes makes a question go HNQ, I retract my earlier sentiment that the answer from the newbie shouldn't've been upvoted. Lit SE needs a higher profile coz we rock and going HNQ early and often is good.

@verbose At the cost of meaningful votes, though?

Remember, that obviously wrong answer is going to get like 5 upvotes a second now. ;-)

@NapoleonWilson Actually I was more talking about the quality of the answer than the upvotes. I mean, I said people "shouldn't post and upvote obviously wrong answers." We sorta got fixated on the upvote part. I was more concerned about the part where someone posted an answer that involved simply their reading a website and misunderstanding it.

> If a novel has different narrators for each chapter but only a single chapter, is it still a novel?

@NapoleonWilson yes?

Correct!

5:46 PM

@NapoleonWilson racking my brains for an example, coming up empty.

@PrinceNorthLæraðr this may be from me asking a lot recently... trying to also answer, but I want to make sure I "beat" Rand for this Topic Challenge

Are you asking me to ask more questions?

What are you asking for? :P

Question race

You want me to upvote you?

Oh, oh

The problem is asking questions might inflate Unanswered

5:49 PM

@bobble You two are already in a rep race ...

I completely misread the statement

@bobble hehe

@verbose :-D

@Randal'Thor I might concede soon, who knows

@Randal'Thor 12 rep. 12

@bobble Solution: ask relatively easy questions, or at least questions that you know some people on this site will be able to answer.

Like Thomas Hardy, or Walt Whitman, or Rabindranath Tagore.

5:52 PM

(Also an easy way to get HNQ)

There's a question I'm planning to ask which I suspect amounts to "please translate some German sources for me"

At this point, I'll concede

waves flag

(not that I'm sure, since I can't read the German myself to see if it answers my question)

You'll pass me eventually :P

I don't know, I read some of Fontane's ballads for the challenge, but I couldn't come up with any question. Other than "why specifically write about Scotland or the US" maybe. ;-)

5:53 PM

@bobble That's a perfectly valid question for someone who doesn't know German.

There. You're officially ahead of me now, Miss Bobbling Crown

I may or may not have just put a 100 rep bounty on the Watership Down timeline

you did

I checked your profile

I once asked a question which amounted to "is this text written in Hindi or Bengali?" Mind-numbingly trivial for anyone who knows the first thing about either language, but genuinely hard for me to tell without that knowledge. @verbose provided a very nice answer without calling anyone an idiot for not knowing the difference.

@bobble You're welcome :)

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Heh, way to make the victory hollow :-P You gave her that victory instead of letting her fight for it.

5:56 PM

Ha!

Couldn't give her that much satisfaction

So somehow, you still won

Same thing DVK did to Valorum on SFF when the big overtake happened.

If I'm going down, I'm going down on my own terms

curse you, tree!

Bountied him a bunch of rep and wished him a happy 4th of July.

(Valorum being a Brit)

5:57 PM

Bwahaha

BWAHAHAHA

21 mins ago, by verbose

wait I was today years old when I realized @NapoleonWilson and @CahirMawrDyffrynæpCeallach were the same person

Wha-

Wait...

@PrinceNorthLæraðr He goes by yet a third username on SO and MSE.

@Randal'Thor Ah, I see

And a fourth on SFF, I think.

Geez

Since Napoleon Wilson is a film character and Cahir-whatsit is a book character, it makes some sense - topical per-site usernames.

(yes, I'm too lazy to type out that long username and check that I'm spelling it correctly)

6:00 PM

I see

CahirMawrDyffrynæpCeallach

You copy-paster :-P

No idea what book character that is :P

Witcher.

@Randal'Thor Hey, says you with your absurdly long username

Good polish-literature series, although I haven't got far enough in it to meet that character yet.

6:01 PM

~~says me with my absurdly long username~~

@PrinceNorthLæraðr At least my username can be typed with a normal English keyboard.

Cahir's needs a Norwegian/Danish keyboard, and yours needs an Icelandic one.

@verbose Well, there was something called work, i.e. a four-hour workshop for university faculty that I co-taught today.

@Randal'Thor Touché

naw, I don't need a fancy keyboard

just let autocomplete do it for me

6:02 PM

^ Update on the rep race.

Yes

@bobble Doesn't work for Cahir since that username of his isn't pingable in here.

You can read above

8 mins ago, by Prince North Læraðr

There. You're officially ahead of me now, Miss Bobbling Crown

Ah, sniped me

6:03 PM

The ranking is cached. Bobble got ahead due to the bounty - even without it being awarded yet.

@Tsundoku If you're teaching online and good at multi-tasking, you could work on a Lit.SE answer at the same time :-P

@Tsundoku Well, partly because I lost rep in the process

I want the bounty to stay on for a little bit

Before I actually award it

@verbose Your pronouns are he/him, right?

@PrinceNorthLæraðr I think you can also call him "major".

@Tsundoku ?

@Randal'Thor I did, however, call the people who ran the website who claimed that poem was Hindi all kinds of idiot, though

6:09 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr ... since his profile says he's an English major ...

He is the very model of a modern major-general.

(Sorry, I confuse people's pronouns every once in a while and have to make sure I'm not like calling someone by the wrong pronouns)

@Randal'Thor Ha...

@Randal'Thor I was rather admiring that myself.

@Randal'Thor hilarious

For regulars in this chat, I think it's Mith (they/them) and I (she/her) that are the only non-he/him peeps

@PrinceNorthLæraðr yes, but I'm not hung up about it. Like, if someone says "she" or "they" about me I don't bother correcting them. Back when my husband was alive, I'd be on the phone with (say) the car insurance people and they'd be all like, "yes sir" and I'd say "oh, I want to add my husband to my policy" and without missing a beat they'd switch to "yes, madam, we can do that for you"

6:11 PM

@verbose Yikes

@Tsundoku ah. How conscientious of you. What did you teach the faculty?

@verbose How to make their PowerPoint presentations accessible for people with disabilities. Next week we continue with Word and video accessibility. (And some other stuff.)

@Tsundoku Wow, EXCITING!

I'm a Linux user but nobody was interested in LibreOffice accessibility :-( That university appears to be a Microsoft shop. Yuk!

@Tsundoku that sounds like really important work. I mean, PowerPoint, Word, etc are awful but people do use them and accessibility so often goes overlooked

6:17 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr It was all new to them. Some of them admitted that they had been using PowerPoint incorrectly for years ...

@Tsundoku That's an oof

Oddly, I just found an answer that has a lot more votes than a better answer, too. That's HNQs at work. ;-)

@verbose Oh it's definitely important

For example, they started with a totally empty slide and then added textfields instead of choosing a proper slide layout and using the standard placeholders.

@NapoleonWilson on Lit SE? I'm aware of a couple of questions like that here.

@Tsundoku that's just making a lot more work for themselves?

6:19 PM

@verbose I was just about to say that

@verbose Exactly. The presentation was an eye opener (pun intended).

har har

@Tsundoku haha

@bobble And here I was thinking that Mathilde Möhring was Fontane's last work.

@Tsundoku you could still write an answer to the metafiction question. It's HNQ and adding an answer will keep it there and it's an area you specialize in

6:22 PM

I'm not sure if the book he was working on before death was ever published - highly doubt it - but thought it would make a good question

@Randal'Thor I think ABCExtended layout on the Mac gets all the requisite letters for those languages. I use it to type Old English.

@Randal'Thor Blame the character limit on usernames. The original is just a boring "ae".

@verbose There's a number of those especially from the early beta days. Sometimes with a lot of effort in promoting and bountying, a newer answer can be made to rise to the top (as in this case), but it doesn't always work.

Q: What is known about the last book Theodor Fontane worked on?

1

This question started when I noticed a curious aside in Fontane's Wikipedia article: Fontane was plagued by health problems during his last years but continued to work until a few hours before his death. Being a slightly* morbidly curious person, I tried to find more information about this work...

german-literature theodor-fontane

@NapoleonWilson Oh really? So it's ~~your~~ SE's fault rather than Sapkowski's then :-)

6:28 PM

Yes. If we're to believe Wad Cheber it's more Welsh than anything anyway.

Or maybe just Kauderwelsh. ;-)

@Tsundoku That...sounds more like they need to first learn how to make presentations, period, rather than making them accessible. ;-)

@NapoleonWilson I had to look that up, but nice one!

Does that German word actually come from the word for Welsh, in the same way as we say "double Dutch" in English?

@NapoleonWilson Probably. I also told them they shouldn't overload slides with text.That also appeared to be new.

PowerPoint: Death by bullet points.

The etymology is actually quite interesting. Indeed "Welsch" seems to be an archaic term for Romance languages, which "Wales" seems to come from, too.

Romance languages? Curiouser and curiouser. Wales has never been home to a Romance language AFAIK.

@Randal'Thor AFAIK, the word is etymologically related to the Dutch word "koeterwaals"

6:33 PM

@Tsundoku That just reminds me of van der Waals forces.

At least that's what Wikipedia says. Fortunately someone better versed in the intricacies of linguistics just joined the chat. ;-)

We had a professor who not only spelt out every single sentence on his slides but also was so damn slow a speaker that it was downright torture knowing exactly what his next word would be.

The Dutch Wikipedia says koeterwaals / Kauderwelsch might come from * Churer Welsch*, which would refer to a Romance language spoken in Chur (in Switzerland). But the article does not cite any sources.

Actually the Wiki on "Wales" says it does come from Germanic "Welsch", but was a term for specific celtic tribes which then broadened to include Romance language speakers in general simply because a lot of these areas were under Roman control sooner or later and got "Romanized".

But that might also be a simplicifaction.

Or shall I say...romanticization?

Interesting that the tribe originally known as "Welsche" was a tribe now called "Volken", which in turn is very similar to "Volk" (singular "people"). That poses the question how much it might even be the basis for the word "welche" ("which") in its very general nature.

But yes, historical linguistics is quite interesting and how every word comes from about 3 ancient base words. (Maybe not 3, but you get the idea.)

And the English Wiki says that "Welsh" and "Wales" was in turn used by the Anglo-Saxons for any kind of Briton.

I also never realized that Cambria is just Latin for Cymru.

6:50 PM

The historical peoples of Britain are a surprisingly diverse bunch.

@Tsundoku The German Wiki cites Luther as using the word that way. But it also offers other possibilities, like the Grimms listing it as a somewhat onomatopeic word for chicken/turkey sounds, as well as "kaudern" meaning something like trading in a derogatory sense (peddling?).

@Randal'Thor it happens more recently too, though. Like I think both @Tsundoku’s and my answers to the question about comparing stanza forms from Tbilisi and Atlanta are better than the accepted, highly (for Lit SE) upvoted one

@verbose True, you have some catching up to do there.

I like how @Tsundoku's answer starts by quoting Baldick. Did he have a cunning plan to define Georgian poetry?

@Randal'Thor I took my 4 minutes and 33 seconds to come up with that plan.

@Tsundoku is that a John cage reference?

7:03 PM

@verbose There is an allusion to 4′33″ in Blackadder the Third.

@Tsundoku ah

@verbose I upvoted your answer, but then undid it - I'll wait until tomorrow since you're close to repcapping today.

@Randal'Thor how very considerate of you!

No worries, I'm familiar with the frustration of "useless" upvotes.

in The Sphinx's Lair, Jun 20 '18 at 16:30, by Rand al'Thor

Jun 6 '17 at 13:49, by Rand al'Thor

It's not useless if it contributes to a badge. There's more to life than just points. For instance, there are other kinds of points. — Engineer Toast Jun 4 '15 at 19:10

In fact getting nearer to the rare Epic and Legendary badges is a lot more important than losing a few reputation points.

If he doesn't reach the rep-cap today because of your reluctance, he might be very sad.

7:15 PM

@NapoleonWilson I think I already have a mortarboard on here. That’s not a gold badge, is it?

Or get the worst of both worlds and forget to vote tomorrow. ;-)

coz I know I’ven’t any gold badges

@verbose No, need about 199 more days for that.

Wait, no, only 149.

Days?

With reputation cap, yes.

7:18 PM

i don’t understand. What does number of days have to do with rep caps and/or gold badges?

There's a gold badge for hitting the repcap on 150 separate days.

Oh I see

In the days of HNQ probably everyone has a Smörgåsbord badge.

@verbose Because the cap is of a daily nature.

@NapoleonWilson S'why I mentioned it in here, to be surer that I'll remember it tomorrow.

True. You can also follow the post.

7:26 PM

I haven't used this newfangled "follow" thing.

Hardly used bookmarks since 2014 either, for that matter.

I try to switch to "follow" for moderation purposes lately because of the notifications (and also because I haven't cleaned out my over 500 favourites for quite a while now).

So now I can trash everything into a new list until it has 500 entries, too. Fortunately, though, the notifications should be annoying enough to clean it out once every while.

And it also helps avoid the "my terrible question was favourited so it can't be terrible" arguments. ;-)

@verbose (At 20'10") youtu.be/vDVxq76-qOw?t=1210

7:56 PM

@Tsundoku 😆

8:21 PM

This site only have 5 negatively-scored accepted answers

*has?

darn brain

do I lose my spellcheck-crown? :P

@PrinceNorthLæraðr look "whose" talking...

@Mithical ai dont no wut ur talking abowt

in PSE D&D Chatroom, 23 mins ago, by Prince North Læraðr

@bobble "And who's fault is that?"

specifically

8:26 PM

@Mithical Harhar

@bobble One of those is Mith's (from Feb '17, an answer I suspect they'd be embarrassed about now).

we do not talk about my posts before... 2018

Two of the others are self-answers.

@Mithical Funny thing is that actually looks like it should be grammatically correct, if English were at all logical.

North's fault, Rand's fault, who's fault - genitive taking 's is the norm.

Except when it's not

contractions

8:50 PM

3 hours ago, by verbose

@NapoleonWilson 😁 'm all about multiple contractions, yo.

Fun fact: if you di' in contractions, you get contradictions.

@bobble Some people can't spell "armageddon". That's not the end of the world, though.

Hehe

Q: Did anastrophe in English poetry have to do with French influence?

9:17 PM

0

From Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote Chaucer wrote in Middle English which, to my knowledge, was influenced by French in many ways. French adjectives are usually postpositive, so did this kind of anastrophe (with an adjective following the noun it modifies)...

geoffrey-chaucer the-canterbury-tales

Q: What is a "kick of the heels"? (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie by Jean Rhys)

9:41 PM

2

This is from the beginning of the third chapter. THE NAME of the dark young man was George Horsfield. Half an hour afterwards he came out of the Restaurant Albert, thinking that he had spent a disproportionately large part of the last six months in getting away from people who bored him. (The la...

meaning jean-rhys

9:59 PM

@Randal'Thor So much that I thought it was correct and Mithical was deliberately writing it wrong and that was supposed to be the joke.

Wait, he was because he said something else anyway.

@Tsundoku Armageddon ma computer to google that!

Q: Translating into English two French phrases from After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie by Jean Rhys

0

I am trying to understand, in English, two French phrases from the Jean Rhys book After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. The quote below is from page 256 of Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels. (I am reading After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie within the the book Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels.) The setting is some kin...

meaning translation jean-rhys

10:21 PM

@NapoleonWilson There has never been so much disinformation at our fingertips.

And information.

Or simply nothing because GDPR. ;-)