@NapoleonWilson I thought I was one of the resident Shakespeare fanatics and Tsundoku one of the others ... he proposed it, I upvoted it ... I think it's the Shavian freaks :-)
Also, I just got a Necromancer badge from that thread ... I had no idea community wiki posts were eligible for badges even
@bobble I learn sth new every day. Yup, two upvotes, one downvote. At least on that thread one wishes downvoters would share their reasoning .... Randolph always does.
@verbose Here's an example of a "the author doesn't really care, it's just a bad novel" answer, although it wasn't particularly well-received (no votes either way).
@Tsundoku That question went HNQ but not for very long.
@verbose I don't always :-) In fact, funnily enough, I just checked and I was the downvoter on the Middleton proposal! Nothing against him or his works, I just don't feel that classic English literature is in the spirit of "getting outside our site's main domains of interest" that topic challenges are supposed to be. (Neither is William Blake, which I proposed back in 2017, I'll readily admit.)
@Randal'Thor I think our site's main domains of interest appear to be Tolkien, Rand, Shakespeare, and a few other well-worn authors. I think it's fine to focus on relatively obscure topics or authors even if they are within the Anglo-American tradition. If our visitors aren't reading Ko Un, they're not reading Middleton either.
Also, Andrew sent me a bunch of screen caps from the BNA that in fact does show a superstition around Macbeth dating back to the 1920s, so that answer is due for another revision, this time reverting to the 1920s claim of the original. Sigh.
Afterall, if the topic challenge is something exotic like Fontane or Maltesian murals of the 2nd century, you only really got Rand alThor and bobble asking questions about it anyway, the same people who'd ask 5 questions against eachother every day no matter the topic.
@NapoleonWilson The question askers are not the only ones who read the works, it's also those who post answers. But the answerers aren't listed in the topic challenge summaries on Meta.
Renaissance England is a different culture than 21st-century England - or any 21st-century country. "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there" (L. P. Hartley)
@Tsundoku that is a shattering novel. I enjoyed hartleys stories and then read the go-between. It was so heartbreaking I couldn’t bring myself to read the pimp and the alimony
@verbose I know they are eligible because I have a bronze nice answer badge for scifi.stackexchange.com/a/146188/4918 . It's basically a trophy that I hold in my display for the whole community, because it's a lot of other users who did the actual identification, I just helped collect them into a single post.
I edited some of the identification into it based on chat and the other answer and comments, but also other users edited identifications directly into it.
Every time I see a HNQ post from Space Exploration about Perseverance, for a split second I think it's a brandon-sanderson question about Preservation.
By the way, I got Os Lusíadas from a library, but I haven't yet started to read it. I might not have the patience to read the whole thing, depending on how pleasant the text is, but I'll read at least some of it.
@Randal'Thor If it is just your personal preference, shouldn't we edit the guidelines for voting? They are currently formatted as if they represented a quote from a community decision, which is misleading, IMHO.
@bobble Based on his home page at Schimon Schuster I would keep the middle name. www.benjaminsaenz.com has only a temporary page, so I wouldn't use that as guidance for the moment.
@Tsundoku Well, those were always the guidelines written on meta, since user20 started the topic challenge program and created a vision for it back in 2017. My rebooted meta post copies that part from the original one.
When you said "Narrowing it down [...] is something that I can't remember discussing", I conceded that not everyone has to vote according to those guidelines - I do, but if a piece of classic English literature makes it to the top of the list, it'll certainly be selected rather than disqualified - but it was always part of the advisory guidelines for voting on topic challenge proposals.
Marry, younglings, then sit you down upon yonder tussock and take heed.
The suffix -(e)st doth succeed the verb in the case of second-person singular, while the suffix -(e)th doth play a similar role in the case of third-person singular.
My knowledge of grammar is more instinctive "that looks wrong" than "oh, there is a disagreement between the tense of the predicate and the noun phrase" (note: I have no idea what either of those things are)
Another way today's youth oft err is the declension of the second-person singular pronoun. "Thou" is nominative (subject), "thee" is accusative/dative (object), "thy"/"thine" is genitive (possessing).
Fie upon thee, for thou hast done me wrong. I declare thy mother a hamster, and thy father passed unto thee the scent of elderberries that thou dost now possess.
The chorus of the song "The Heart of the Raven" by the German band MONO INC. goes like this:
But here in the raven's heart
Your heart is beating on
I ween that you are better where you are
You're here in the raven's heart
No matter where you've gone
I'm sure that you are there among the stars
T...
From Lady Saba Holland's memoir of her father the Rev. Sydney Smith, published circa 1855:
The reigning bore at this time in Edinburgh was ——; his favourite subject, the North Pole. It mattered not how far south you began, you found yourself transported to the north pole before you could take br...
What is the main idea behind Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Times" (1829)? What is the literary and sociopolitical background of the essay? Is he just mirroring the 19th century sentiments or there is something beyond what is obvious?
@Tsundoku I'm always tempted to put "I / me / my" as my pronouns but I'm worried I'll get yelled at for trolling. Seriously, though, they are my pronouns. I don't use any others in reference to myself. Not the royal We, not the third person.
@Bookworm It would probably be good if I could write a nice comment welcoming the OP and asking them to clarify exactly what they're asking; probably offer tags at the same time. However I do not have the bandwidth to write such a comment at the moment.
The chorus of the song "The Heart of the Raven" by the German band MONO INC. goes like this:
But here in the raven's heart
Your heart is beating on
I ween that you are better where you are
You're here in the raven's heart
No matter where you've gone
I'm sure that you are there among the stars
T...
What is the main idea behind Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Times" (1829)? What is the literary and sociopolitical background of the essay? Is he just mirroring the 19th century sentiments or there is something beyond what is obvious?
