The Reading Room - 2021-03-10

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4:17 AM

@bobble oh were these early decision then? It seems a bit late for early decision so I'm guessing just schools that have earlier deadlines.

The first rejection was to a school I applied to for early action; like most applications of that kind, schools will only let you do one. The second rejection was just a university which does decisions a little bit earlier than my others.

Early decision is different than early action; if you get in for early decision, that is binding. Early action just gives you a choice earlier

@bobble i'm not entirely sure how tag synonyms work but would it make sense to create august-schlegel and august-wilhelm-von-schlegel as synonyms for august-schlegel?

Tag synonyms are only supposed to be created when another tag is expected to be, or has been, persistently used when the mother tag should have been

@Tsundoku who's Paul Nation?

4:37 AM

@bobble what's NLN?

No Longer Needed. One of the standard reasons comments can be flagged

It's the one I use the most often

@bobble I see

@bobble ah

97

Q: What are tag synonyms and merged tags? How do they work?

What are tag synonyms? How can tag synonyms be distinguished from "real" tags? How are new tag synonyms created? Who can create tag synonyms? How can I delete/reverse/undo bad tag synonyms? What are merged tags? Return to FAQ index

support faq tags tag-synonyms

5:02 AM

@bobble Thanks!

> Users (including moderators) can only propose or create synonyms for a given tag if the proposed synonym tag already exists.

See identification-request for an example of a tag synonym page

There goes my plan to propose edward-de-vere as a synonym for [william-shakespeare]

And a list of all our synonyms

The voting process, especially on small sites like ours, doesn't really work. So usually moderators just push the synonym through

We have a synonym (oed) where the mother tag (oxford-english-dictionary) has only one question, and that question is closed for being not about literature due to a meta consensus that dictionaries are off-topic. Seems... wasteful, somehow.

Is there a way for me to see a list of closed questions?

Yes. Use the search term "closed:yes"

Why in the world was this answer converted to a comment?

Since it was done so by a mod I'm inclined to believe there is a reason, but I flag the comment as being a whiny rant otherwise.

Is this answer bad enough to be deleted? I would flag as VLQ (Very Low Quality) if not for the age.

Or if it's not bad, then I might edit that jab at "stackexchange users" not understanding "subtlety" out

4 hours later…

8:54 AM

@bobble I agree and I flagged the comment as well as VdTC the two non-answers

9:21 AM

@verbose Paul Nation: a professor who worked in the area of language learning and teaching.

@verbose And francis-bacon and william-stanley. Shakesepare was more versatile than most people give him credit for :-P

@Tsundoku ah. Thanks.

@Tsundoku I've seen the Oxford editions of Shakespeare. I've yet to see a Shakespeare edition of Oxford, though.

Perhaps we should merge the christopher-marlowe and william-shakespeare tags

Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship

The Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds that the Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was the main author of the poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Further, the theory says Marlowe did not die in Deptford on 30 May 1593, as the historical records state, but that his death was faked. Marlovians (as those who subscribe to the theory are usually called) base their argument on supposed anomalies surrounding Marlowe's reported death and on the significant influence which, according to most scholars, Marlowe's works had on those of Shakespeare. They also point...

9:38 AM

I have also seen Cambridge editions, so perhaps we should also synonymise the Earl of Cambridge?

And some nobleman from the North Pole for the Penguin edition.

*South Pole

Nobody in Elizabethan England knew the South Pole I think.

9:55 AM

Question: if I wanted to read Shakespeare (or Marlowe) and Milton and understand the allusions without notes, how do these books do for some preliminary reading: The Odyssey (Pope), The Aeneid (Dryden), some Chaucer, the King James Bible, and Churchill's A History of the English-speaking Peoples, Vol I and II?

10:40 AM

@Soyuz42 It's a pretty tall order. I have graduate degrees in English literature; I specialized in the literature of the English Renaissance; and even so, I wouldn't claim to be able to understand Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Milton without notes. The allusions are too historically specific.

I can understand the syntax and poetry easily enough, but the allusions do require looking at the notes.

I didn't specialise in English Renaissance literature but I read each Shakespeare play in a annotated edition (Penguin, Arden, Oxford or Cambridge, etc). When I was reading All's Well That Ends Well for my master's thesis, I read four editions in parallel.

The allusions are not only to classical authors but also to the Bible (not so much to the King James version but the Geneva Bible, if memory serves) and to the Book of Common Prayer.

@Tsundoku is "for" a misprint for "four"?

I might then have to forego Samuel Johnson's advice: "Let him, that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and Pope."

@verbose It's a typesetting error.

@Tsundoku ah

10:47 AM

Hand E.

You missed an opportunity to say "Hand I"

In addition, Shakespeare cites proverbs or makes allusions to proverbs that have gone out of use.

@verbose It's too late to sue Jaggard anyway.

@Soyuz42 Oh, you can have a first read without notes to get the gist of the play, I guess.

@Tsundoku yup, the statute of limitations has expired. As has Jaggard

@Soyuz42 For a contemporary Homer translation, you would go to Chapman rather than Dryden.

@Tsundoku Do you mean Virgil?

10:53 AM

There was a time when my husband and I were reading (in my case re-reading) Spenser's The Fairie Queene together. It was interesting to see how natural reading Elizabethan poetry seemed to me; I just didn't have to worry about figuring out the syntax of complicated sentences, or about the meanings of many unusual words, or even what certain words which have since changed in meaning meant in context. They just made sense to me while Zephyr struggled a bit.

@Soyuz42 "Upon first looking into Chapman's Homer". No, definitely Homer.

@Soyuz42 No, George Chapman was a playwright and poet who translated Homer into fourteeners

Gavin Douglas translated Virgil's Aneid in the early 16th century.

See my Chronology of English Renaissance Literature.

Oh, but I wanted to read Pope's translation of the Odyssey, because I liked his Iliad.

It's not exhaustive, obviously.

@Soyuz42 I'm not orthodox about reading Pope ;-)

10:57 AM

I think it should be The Odyssey translated by Pope et al., since he didn't do it alone.

I also have a Shakespeare chronology in which you can filter specific types of events. I still want to make that English Renaissance literature chronology "filterarable".

Well, the Iliad in fourteeners, the Odyssey in heroic couplets

@Soyuz42 here you go

@verbose I've also found this

Nice! The archive.org link includes the Iliad

@Tsundoku Strobby! ¡¿Why have you kept those hidden from me until today?!

I simply thought that I had shared them before...

11:04 AM

@Tsundoku Maybe you did and I just wasn't around

Oct 4 '20 at 15:05, by Tsundoku

See my Shakespeare chronology.

yeah I didn't come back here for reals until after the Nov 4 election

sigh

@Soyuz42 since you speak Malayalam, have you seen these three questions? Two of them lack answers, maybe you can answer them?

I created the Shakespeare chronology during a ten-week online course on FutureLearn. Unfortunately, the course has not been repeated since 2017.

I understand Malayalam is palindromic but case-insensitive. Must be fun to speak a language with such constraints.

> A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.

> Madam, I'm Adam.

11:09 AM

wonders if case-insensitive means merely that nouns are not inflected

@Tsundoku His equally palindromical interlocutor merely stuck out her hand and said "Eve".

11:46 AM

@Tsundoku By about 1600, the magnetic nature of the earth was known, I think.

@verbose I am quite illiterate in Malayalam; I can only speak a very broken version of it, tolerably well for my near relatives to understand.

Reading a novel in it is beyond me.

@Soyuz42 Ah I see. But the question about the novel has an answer; it's the other two that don't, and one is about a short story. :-)

@verbose Sorry, I have no idea what the questions are about. Perhaps I can ask my mother.

@Soyuz42 Wonderful! Thanks

12:03 PM

Why are there so many false impressions about the role/identity of the villain in The Hound of the Baskervilles?

I once had someone tell me with conviction that it was the postman. Then today an answer said it was the butler.

Wasn't it Mr. Stapleton?

Yes, and he was a neighbour, neither a postman nor a butler.

He was also a relative of the family of the man Holmes was protecting. I distinctly remember Holmes climbing up to the portrait of an ancestor, obscuring the fringes of the face with his arms so that Watson could see Stapleton's resemblance.

They should have put Poirot on the case. Belgian detectives are so much more competent :-P

@Tsundoku I don't think they consumed ahem chemicals either.

@verbose Update: my mother doesn't know either.

12:18 PM

@Soyuz42 😢 But thanks for asking her!

@Randal'Thor And that answer was Chenmunka's, who's usually quite reliable. I was thinking today that we have a lot of folks who help with things like clearing queues and commenting on questions but who rarely answer or ask questions themselves these days (Chenmunka, shoover, skooba). Then Chenmunka answered a question and promptly deleted the answer. Sigh.

@Tsundoku Are there any other well-known Belgian detectives? Simenon is Belgian but Maigret is French as I recall

@verbose Ric Hochet, if you like comics.

Van Zwam in the Nero comics, but he is not the main character in that series and his detective work is a joke, really.

12:38 PM

Ah. Never heard of either, but I will see if I can find an Ric Hochet comics. Thanks!

Do you know a Dutch sinologist called Robert van Gulik?

Not personally, I mean, I was wondering if you'd come across his work

1:11 PM

@verbose Yes, but I can't remember reading any of his works. I think I've only seen them in second-hand bookshops.

1:40 PM

0

Q: When exactly & in what exact circs was the phrase "these dark Satanic mills" in Blake's "Jerusalem" first altered to "those dark Satanic mills"?

William Blake's lines of verse "Jerusalem", which appear in the "Preface" to his poem "Milton", were written c.1804 and first printed c.1808. They also appear, but with the phrase "these dark Satanic mills" (present tense) altered to "those dark Satanic mills" (by implication from context, past t...

poetry william-blake

2:17 PM

@Tsundoku they're fun

3:06 PM

@verbose shoover? That's a user I've noticed more for their good answers than for review queue activity.

4:02 PM

@Randal'Thor I know the language of this site isn't American English, but if someone who speaks American English wouldn't understand the title that's a problem

4:20 PM

@bobble Is it? Should we edit "candy" and "diaper" out of titles because British English speakers wouldn't understand them?

(FTR, although I'm a Brit, I don't remember ever hearing "circs" before, but the meaning was clear to me from context.)

For me it was akin to having a foreign word suddenly pop up in an otherwise parsable title. So I made an edit that I saw as only an improvement, no downsides. If there are words that a Brit would have no chance at understanding then changing them might also be an unambiguous improvement.

My vague guess at meaning was it was about time, similar to "circa"

I agree your edit was an improvement, just the "does not exist in American English" in the edit description rubbed me the wrong way :-)

Several perfectly valid English words, not easily replaceable by others with the exact same meaning, don't exist in American English.

Well, then I wouldn't replace them. But here the word both doesn't exist and there was an easy fix. Was the most accurate reason I could come up with

2 hours later…

6:36 PM

Who else has a stash of 30 questions that they can post at a rate of one per day for the next 30 days?

I have about ten question ideas that I haven't posted but I have not actually fleshed them out into full questions.

Oh, mine haven't been fleshed out either (or at least not all of them), but that's easy enough.

Some of the question ideas are waiting on me getting a copy of a certain book so I can do the relavent quoting

I guess I'll on collecting until September. Hopefully, I will then have enough questions to post seven of them per day for an entire month ;-)

I have a few meaning questions about The Lusiads that I've held off on because I don't want to post some dumb, obvious question for a topic challenge. Seems wrong somehow.

6:53 PM

Oh, I don't think those questions need to wait until September :-)

I have a bunch of questions that I can vary for every literature. Pattern: What was the first x in <language> literature? Now I'm wondering how many hundreds of questions that could generate.

@Tsundoku Y'all plan out your questions beforehand?

@Mithical All of me, apparently.

Napoleon Wilson

@Tsundoku That's not going to skyrocket the q/d stats, though.

@NapoleonWilson Not if I'm the only one doing it. But with 6 or seven other people, we could keep the QPD at 10 or higher for an entire month.

7:10 PM

I mean, if I'm at home with my computer I could probably write up 30 questions in a few hours. There are a bunch of poems and songs I could ask more questions about...

That means we now potentially have 60 questions. Five more persons and we're good to go ;-)

@Tsundoku prepares to suspend Tsundoku for low-quality contributions :-P

Napoleon Wilson

I'd guess Knight and the GK Chesterton dude could help.

@Randal'Thor Wait until you see how much research some of them require. I haven't even started collecting meaning questions yet.

I'm sure I could find 30 questions to ask in a month, just by reading a few tricky texts, but I'd want to have some variety in the works I was asking about.

Not just 30 questions about the same story.

Speaking of which, I finished my re-read of Watership Down, but the last question I have in my mind about it is such an anticlimax compared to some of the others.

7:22 PM

You could intersperse meaning questions with other types of questions.

7:38 PM

Wikipedia is another source of potential questions:

Aug 4 '20 at 16:11, by Tsundoku

Here is one potential source of new questions: all Wikipedia articles about literature using the template citation-needed because they contain unsourced statements.

Aug 18 '20 at 13:29, by Tsundoku

This search on fr.wikipedia finds articles on 20th-century French novelists containing unsourced statements. The French Wikipedia has no category of literature in general.

Aug 18 '20 at 13:31, by Tsundoku

Here is a similar search for 19th-century French novelists. As you can see, Roman numerals are still useful.

We have enough french-literature questions already ;-) Time to inflate another language tag.

7:55 PM

On the German Wikipedia, the relevant template is Belege fehlen but there aren't many pages about literature that use it. I think there are generally fewer pages with missing sources than on the English and French Wikipedias due to a system of reviewing.

That would fit with the stereotypes about Germans :-)

Not surprised to hear that ;-)

On the Spanish Wikipedia, the relevant template is Referencias and there is a list of pages using that template.

Napoleon Wilson

Usually Wikipedia destroys potential questions, though.

@NapoleonWilson What do you mean? In a Lit SE question, you can link to the version of the relevant Wikipedia article that is current at the time when you post the question. And with regard to answer: you need some text, not just "You can find the info at x."

I have asked a number of citation needed questions in the past. Wikipedia does not appear to have caught up yet.

8:13 PM

That is a search for all posts with "citation needed", words not necessarily together. There are 21 posts with "citation needed" exactly, 17 questions with "citation needed" exactly, and 13 questions with "citation needed" exactly from you

@Randal'Thor once asked a question in which he pointed out that the Wikipedia article about Steampunk is full of citation-needed notes. It still is.

Would that question be terminology?

Hmm. Perhaps.

@Randal'Thor We have enough questions about English literature. Let's inflate all other languages :-P

Napoleon Wilson

9:16 PM

@Tsundoku My point was more that sometimes I have an interesting question but find out it's already fully answered by Wikipedia. And in that case I don't really feel it's worth asking the question anymore.

And asking for Wikipedia sources isn't something I find too intriguing.

9:43 PM

The answer can bring up interesting information, though.

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