The Reading Room

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Peter Shor

00:51

@Bookworm Now that I've looked at the one example of Marc Papillon de Lasphrise's example of "chain verse" (the alleged inventor of the form) that I've found on the web, I want to write a long answer quoting this example in French and explaining why it's so much more fun than the examples I've found in English.

But the real answer is that there are two quite different forms here, "chain verse" and "chain rhyme", but that people have indiscriminantly used both terms for both forms.

Bookworm

01:05

Q: When and where was the first sketch story published?

A sketch story is a literary piece of writing that is generally shorter than than a short story and little, if any, plot. According to this source, the genre was introduced after the 16th century in England. However, neither the wiki page nor the Enclyclopedia Brittanica page it refers to go into...

untagged

CDR

Mods...do you have control over the example tags that show up here? (I think only new users see those, but can you change or choose the ones that show up?)

3 hours later…

verbose

04:18

@PeterShor Please do

1 hour later…

verbose

05:22

@Bookworm I tend to think questions of the form "what was the first example of this genre" are impossible to answer. It's like asking, "when was the first dog kept as a pet?" The assumption that there is an identifiable, discrete Ur-event seems untenable. We keep getting such questions, and none of them ever get accepted answers.

Even something as seemingly straightforward as What was the first novel in English? can have any number of answers from Malory (c. 1470) to Richardson (1740). The English novel evolved over a 300 year span, and it's impossible to pick one of those candidates as the "first." They could each be the first depending on what criteria you're using to define "novel."

At some point I should start a meta post on "What kinds of questions don't get satisfactory answers here?" "Name the first" is clearly one of them. Another is "How is this broad topic connected to this literary work." Another is "What is/are the theme(s) of this work."

CowperKettle

06:15

загалоперидолимся| СОVER | гусли

►

"We will take haloperidol together", a romantic song in Russian played to the accompaniment of gusli, the oldest East Slavic zither-type instrument

12 hours later…

Bookworm

18:41

Q: What does "hung an entire history on him" mean?

From John Le Carre's Smiley's People: At a crucial moment, an unknown man turned round and looked at me and I hung an entire history on him, even imagining he was my dying father. Background: "I" refer to the young man acting as a courier for the general. The "unknown man" was sent by the gener...

john-le-carre smileys-people

Rand al'Thor

18:53

@CDR Nope. I don't know how the system figures out which tags to suggest there, whether it's random among highly-used tags or based on the content typed into the post box.