I heard about it on the radio, I damn near soiled myself getting home to my computer so I could buy a ticket! It was already close to sold out...maybe 70%?
So now I have to wait 2 months! Torture! (I've never seen it live). 25th Anniversary was a few years ago. It was that concert (at the O2 in London) that was my introduction to the story and the musical.
I got home with the DVD thinking that it was a full stage production.
At first I was irked..."I don't want the concert, that's boring!"
For the next 3 hours, I didn't move. I'm not sure I breathed.
I'm sure it will. As excited as I am, I won't even see flaws. I very much enjoyed the film version. It opened on Christmas day, I watched it 3 times in a row.
Anne Hathaway was fantastic, Hugh Jackman did a very credible job, and I liked ...what's his name...Javert...
When I was in grad school just before my advisor retired the department asked him what he wanted to direct in his final year. He picked a Very Obscure late play by Shaw - actually his last one - and they said "What? That?" ... He said "I saw the premiere in 1948, and I've never seen it since - and this will undoubtedly be my last chance to see it."
Russell Crowe. The Thenardiers were a disappointment. I wanted very much to like Helena Banham Carter in the role, but they just ruined what should have been a show stopping number.
Crowe was pretty darn good in it. So many people said he wouldn't have the vocal chops, but he did just fine, and his performance brought nice nuances to the role. His big number had a weird thing I didn't like, but that was the director, not him.
And this one is totally sung through on stage, that makes it extra tough. They included some dialog in the film, I'm not sure if that was a good call or not.
At any rate, if you've never seen it (and I think you have told me that you haven't), see the 25th Anniversary Concert first, with Alfie Boe.
I'll look forward to your report on the production. ... And I'll certainly look it up. But I'll reread the book first -- I like immensely long books, and I'm sure the version we read in high school was abridged.
The very nature of this musical is that it tells you very clearly, in the first few minutes, that it's about to take you on a ride! If you like immensely long, you'll love it! :) I've seen many, many film adaptations, and the musical is the only one that comes close to Hugo's vision. (IMHO)
@skullpatrol Yep :) That's kind of why I left for a while. I was getting annoyed, and that wasn't a good thing.
The book is full of introspection. That's why it doesn't work as a straight adaptation. You can't have your characters walking around talking to themselves, but you can have them singing to themselves :)
What's kind of fun about the cooking board is the huge variance of skill level. We get Q&As about extremely technical aspects of complicated molecular gastronomy, next to "Why can't I make rice?"
Well, I know how to make rice, sorta. There's three cups drying on my stove right now for a fried rice in a couple of days. But that's pretty much my limit.
Which acid works best to keep avocados from browning?
Answer: None (of the acids tested)
It's not that acid doesn't do much to help.
ALL OF THE ACIDS TESTED CAUSED AVOCADOS TO BECOME MORE BROWN AND TO BECOME BROWN FASTER THAN NO TREATMENT AT ALL
I am not kidding.
Method
For acid, I used fre...
Perhaps its because lemon juice (like lime juice) is a pleasant flavoring, so the avocado gets eaten before it turns brown.
I was worrying about how to keep the leftover two-thirds of the chicken pie I made last night fresh, and got up this morning to find my son had eaten the whole damn thing.
I have other books on my bookshelf that kinda claim to be reference grammars (in their own authors' minds), but they are rather thin, and have bad errors, and really don't compare to CGEL at all.
2002 CGEL is 1800 pages, with small print, and that's really not even enough pages to hit all the common topics sufficiently (imo).
All the small, er, typical "grammar usage manuals" are actually more like style guides.
CGEL at least, for the most part, provides reasonable rationales for their "rules", and walk the reader through them. Most grammar books don't do that, for lack of pages and for lack of, er, knowledge.
There really isn't anything out there now that compares to the 2002 CGEL.
Some explanations are concise, perhaps too concise, but they have to cram everything into 1800 pages.
Their framework is simpler than others, and it's more intuitive.
CGEL keeps reintroducing the same concepts over and over, but in different contexts and in different topic sections, so there really is no need to memorize.
The learning is based on understanding the rationales, not by memorizing "rules".
The best info and reading is in their so-called "specialist passages", which are chunks printed in smaller print and with a bluish background.
Supposedly a reader doesn't need to read them, but those parts are the most interesting and often have the rationales.
You know that the first 2 chapters are free to read online on their website.
Nope. It ain't always. Usually it's the spelling of the word pronounced 'EnPee', which is any entity acting in one of the core syntactical roles of a noun or noun phrase. A 'noun phrase' is a phrase headed by a noun.
Clauses do not have inherent number, but when a clause is employed under the category of an NP† it must be treated as either singular or plural. A single clause so employed is treated as a singular entity; two or more coordinated clauses so employed are treated as a plural entity.
That John i...
> †An 'NP' is not the same thing as a 'noun phrase'. A noun phrase is a phrase headed by a noun, while an 'NP' (pronounced En-Pee) is a phrase which plays certain (not all) syntactic roles typical of a noun or noun phrase. Thus a clause (which is headed by a verb) cannot be a noun phrase, but it can be (as in these examples) an NP.
> Note that the indirect object node in the tree diagram on the right is marked as NP2, even though it is obviously a prepositional phrase (PP). PP would be one acceptable label for this node, but I have chosen to label it as an NP for two reasons: (1) it functions as an NP, the indirect object of the clause,
> and (2) the preposition to disappears under the Dative alternation. Labelling it as a PP would draw attention to the preposition, which is dispensible, instead of the grammatical relation of indirect object NP. The purpose of tree diagrams is to point out the important relations, rather than to be some kind of complete accounting of all the minor details.
A modern version of "Parts of Speech".
No wonder students say the grammar stuff they say on the internet.
Too many students don't know the difference between a noun phrase (NP) and a grammatical subject.
> A: "When is a clause not a clause?" > B: "When it's acting noun-y!"
facepalm
> A: "When is a PP not a PP?" > B: "When it's acting noun-y!"
@F.E. I don't abbreviate it. This is not, in fact particularly abstruse; it is of a piece with, for instance, CGEL's distinction between lexical categories, grammatical functions, and constructions. It is like most technical terminology a way of making clear what exactly you are talking about and avoiding the confusion which arises when you use terms like 'noun' and 'verb' loosely to signify a 'part of speech' (lexical category) on one occasion and a grammatical function on the next.
It leads, to be sure, to a great multiplication of terms, which is (briefly) a burden on the student; but that is offset by the fact that you are not confusing your students while you burden them.
In Short (or tl;dr)
These all say the same thing (well, or can say the same thing; see below):
It has been done so as to permit air to circulate freely.
It has been done so to permit air to circulate freely.
It has been done in order to permit air to circulate free...
> Apparently Messrs. Huddleston and Pullam have decided to reclassify subordinating conjunctions as prepositions when their argument is a non-finite verb clause but leave them as conjunctions when followed by a finite clause.
> Makes no sense to me, but this would hardly be the first time I’ve caught Pullam barking up the wrong tree.
> "Messrs. Huddleston and Pullam" ? ? ?
Read the comments for that post too. (Especially mine.)
I don't do many diagrams, but what labels I use depend on what sort of analysis I'm doing. Sometimes I make up my own terms; see, for instance, the diagrams in sections 1 and 3.1 of my post on perfect constructions on perfect constructions.
As for Profs. Huddleston and Pullum, I'm still working my way (very slowly) through CGEL. I take issue with some of their positions, I find others extraordinarily enlightening. But I'm just an amateur.
I take my use of NP and VP from McCawley's Syntactic Phenomena, which is the work that really got me into contemporary grammars, and apparently something of a bible in syntactic studies. As for 'most of us' ... 'most of us' call perfects and progressives and suchlike tenses, but that is not how the terms are used anywhere in modern linguistics.
@Cerberus In the case of NP and VP, it's because these have come to mean something other than 'noun phrase' and 'verb phrase' - they are in fact acronyms, not initialisms or abbreviations.
For me there's also the consideration that many technical terms are so long (and in many cases so clunkily constructed) that an abbreviation or initialism helps the reader sort out the syntax.
It's an acronym if you use it as a word, pronounced NayToe; if you use it as an abbreviation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization it's an initialism ... But grammarians today tend to restrict acronym to words which have lost any 'initialist' sense: sonar, for instance, or Gestapo.
Fersher. It meant weight. Except when it meant dignity or solemnity.
Or severity.
‘But Aristotle his reasons are generally approued, to proue the earths stabilitie in the middle or lower part of the world, because of gravitie and leuitie.’ See OED 1,s.v. Gravity, II.4.a
I cannot judge the gravity controversy of the 17th century.
As to computer, I see no immediate cause for confusion.
In linguistics, grammar, classics, etc., however, I see a great, great deal of confusion about terminology. Scientists should seek to avoid this if possible rather than fuelling it. ELU is another great example of the problems caused by such implicit redefining of existing terminology.
Sometimes, there may be a good reason, one that is worth the disadvantages.
But when you talk about language you're dealing with a) a huge installed base of terminology which is only vaguely apprehended by the overwhelming majority of its users -especially teachers- and b) a very rapidly evolving field which has not yet achieved consensus on fundamental principles.
At one time progress in linguistics was very slow - for instance, the adjective was not recognized as a distinct 'part of speech' until the middle of the 18th century.
In the course of my lifetime, however, understanding of grammatical and syntactical phenomena has been changing constantly.
Every linguistic scholar is faced with a dilemma: does he use old terms in a new sense, which will be only partially understood by most readers, or does he invent new terms which will be understood by experts but will not be understood at all by most readers.
'NP' is a compromise between those two.
... Gotta run now, and throw some meat through the bars of my son's cage.
Stoney too, but it sounds like it's feeding time for the wild progeny. :)
Gads, are you gone? Oh well, I'll type it anyway.
Normally, I'm all up for hearing arguments debunking religious myth, but this was literally the dumbest thing I'd ever seen on the internet. I had just watched a video produced by the BBC about some aspect of Christian history. Some guy in comments: "The Bible can't be real. Come on, if it's really that old, how come it's in English?"
Which acid works best to keep avocados from browning?
Answer: None (of the acids tested)
It's not that acid doesn't do much to help.
ALL OF THE ACIDS TESTED CAUSED AVOCADOS TO BECOME MORE BROWN AND TO BECOME BROWN FASTER THAN NO TREATMENT AT ALL
I am not kidding.
Method
For acid, I used fre...
Clauses do not have inherent number, but when a clause is employed under the category of an NP† it must be treated as either singular or plural. A single clause so employed is treated as a singular entity; two or more coordinated clauses so employed are treated as a plural entity.
That John i...
In Short (or tl;dr)
These all say the same thing (well, or can say the same thing; see below):
It has been done so as to permit air to circulate freely.
It has been done so to permit air to circulate freely.
It has been done in order to permit air to circulate free...
