h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wiles on the other hand was not a typo.

"'Wiles' is one of those nouns that's always associated with a particular adjective, isn't it? Do we ever talk about any other kind of wiles apart from 'feminine wiles'?"

The dictionary says nothing about 'wiles' being always associated with adjectives like 'feminine' or 'womanly'. That may be the way it's used most often, but it's not a general rule.

After all, what about Gnomon's Canadian wiles? Or is Canada female?

I was merely observing that this is (I think) the only time I've heard of any other kind of wiles.

I've noticed other seemingly fixed adjective-noun combinations...but I can't recall any at the moment.

If wiles was not a typo I cannot imagine how Canada has any.

We do have lots of what Europeans called 'wilds' which natives of course call home.

An important (but oft' neglected) anthology volume of writings on the subject of Canada by 'foreign' writers called "The Wild Is Always There" has many examples of this prejudiced misperception of our geography, weather and people.

Dickens, Doyle, Voltaire, Hemingway, Faulkner and dozens of others (who may or may not have actually visited this country) all had something to say about us.

Because much of their commentary is unflattering or just plain ignorant about Canada the book has been misunderstood and deliberately ignored here. But I highly recommend it (even if for nothing more than an excerpt from the very first sci-fi story about a flight to the moon by Cyrano de Bergerac)

Review at:
http://www.geist.com/books/wild-always-there
For Sale at:
http://www.antiqbook.com/boox/recy/59633.shtml

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought Winnipeg was the best place in the world to experience psychic phenomena. (Which might explain Neil Young.)


~jwf~

I went to Winnipeg once. It was shut.

(Seriously! Three hour evening stopover when travelling by train from Banff to Ottawa. I couldn't find *anything* to do!)

I was watching a fascinating programme about Samual Johnson last night on BBC 4. The front page of his dictionary says "and grammar book", so I think we could date the formalising of grammar rules in English to the late 1740s. Certainly he was responsible for a lot of insistence on Latin models in both spelling and grammar (however innapropriate)
Now I have to look and see whether there's an edition of that dictionary cheap enough for me.

Is this cheap enough?
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5430

Certainly looks like it! Thank you.

Absent mindedly listening to some music-radio station I was struck by a lyric: "...a sky full of stars".

The use of the indefinite article grated me. A sky? Isn't there just one sky, THE sky? So I started thinking about it. First by comparing similar items such as THE ocean and THE earth.

Well I suppose because of local weather conditions and the limitations of individual human perceptions there could be different skies and different oceans. A gray sky, a blue sky, a dark sky and even a sky full of stars. Same goes for oceans.

But outside of science fiction and quantum theory (same thing really) there is only one Earth. There may be other earth-like planets and possibly in a multiverse, other earths. But The earth is The earth.

Space is something else again.
There is neither 'the' space nor 'a' space.
Just space.

~jwf~

A Battle of Britain sky.

Under a Blood Red Sky.

I can see the case for it. One day it might be a cloudy sky, the next it might be a clear sky - cf gardens. A visitor might describe mine as a garden full of vegetables one year, but a garden full of roses the next year, despite being the same garden.

Or the politician's one. "Do we want to live in a Britain/an Australia/a Canada where herring shoals mug old ladies? No!"

There were grammarians before Dr Johnson. Dryden is credited (?) with the insistence on not splitting infinitives. He said you're not to even dream of it.

True, but people took a lot more notice of Johnson.
True, but the people took a lot more notice of the Johnson.
If I ever got back to academic life, I would write about the definite article.

()
True, but people took a lot more notice of Johnson.
True, but the people took a lot more notice of the Johnson.
If I ever got back to academic life, I would write about the definite article.

If I ever got back to academic life
If I ever got back to the academic life
If I ever got back to an academic life

Nice (in the sense of subtle) isn't it?

Hal A Looja!
I have finally discerned why Voltaire's Ingenu was not recognised when I mentioned it (badly mis-typed) a few days ago and could subsequently find no listings or reference for it.

It is because this story is best known in English (and listed in English language bibliographies) given the title 'Master Simple', a rough but colourful translation (by Tobias Smollett in the early 1760s) of an idea - the notion that a young man could be as innocent and unsophisticated as a young woman - which was incomprehensible to the English mind of Smollett's time.

The French may have been enchanted by the notion of a male 'ingenu' from the wilds of Canada but the British would not have been amused (especially considering that Wolfe had just died at Quebec). Any popularity the story might have had in English was due to its critical expose of a contemporary corrupted French society and its anti-Papist propaganda.

~jwf~

'Yingzi': English written as if it were Chinese:
http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

Barking! Absolutely barking!

I wish I'd had that when I first went to China in 1986.

Except that near the end, he says that it doesn't relly help. Firstly, the radicals have become somewhat abstract. Secondly...you'd have to be able to rhyme in Ancient Chinese - like you or I being able to rhyme in proto-Germanic.

It really is a daft way of writing, isn't it. I can't see how the Chinese can possibly manage it. Yet they seem to!