XPost: alt.usage.english, sci.lang
so it seems PTD liked the SH edition by W. S. Baring-Gould
but he thought the Re-ordering was ill-conceived.
i tend to agree with that.
Oxford SH reordered REDH and IDEN.
------ i don't like the reordering, but it much less bothersome!
____________________________________________________________
Peter T. Daniels -- Apr 8, 2015, 10:10:07 AM
Is that the recent one by a youngish American, which was sold in 3
separate volumes over several years and hasn't yet turned up in the
secondhand stores? Or the classic by W. S. Baring-Gould?
_______________________________________________________Cooee!
Peter T. Daniels -- Mar 24, 2019, 9:53:20 AM
It's not impossible that the single occurrence in a Sherlock Holmes
story brought it to daily use in at least some parts of Britain --
Holmes was immensely popular. The X-Men of his day (and it only took one
of him).
________________________________________________________________
Peter T. Daniels -- Apr 7, 2019, 11:19:24 AM
On Sunday, April 7, 2019 at 10:19:11 AM UTC-4, Peter Moylan wrote:
On 07/04/19 20:49, Janet wrote:
Patricia Cornwell's clumsy use of language is damaging your
understanding and use of English.
I've been wondering about that. Clearly Cornwell's prose is not admired
by AUE regulars. But should we apply native-language standards when the reader is not a native speaker? Perhaps her very lack of elegance makes
her suitable reading for someone whose command of English is lower than ours.
I can't answer that question because I don't read much of that genre. I
can make an analogy with science fiction, though, a genre where I have a large collection of books. In the SF world Isaac Asimov is occasionally criticised because he is not a stylist. He has a "plain language" style
of writing. But it's that very quality that would prompt me to recommend
him to a beginner, including a beginner who has English as a second language.
Asimov's fiction-writing was deadly -- his novels were un-rereadable,
because they existed solely for the plot. There was no subtlety at all,
no interest in "character," let alone "character development."
It may be the same characteristics that made his science writing so
good. He was superb at explaining.
It may also be those characteristics that deterred me from trying the
history books -- or maybe it was from reading the Guides to the Bible
and to Shakespeare.
In each case, he was interested in nothing but
explaining the allusions to bygone eras and phenomena.
The very organization of the Shakespeare book into the "historical"
order in which the action of each play took place was bizarre
-- quite possibly inspired by Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock
Holmes, which devotes a very tedious amount of space to determining the
exact dates on which each story took place.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)