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'Here dwell together still two men of note'
Ah. Know what happens when you go back and look at other people's earliest entries? (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
incandescens in this case)
First The Flow grabs you:
221B
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears--
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
-- Vincent Starrett
Flow because last night I was looking at the copy of Nemuki I so self-indulgently bought myself, and aside from the 100 Demons story I bought it for (which on second read suggests Saburou has indeed come back to this world, as a chicken) there's a series by JET. JET, you remember, are the guys who travestied Sherlock Homes. Well, they've stopped travestying Holmes and err I will not say 'learned to draw' but at any rate learned to draw more to my tastes. And they're doing a straightforward manga version of Holmes' adventures: says right on the cover, 'story by Conan Doyle art by JET.' This issue was the one about Napoleon's busts. May provide illos if I stop being a lazy sheep and get to the scanner.
(Am not sure why I think JET is they. They could be she for anything I know to the contrary.)
And then Inspiration does, via an MR James quote she casually tosses in somewhere:
Now if only I'd bookmarked whoever it was on her FL who said how to cut amazon urls to manageable length...
incandescens in this case)First The Flow grabs you:
221B
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears--
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
-- Vincent Starrett
Flow because last night I was looking at the copy of Nemuki I so self-indulgently bought myself, and aside from the 100 Demons story I bought it for (which on second read suggests Saburou has indeed come back to this world, as a chicken) there's a series by JET. JET, you remember, are the guys who travestied Sherlock Homes. Well, they've stopped travestying Holmes and err I will not say 'learned to draw' but at any rate learned to draw more to my tastes. And they're doing a straightforward manga version of Holmes' adventures: says right on the cover, 'story by Conan Doyle art by JET.' This issue was the one about Napoleon's busts. May provide illos if I stop being a lazy sheep and get to the scanner.
(Am not sure why I think JET is they. They could be she for anything I know to the contrary.)
And then Inspiration does, via an MR James quote she casually tosses in somewhere:
Maybe they got off at the wrong station from the train, and replied to the voice which called out to them, and now have a follower who will not be gainsaid.I dare not read MR James- it's as much as my peace of mind and sleepful nights for the next five years are worth- but oh oh oh how that starts the 100 Demons plotbunnies nittering at me.
Now if only I'd bookmarked whoever it was on her FL who said how to cut amazon urls to manageable length...
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I love it when the flow comes together. (And I would be very curious to see the Six Napoleon scans.)
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...err what was this that you found...? All I see is a straight google function. Lux, are you really here? Are you talking to me? Is this a post from the past that lj's randomly released along with some left-over comment notifications? ....Lux?
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Once again, Lux Knows All.
Hah! I have a fantastically stoopid question to prove you wrong. A question which I shall ask you, as you know your way around ze English, among other things. Is 'twasn't a word? I feel like it -should- be a word. But Google has no dictionary entry for it (and if it's not in Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=%27twasn%27t&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLJ) it doesn't yadda, yadda). Urban Dictionary tells me this (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Twasn't), which um, no.
Am I just screwing this up? I've heard people say it. (Please note that this question is posted by someone who mispronounced "aficionado" until the ripe old age of 27 due to lack of correction.*)
*
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My guess is that tisn't and twasn't were never standard written English: the earliest examples I get googling give me English and Irish dialect usages. As with ain't (don't quote me on this- my reference is fuzzy) the words *may* once have been accepted spoken English even by upperclass people. But all my references I come from the mid-to-late 19th century and there was a real class shift in language from at least the early years of Victoria if not before. Twasn't is probably best taken as having been dialect from the time that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
(Hm- I also discover that Punch is online, spekaing of worlds where it's always 1895. This could prove disastrous to my life for the next little while.)
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In sum: dialect word originating in the British Isles, possibly exists in parts of the US (such as the Appalachians) as an adapted holdover from pre-19th century English, in other parts probably brought by 19th century immigrants. There's a suggetsion that it's primarily an Irish usage, which may or may not be true.
(They may have thought you were being funny when you said aficondo. There was a vogue for mispronouncing words when I was young that I believe never died out.)
Thank you!
They may have thought you were being funny when you said aficondo.
It's still a "leg twitch while looking up at the ceiling trying to get to sleep" kind of moment for me, it's just that embarrassing. Ah well.
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I'm in full agreement with you about the general crappiness (http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/firefox_internet_explorer/) of Firefox's look and feel - you should definitely take a look at the themes (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3984) people have devised if you're considering a switch. Re the fonts, I found a helpful extension (I have poor eyesight to begin with and most websites nowadays seem to insist on coding their fonts in the smallest point size possible which is highly annoying.):
No Squint (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2592): NoSquint allows you to adjust the default text zoom level, which is useful if you have a small display or run at a very high resolution. NoSquint also optionally remembers the zoom level per domain. (That last is particularly useful - you just set your font size once per website and you never have to do it again.)
There's also this (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/472), but I don't think you need it if you have NoSquint, as the latter comes with a similar option to add buttons to the toolbar.
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I might try making Firefox look like IE, but I strongly suspect the problem is my extremely low resolution- one which most monitors won't support any more. Everyone else's Firefox fonts look fine at 1280 x 1024 (if they're visible at all at 1280 x 1024: often they aren't) but at 640 x 480 those pixels don't smooth out. Except they smooth in IE, is why I still prefer IE's look- though these days, nothing else about it at all.