Quite so - but there are always those who've not yet made the journey.

quote:

Far too many. It's old ground, frequently trod, and the scenery on this familiar path gets rather tedious at times.

One problem with forums can be that there are those who have been here awhile, and then there are those who are newer. For some, this is old ground, though not for others.

Now having said that, it surely is old ground for me because I have been here since the beginning of this board. Sorry if I have contributed to being tedious. I have only recently changed my mind on this particular issue and thought it worth mentioning. Oh well!

By the way, what about Finnegans Wake?

Joyce purposely left off the apostrophe in Finnegans Wake. There is an Irish folk song called Finnegan's Wake. (The German author, Arno Schmidt, put an apostrophe into the title of one of his books, Zettel's Traum, as an homage to Joyce's choice. German does not use an apostrophe in marking its genitive case.)

Urban legend

When I took a course in folklore at university, we used one of Brunvand's books on folklore, but not one of his Choking Doberman series. We also discussed the term urban legend, which is pretty much the term to distinguish modern folklore, such as office or xerographic / fax / net folklore. IIRC, it pretty much had to do with how the folklore was decimnated: in newspapers, by phone, fax and now the internet / web. Many folklorists distinguish between legends and myths, the latter having to do primarily with the origins, usually divine, of things.

As for the apostrophe s or simple apostrophe for possessives of nouns ending in s: I have stated before that in the States, it used to be the preferred style to use apostrophe s—at least thirty or more years ago. This has fallen out of style. The apostrophe in the possessive does not stand for an elided letter, as it does in contractions, or an added vowel in pronunciation. It simply marks the possessive, and it is, like so many things in language, pretty arbitrary. It's only a couple of hundred years old at most. Any attempt to retrofit English orthography with rationale origins is probably just an urban myth.

quote:

Originally posted by zmjezhd:
[i] Any attempt to retrofit English orthography with rationale origins is probably just an urban myth.

You didn't myth the mark on that one! As for Finnegans Wake - I thought it was his bow wave as they towed him out to sea.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English: Keats's poetry

17,900 ghits for keats' poetry
542 ghits for keats's poetry

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
And once it's considered correct by the majority then, of course, it will be correct ...

What say you now?

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English: Lehman Borthers' loss

What's a borther?

quote:

Any attempt to retrofit English orthography with rationale origins is probably just an urban myth.

Leave it to Zmj to bring this thread back to the original subject. Welcome back, Zmj!

Keats? I don't even know what they are.

quote:

What's a borther? Wink

A typo ;-(

quote:

Joyce purposely left off the apostrophe in Finnegans Wake.

I knew that the omission was deliberate; what I don't know is why he did it.

what I don't know is why he did it.

I've heard it alleged that the reading of the book's title is not one of a possessive noun and another noun, but of a plural noun and a verb. "(Multiple) Finnegans (perhaps we the readers) wake up".

On the subject of Finnegans Wake, a newspaper published a reader's letter recently asking if Joyce had written the book as some kind of elaborate joke. Over the next few days the paper published replies that seemed to be evenly split between:

1. the book is a serious work of great literary merit; or
2. it's a huge con-trick.

One letter in particular amused me; it was from a librarian who worked in north London (in an area favoured by the "intelligentsia" at the time) in the 1930s. She said that when the library got its first copy of the book she noticed that its pages were uncut. A year later she checked it again and a good two-thirds of the pages were still uncut, despite the book having been checked out frequently.

I would add that I have never attempted to read the book, so have no opinion myself.

it's a huge con-trick

Highly doubtful. FW took up more than a decade of Joyce's time near the end of his life. I've read most of it, but not all in one sitting. It's not really my favorite Joyce; that place of honor is occupied by The Dubliners. There's another book by a famous Irish writer, Flann O'Brien, that was also published in 1939: At Swim-Two-Birds. I recommend it to anybody who'd like a good read. It's hilarious. But then his The Third Policemen is great, too. O'Brien, aka Myles na gCopaleen, is also known for having written a book that was extremely critical of Ireland, but he wrote it in Gaelic, so that his Irish critics would not be able to read it (most of them anyways), but could only find out about its nature second-hand.

[Fixed O'Nolan's pseudonym.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

I quite agree about Flann O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan aka Brian Ó Nuallain aka Myles na gCopaleen). He was one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century. In particular, try to lay your hand on a book of his articles for the Irish Times published under the title of "Cruiskeen Lawn". Although he owed much to him, he wasn't much of a fan of Joyce; he once said "I declare to God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob."

I've never been able to finish Joyce, I fear. I've started Dubliners and Ulysses, but never finished them. I've avoided Finnegans Wake partly because of the other two I tried and also because of what I've heard about it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: arnie,