"Some modern travellers still pretend to find Acephalous people in America."
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, 1753
And you people think
I make this stuff up.
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Yay? On the plane back to California, I was seated next to an older Hispanic couple. The husband, who spoke little English, observed me writing in my book. He turned to his wife, said something in Spanish, and then she told me he wanted to know what I was writing in my book. "The words I don't know," I replied. She translated my reply, then his. "But you know English, don't you? "Not all of it." "Me neither," he said through her. Then he pulled a copy of Angels & Demons from her purse, gestured for my pen (which I gave him), and proceeded to write "largest," "scientific," "research," "facility," "recently," "succeeded," "producing," "antimatter" and basically every other word on the page at its top. After a minute or so, he stops, looks at me, and says: "Nope nope. Still no English." I wouldn't share so trivial an encounter but for the fact that I start teaching again tomorrow, and need to reacclimate myself to environs in which people write things in a language they don't actually know.
Oh, to be a medievalist at Irvine....
Truth is always stranger than fiction, as Mark Twain said, because fiction has to make sense.
Posted by: Ahistoricality | Tuesday, 05 January 2010 at 09:49 AM