Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/07/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Geez, Over on the Pentax list, they (we) are in the midst of a thread which has devolved into an exogesis of the word "shite". I'd say there's something in the water, but both of these lists are obviously far flung, so that can't be it. Maybe the alignment of the stars? <vbg> cheers, frank Chandos Michael Brown wrote: > Years ago I read a late-18th century poem in a unique copy held by the > Houghton Rare Book Library in Cambridge, Mass. The eighteenth-century > convention was to do exactly as you do and to substitute asterisks for > letter in scatological terms and often in names (to avoid charges of > slander, perhaps?), so that "shit" become "s**t" and Lord Bute, Lord > B**e, and so on. > > In the event, I found in reading "Mineral Water, a Poem" that someone > had, in a contemporary hand, filled in all the asterisks; "s**t" became > "shit" again, and "c**p" "crap." You get the picture. > > I like to think that this was the work of some bored sixteen-year-old > Harvard student, idling away an afternoon in, say, 1799 or so, restoring > the English language to its proper muscular self and deriving an > exquisite, guilty pleasure from the act. > > Chandos > - -- "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in pi" - Henri Cartier-Bresson - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html