But in the next verse it’s this variation:
Pretty unambiguous that it’s supposed to be ‘chronological’ and meteoroid is used for the rock on the ground.
Nope, because Colt never made a revolver chambered for the .45 WinMag (which is how the cartridge is stamped), and the book clearly mentioned a cartridge stamping of .45 Colt Magnum.
From that link:
Are we sure about that? www.etymonline.com doesn’t mention Shakespeare in its entry for “torture.”
We’re sure that’s wrong. Some ignorant person confused “Shakespeare’s famous works use a lot of words for which we currently haven’t stumbled across earlier printed documentation of because some of it may not have been printed previously, or was lost since then, or only a handful of people bother to read what does exist and when they do they aren’t that worried about what word came when” with “Shakespeare invented thousands of words.”
And since the second sentence is shorter and more interesting to shallow people, it’s what gets repeated.
Alabama’s in the same boat. There are several sitcoms (Married With Children, That Seventies Show and others) that have episodes set here where evidently they find the only place in the state without telephones or fast food places or- in effect- every kind of place and technology every other city or town of equal size anywhere in the country has.
Speaking of southern things, on the TV show HEROES in which a young woman has to put up with her boss’s sexual harassment at a fast food place because she lives in post-Katrina New Orleans and, as her boss says, “there ain’t no other jobs in miles of here”. Actually it was quite the contrary: there were plenty of low playing fast food and tourist type jobs going begging because so many people who would have taken them never returned to the areas.
Speaking of New Orleans, I hate when TV shows and movies portray New Orleansians as speaking with “Y’all come up heah on the veranda and drank a mint julep wid me…” stock southern accents. In addition to the fact that few southerners anywhere have that accent (and on TV and in movies it’s used for characters who are rich/poor/white/black/educated/ignorant/trailer park/columned mansion) it’s doubly irritating with NOLA which is one of the few cities in the U.S. with its own distinct dialect family, and the dialects you’re most likely to hear among the native born are closer to what you’d hear in Astoria or Brooklyn than to what you’d hear in Atlanta or Nashville.
And of course how many sitcoms and movies have characters who use “Y’all” as a singular? The very first page of the novel MASH does this- irked me so much I stopped reading.
Speaking of MAS*H, on one episode Hawkeye tells the sad and poignant story of Charles Drew, the black doctor who contributed to blood typing and plasma storage and died in a car accident because no white hospital would admit him. I’ll admit I used to believe this myself, but it’s an urban legend with no basis in fact: he died from a car accident in the south, but it had nothing to do with the local hospital, he was simply too severely injured. The same story is told about Bessie Smith- including by her half sister who lived until the 1990s- and was the basis of a play by Edward Albee: also simply not true, she in fact received excellent care by a physician who happened to come along just after the accident and in fact the nearest hospital was a black hospital, but she was too far gone to save.
The notion of blacks dying because of white hospitals refusing them care is used in several shows and movies- Purlie Victorious, an episode of Archie Bunkers Place mentions it and other shows and movies have referenced it. I won’t say it never happened but if it did it was extremely rare and most whites would have been outraged as well. Most small town hospitals were integrated (they had black and white wards [as did many northern hospitals] but they treated all races) and where you did find segregated hospitals was in cities when they had all black AND all white hospitals and it’s highly unlikely a black person would have been taken to a white hospital or a white person to a black hospital to begin with, let alone refused care at one.
This is not in any way to say segregation didn’t exist or that it wasn’t ridiculous and often inhumane, but that just happens not to be one of the hallmarks. (For a really interesting read on segregated hospitals, try Under the Knife: How a Wealthy Negro Surgeon Wielded Power in the Jim Crow South, a book that I don’t know but suspect had some influence on Cider House Rules but is a true story of a black doctor who performed illegal abortions, many of them on women from wealthy and powerful white families, and used the blackmail leverage it gave him to fund one of the best hospitals in the south.)
In all fairness, you don’t yet know whether they’ll bring that back by 2018. (After all, it’s not an error when Marty McFly hears the Cubs just beat Miami to win the 2015 World Series, right?)
Either way, it would be an odd reference, since Parsifal is the opera that deals with the Grail and Spear, not any of the Ring operas.
My entry comes from the book The Sparrow, which I picked up on a recommendation from someone on these boards. In it, the main character is a superior linguist - it’s pointed out very clearly that he’s learned 14 languages, six of them in the space of just over three years. So I was a little surprised that he didn’t know what “groggy” meant, especially because he’s Puerto Rican. Sure, they mostly speak Spanish down there, but English is also one of its official languages. And this character had a very rough beginning, but then was plucked from that and highly educated. I just find it pretty weird that he doesn’t recognize “groggy.”
“Cotton fields,” by Credence Clearwater Revival has: “It was down in Louisiana,
Just about a mile from Texarkana …”
The Louisiana state line is a good 30 miles from Texarkana.
My worst offender in this area is Bee Movie. The movie starts with these words:
Yeah. Not only is this debunked by Cecil, but the misconception regards bumble bees, not regular bees. You would think that somebody on a project with a huge Hollywood budget involving hundreds of people and high paid directors and producers would spot a factual error that is essentially the very first thing you see in the movie. You would also imagine that Jerry Seinfeld would have an interest or obligation in doing some basic fact checking about bees before launching a title called Bee Movie. But I digress.
I read The Sparrow just a couple of months ago and don’t remember anything about the main character not knowing the word “groggy”, but even if he didn’t that’s not a factual error. It’s at worst implausible. I wouldn’t even call it that, given that this character is a non-native English speaker and the book is set in the (near) future*. Being a linguist or even being fluent in another language doesn’t mean one knows every single word in that language, and “groggy” isn’t the type of word one would encounter often in an academic or professional setting. In a future world it might also be a word that hardly anyone uses anymore because it’s so “old-fashioned”.
*The action begins in 2019, which doesn’t seem all that far off now but was about 25 years in the future when the book was written.
Well, this is apparently the transcript of the episode I remember (REALLY poorly). Transcript of Roosters - Millennium Episode and Credits Guide
Götterdämmerung reference? No. :smack:
Spear mentioned? No. :smack:
Grail references? Check.
Parsifal references? Check.
It must have been the mispronunciation of “die Blutfahne” that made me cringe. :smack::smack::smack:
In other news, there are still fans of the series who are devoted enough to produce transcripts and develop “virtual seasons”!
Of course, whenever I hear Andrew Lloyd Webber referred to as a lyricist or in connection with Les Miserables, I throw something. And referring to “cast recordings” as “soundtracks” makes me cringe.
I give animated movies a pass. Once you’ve accepted talking animals, how can you hold them to any factual standard?
Concur.
Well, I lack-of-concur. I would think someone named after (NO, not an animated fish) a beloved character of Winsor McKay, a pioneer of animation would realize that if the animated world doesn’t have consistency, you lose viewers.
Wallace & Gromit, Bugs Bunny, Kiki’s Delivery Service – they all have an internal logic to them.
Even The Simpsons: If Smithers is deathly allergic to bees one episode, but then is stung all over without feeling it later, it bothers some of us
(Oh, yes, that Smithers, the one who started out accidentally black, then changed to yellow).
When you ignore logic because “it’s just a cartoon”, you end up with travesties like the “Principal Skinner is really Armin Tamzarian” debacle, or a entire show that violates its own rules (Family Guy, I’m looking at you… or rather, I’m not).
That is not really the same thing. Bee Movie isn’t trying to make it seem like bees *actually *talk, that is simply how the Bee Movie universe works. The movie does, however, pass off the tidbit about flying bees as fact, which is clumsy and incorrect.
Does it matter if it’s animated? Wouldn’t you be annoyed if Bugs Bunny paid a visit to “Dublin, capital of Scotland”? I don’t see a reason to hold a lower standard to animated films.
I’d probably assume it was a joke of some sort. Warner Brothers Cartoons are full of factual errors, and most of them are deliberate and foe comical purpose.
I remember a blog post critiquing all the factual errors they thought Brown had made in the first <i>paragraph</i>. But that said, those were mostly the sort of sloppy description I’m happy to gloss over in a comparatively enjoyable book; it’s errors of history that Brown DELIBERATELY perpetuates that makes me cross.
Were all the Americans expats in Paris? They may not have wanted to make a big deal of it. How many Francophiles are going to nitpick which Dakota? Maybe they thought he was obfuscating but didn’t care why.
Does she see in a different visual spectrum, due to some genetic drift? 
As far as telling the difference goes, I suppose one could tell the difference between a very dark-skinned person & a very light-skinned person, but have trouble finding the “line.” Actually, I think that’s true of many of us who *live *in this culture.