Tigers?! In Africa?!
I was getting tired of the series (she kept describing one person as fat, but gave her a height and weight that would have made her a size 6…). But the one that stopped me from reading was the Kinsey, a California girl, claiming to have loved Hellman’s mayonaisse all her life. It’s minor, but it’s the minor things that break the camel’s back.
Another thing I’ve seen a couple of times is people viewing the Pacific Ocean from Seattle. The Pacific is 100 miles away, and there’s this pesky mountain range between the city and ocean. Makes it kinda hard to see.
A famous old one
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. by Jules Verne
A league =2.16 miles (in Verne’s context) gives 43,200 miles, yet the Earth’s diameter is 7,926 miles at its greatest.
I now found a site that shows I have been whooshed, the title is refering to a 20,000 mile journey which took place at various depths below the sea, not 20,000 leages straight down. I thought it was just an error where fathoms were meant to be used not leagues.
I seem to recall a sketch on Saturday Night Live in which Kelsey Grammer as James Mason as Captain Nemo goes on and on about leagues and fathoms.
Hmm. James Mason. James Mason certainly doesn’t fit the novels’ description of Nemo as an Indian princeling and descendant of Tippu Sultan.
I don’t have my copy of Lord of the Flies to hand, but going by the discussion of the point in John Sutherland’s excellent Where Was Rebecca Shot?, yes it is. Sort of. Apparently, in the same passage Piggy protests that all he can see is “blurs, that’s all. Hardly see my hand”. Which, as a sufferer, seems a reasonable description of myopia.
Sutherland’s chapter on the point actually covers how the quibble in this instance became a persistant tradition in English literary criticism. More broadly, his entire series of books on literary enigmas, starting with Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, are filled with these sorts of glitches.
A personally annoying detail: in Stanislaw Lem’s The Investigation, set in London, there’s a cinema opposite the Ritz hotel. Now I understand that Lem wasn’t able to visit the city before writing the novel and so can be excused getting such details wrong, but anybody who knows London realises that there just isn’t a cinema opposite the Ritz.
Conciel: “Wow, that’s deep!”
Cap. Nemo: “No, it’s a unit of length!”
(Nemo gets grabbed by the Giant Squid)
Ned: “That thing must be 20,000 leagues long!”
Nemo: “Now you’ve got it!”
I wish I could find a video of that.
In Cat’s Cradle Kurt Vonnegut apparently forgot that air and skin contain moisture. Didn’t wreck the book for me, I don’t read fiction for scientific accuracy.
Ian Fleming was fond of repeating factoids in his James Bond novels, implying that independent spymasters the world round have concluded that the most innocuous occupation to cite on a phony passport is “Company director”. While I could sort-of buy this, he also uses a factual error in two novels; describing bats as having radar.