Not to mention how Jill “made love to everybody.”
That one deserves a quote all of its own: “She made love to everyone - the grooms, the porters, the housemaids, the ladies-in-waiting, and the elderly giant lords whose hunting days were over.” Ewww. No wonder she remarks earlier “How wet I am!”. Yes, childish innuendo delights me.
Fredrick was born in 1852 so he’ll be 21 in 1940? There’s some bad math in there somewhere.
No, he’ll have his 21st BIRTHDAY in 1940. Check the date. I don’t know who set that up, maybe the Royal Astronomer, but it is a paradox.
So CS Lewis is actually trying to recruit for the gay? 
I know this doesn’t count b/c it’s Stephen King, and I know how some people on the board think he’s a hack…BUT, in The Stand, Nick (the deaf guy) is deaf due to no eardrums. You CAN hear with no eardrums. Also, he isn’t sent to a state school for the Deaf, instead of that orphanage, when his mother dies.
Nice one, Kaitlyn. Ya beat me to it!
In Julius Caesar Brutus is told twice of his wife’s death, reacting each time with surprise. The editors have glossed this as a mistake in the printing; Shakespeare revised the scene and the printers erroneously printed both the earlier and later version. (It’s a clear sign that the copy text for the play was ‘foul papers’, the term used for Shakespeare’s own manuscript, rather than a copy prepared for the playhouse.)
In the unabridged version, that mistake is corrected to generalized “birth defects.”
The serial installment of The Green Mile have Percy Wetmore rubbing his mouth while in a straitjacket! King cut that line in the complete paperback.
You positive? I mean I remember the Sheriff asking Nick why he was deaf, and Nick replied with “no eardrums, no vocal cords” and then the Sheriff saying “classic birth defects”
Hmmm…if memory serves, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain mistakenly uses the word “mortified” to mean “has undergone rigor mortis” when in fact it means “embarassed.”
My search on “mortif” in an e-text, http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Twa2Huc.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all, found only this in chapter XXXII: “He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he did die. Mortification set in, and they had to amputate him. But it didn’t save him. Yes, it was mortification – that was it. He turned blue all over, and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection. They say he was a sight to look at.” That – the mortification – seems to me more like “gangrenous”.
Some of us may also have memories, perhaps classic, of feeling mortified when only a part of our body became blue. Baton Rouge indeed.
The word “mortified” had a literal, medical meaning before it acquired its figurative sense.
Memory could use a slight tune-up.
It’s in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom tries to get out of going to school one morning by telling Aunt Polly, “Oh, auntie, my sore toe’s mortified!” She doesn’t buy that, so he switches his complaint to a loose tooth, which she promptly extracts.
Chapter 6.
Byrons mention of a "Sheer Hulk"as though it was a useless floating wreck!when in fact a hulk was the hull of an ex ship used for flotation in harbour and "sheers "were an 18th c primitive equivelent of a crane (but more akin to a pulley system )
Yep ,totally agree ,have read all of the Aubery/Maturin series many ,many times over ,was and still am gutted at his death.
Dont know of the context youre quoting ,many years since I read it !but mortification actually meant at that time , (apart from the embarrassed sense)when a wound started to go gangrene .So Twain didnt actually make a faux pas !
I don’t have the book on hand, but you reminded me. I think there is an error in the scene where Nick’s getting beat up…it seems to me that there is some description of the fight sounds, although we are experiencing the scene through Nick, who of course, couldn’t have heard anything.
I was flipping through my copy of Martin Gardner’s **The New Age ** and weird Water and Fuzzy Logic, and in one of these was a chapter that was originally an article in The Skeptical Inquirer on this very topic of blunders in classic literature. Several of his examples have already been cited in this thread.
The word mortified also means to undergo mortification; become gangrenous or necrosed, a usage very common in the time period of both Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. Twain was not one to make mistakes with words. (He frequently had his characters use words in strange or mistaken ways, however, for comedic effect.)
And while we’re on the subject, when we first encounter Mabel and her sisters, they are tripping down to the sea to bathe… when we’ve already established that it’s Frederic’s birthday, February 29th. Trust me, you don’t want to go sea-bathing in Cornwall at that time of year! :eek:
Continuity error in Annie Get Your Gun, which I’ve just been in (the stage show): Annie and Frank have just had a tender love scene and they’ve both had to go and get ready for the show, whereupon the cowboys appear and announce their intention to go out on the town. Frank says “Sorry, I can’t come; I’m getting engaged tonight” instead of “Are you out of your minds? It’s showtime!”. And in case there was any doubt, once the musical number is over and with no change of scene, we carry on with Annie’s spectacular shooting feat.
And to further fan-wank the issue, we can assume that the Major-General, in view of his high station, was most likely a patron of the arts, and perhaps privy to an advance rehearsal of the music well before the show was staged for the first time.
It’s not at all shocking to realize that Frederic doesn’t know 1900 is a leap year. The whole idea of counting birthdays instead of years is relatively new to him, having himself only just been infomred by Ruth and the Pirate King of the necessity and rule. Frederic is only only one that has to have this misconception, since he’s the only one that makes the claim to Mabel. We can, if we wish, assume that Gilbert deliberately introduced the error into Frederic’s verse.