So is this just the Tom Sawyer thread now or can we bring up other stuff we missed in books as the title seems to be asking for?
Anyway, I totally missed the whole “Renly’s gay” thing in the Game of Thrones books it was so subtle. Of course the show was completely the other way and so in your face about it that it was pretty jarring in contrast. oh noes i mentioned the book and show in the same post, the horror
Not so recent, I think. The edition of Tom Sawyer we had about the place forty years ago had a foreword by Twain himself in which he commented on the reception the books had been getting, and remarking (possibly ironically) that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn weren’t intended to be handed out to children. So if there was an edition with a foreword by the author, the discussion must have been ongoing for quite some time.
The N word? There’s no use pretending it never happened - and you might as well take a look at Tom and Huck who are basically good people for their time and who use the word as naturally as breathing. Is the word “not so bad” in the context of the time because children can use it innocently and without malice (Huck uses the word while remarking on his realization of how much Jim loves his family) – or is it so insidious that innocent children can use it and not even realize that they are regarding human beings as something other than human because of the colour of their skin?
Another instance is a footnote reference to “Bull Harbison”, who is a dog: "If Harbison owned a slave named Bull, he would be called ‘Harbison’s Bull’; but a son or a dog of that name was called ‘Bull Harbison’ " – which carries quite a chilling implication the moment you think about it. But you might as well leave it in and have the discussion rather than assume that Twain and, somewhat more to the point, his characters and the world they lived in, conformed to the norms of more-enlightened 21st-century society.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to read the historically accurate use of language in this book regardless of age(within reason) because A) It will provide an accurate image of the times and B) the context and meaning of the language should be understood by the reader prior to reading the book. The N word has had a number of meanings, definitions, and intonations over the years. Maybe it should be the teacher’s responsibility to enlighten the class on the finer points of the N word relative to the book.
Huh, i missed that too. I watched season one and two before i started reading the series. So i only made to about page 600 in the first book before i decided it was similar enough to the show that i can skip right to book 3. I definitely lost out on some of the content by doing that.
Speaking of things missed in game of thrones. Have you read any of the threads on the series? Who do you think John Snows mother is? There is a gang of people who think that John Snow is the bastard of Rheagar Targaryan and Lyanna Stark(Ned Stark’s dead sister). They have assembled a small list of clues that I never linked to together and they are ambiguous at best… I’m not convinced. I think that Ned Stark is telling the truth that he is John Snow’s father.
Not necessarily. Polly Sawyer’s late sister could have been a round-heeled tramp, with really bad contraceptive skillz…
ETA: Ninja’d by the far more gallant and circumspect Miller.
The “i.e.” in the title implies that it’s specifically a Tom Sawyer thread.
The appropriate abbreviation for signalling that it’s only an example would have been “e.g.”
You rebel, you. 
I don’t think Aunt Polly’s last name is ever given. And there’s a third child, the older sister Mary.
Is Sid really described as “step-brother” or “half-brother” or is it just Tom saying so? If it’s just Tom saying so, it could be just Tom’s way of insulting Sid?
From the text of the novel (chapter 1):
*Tom did play hookey, and he had a very good time. He got back home barely in season to help Jim, the small colored boy, saw next-day’s wood and split the kindlings before supper—at least he was there in time to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did three-fourths of the work. Tom’s younger brother (or rather half-brother) Sid was already through with his part of the work (picking up chips), for he was a quiet boy, and had no adventurous, trouble-some ways. *
I believe Mary was Tom’s cousin, not sister.
completely off topic, just related to the ‘two unrelated Sawyers’…I have a distant rel. who my age. her mother was a “Smithchik”, and her mother married three times, twice to two different men named “Smithchyk” and “Smithchuk”. I am assured there was no mistake in the records and that the three men, the father and two husbands, were not closely related, if at all. I’m still not convinced. today, in the USA, there are fewer than 50 people with any variation of the ‘Smithchxk’ name.
It was also not uncommon, especially in rural areas, for widows (or widowers) to marry siblings of their deceased spouse. Tom’s mother may have married the Sawyer brothers consecutively before she died.
Of course that would have made Tom and Silas cousins in addition to half-brothers.
Even in peacetime, even in America, life before the 20th Century was often nasty, brutish and short. An orphan would be a thing too commonplace to require backstory.
Who the hell is Silas?
There was a lot of tragedy in most families in those times. Women and children often died during childbirth. And the childhood illnesses took many more.
People who fell on difficult times gave them away to other families and being orphaned was also more common.
My own grandmother’s family was yours, mine and ours. Makes for a mix of step- and half-siblings and really gets confusing.
If that were the intention, it would be a redundant redundancy to title the thread that way instead of just as “Stuff you didn’t notice in Tom Saywer”, though. So I think it’s safer to assume, that like 99.999999% of people the topic creator either doesn’t know the difference or care about the difference regarding ie and eg.
I’ll willingly excuse the OP’s mistake in that case, but I refuse to believe that I’m the only person on the planet who knows or cares about the difference as your mathematics would suggest. :dubious:
he might be exaggerating but the basic idea is true.
it is sad how many people nowadays don’t care about correct Latin
Sic transit gloria mundi. 
Particularly if her husband had already died, leaving her as a single mom with a small child - Tom’s cousin Mary. When Tom’s mom, her sister, died, leaving Tom’s dad also single with small child to look after, the two married. Then together they had Sid, Tom’s half brother/half cousin/step brother. Of course Aunt Polly liked Sid better – her own child, and her youngest child.
In the RC church, that would have required permission from the Bishop, but the Sawyers weren’t RC. Very sensible, but still I reckon Polly was the Younger Sister – she married the husband of the older sister she always admired, he married the younger version of the wife he first loved. Besides, the younger sister is on average the more likely to be the survivor.
Not that I paid any attention to it before now. Your relatives are always peripheral to your story.
My mom and her sister both married unrelated men with the same last name. My last name isn’t quite as obscure as Smithchik, but it’s not exactly Robinson either. People naturally assumed that my cousins and me were related through our dads’ bloodline. Nope. So, from my perspective, Tom’s mom marrying two unrelated Sawyers would be unusual but not implausible.