Things from literature that you've gotten wrong

Cafe Society
1

Here’s a corollary to this thread . What thing in drama/literature/film/theatre have you realized you’ve just gotten wrong? Through ignorance, long-term misreading/mishearing, or just plain cluelessness.

Let me steal a story from my boyfriend:

We were doing the crossword. The clue was four letters, “Learned men that came from the East.”

He had no idea. I said “Magi.”
“What?”
“Magi, the three wisemen that brought Jesus presents.”
“THAT’S what Magi are?!” He asked incredulously.
“Yeah, what did you think they were?”
“Gypsies.”

He falls silent for a moment and then says quietly, “That O. Henry story title makes a lot more sense right now.”

2

When I was little we had a set of records of the play Hedda Gabler. I can’t imagine all the things I didn’t quite get through just hearing the play, but one was when the evil mean and nasty guy says what I now know is “Skoal, Thea.” Years later I found out what the expression means but I thought he was saying something like “scold”. :confused: :smack:

Of course there’s also me as a little kid thinking that people stood behind the movie screen speaking the parts. Or that in Barry Lyndon, Ryan O’Neal got paid to have his leg cut off in real life.

:o :smiley:

3

There’s a scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo is fighting several giant spiders, and taunting them by calling them names: “Lazy Lob, Attercop, and Old Tomnoddy”. Tolkien then helpfully explains that “Quite apart from the stones [that Bilbo was throwing] no spider has ever liked being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody.”. For many years, I presumed that this was just a bit of whimsy on the part of the good Professor, similar to where he says things like “This is of course the proper way to converse with a dragon”, or “As everyone knows, goblins are very inventive, especially when it comes to devices of war and torture” (those last two not exact quotes). So imagine my surprise when I learned that “attercop” = “addled cob”, where “cob” = “spider”, as in “cobweb”, and “tomnoddy” is an actual insult used by British children.

4

Not me, but several years ago I was in a scholars’ bowl competition. One of the questions ran something like:

“Name the mistake in this sentence: At the end of The Iliad, the Greeks sneak into Troy in a wooden elephant.”

When someone challenged that there were two mistakes in the sentence, not one, they got blown off. Oops.

5

Growing up with Yiddish-speaking folks, I always thought that the -cop was Germanic for head. This left atter- which I assumed meant poison as in adder. A quick search agrees with me Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions Dictionary.die.net Shut Down Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos " ETYMOLOGY:
Middle English coppeweb : coppe, spider (short for attercoppe, from Old English ttercoppe : tor, poison + copp, head)"

6

Other than the elephant, what’s the other mistake?

-FrL-

7

I’d guess it revolves around the interpretation of the phrase “at the end of the Iliad”. There’s actually no reference in the Iliad itself to the wooden horse.

There is a passing reference to it in Book 4 of the Odyssey and a much more detailed account in Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid.