sentences that cause your confidence to evaporate [this thread is abt BOOKS not yr SOCIAL LIFE]

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ok i am reading a book abt the history of islam -- it is already a bit confusingly organised (important concepts mentione w/o definition; pronouns of reference used unclearly) but then on page 18 i read this:

"The clash between Pope George VII and Emperor Henry IV of England is a case in point"

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:01 (twenty years ago)

the author is/was a senior indian statesman/civil servant, so maybe fair enough that his european history is a bit shaky but the book was published by penguin and presumably read by editors there

(if george becomes gregory and england becomes germany it possibly makes his case)

anyway: yr examples?

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:04 (twenty years ago)

Oh. I thought this was going to be a thread about "I was hoping we could just be... friends" and things that make your personal confidence evaporate.

But no, this is much better. Things that make your confidence in a *book* evaporate. Blimey, this happened just the other day. I wish I could remember what it was about. It was a minor error, but egregious enough that I didn't trust anything else written in the rest of the book.

Pope George VII. That's classic. I may nick it.

― Win A Lie-Down, Mrs. Davies (kate), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:07 (twenty years ago)

When i was writing my prototype novel, I had one of the characters turn to the other and say "Things could get interesting..."

That's when I packed it in.

― mark grout (mark grout), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:11 (twenty years ago)

maybe this is like when anglo authors anglicize muslim names???

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 08:16 (twenty years ago)

(xpost)

Oh yes, I hate that! When you work so hard on a novel and get to a certain point and like, paint yourself in a corner, or read back over the dialogue and think "uch! I hate my own characters!"

I have two novels going mouldy because of this :(

― Trayce (trayce), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:17 (twenty years ago)

henry that's possibly fair enough for "gregory for george" maybe - the guy is a muslim, why shd he care which pope is which? - but he wz also deputy leader of the Indian delegation to the UN, a job where being able to distinguish england from germany is surely U&K?!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:21 (twenty years ago)

"Two world wars and one world cup!"
".. sorry?"

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:25 (twenty years ago)

the flip of this is the sublime sentence which redeems a terrible book:
"By the last decade of the century it seemed that everything possible in electronic rock had been achieved. Then along came Enya with a new sound"

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:25 (twenty years ago)

haha, i was bending over backwards a bit. crazy europeans with their inbred monarchies, though.

i think you overestimate the propensity for reading of pingwing's eds a little (well, okay, they read for structure, but how many of them will know what you know here (i sure as hell don't, and i'm not even an english grad) sorry this is all a bit personal, i am about to go on holiday with a penguin ed)

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 08:25 (twenty years ago)

the phrase "Emperor Henry IV of England" made me think i wz in a michael moorcock novel!!

or are we back at "who the hell is john wayne?" -- the lex to thread!!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 08:30 (twenty years ago)

weird eye-bugs made me not see the word 'emperor', discount preceding posts.

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 08:33 (twenty years ago)

'it was a time of great change'

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 08:36 (twenty years ago)

"At the beginning of our investigation it is not possible to give a detailed account of the presuppositions and prejudices which are constantly reimplanting and fostering the belief that an inquiry into Being is unnecessary."

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:01 (twenty years ago)

actually i really do have a beef with 'more of which later', or even worse 'which i'll discuss later'. it's not the 4th wall breaking, but the failure of structure. i mean, obviously if i wrote a book, this would sound slightly less hollow, but there it is.

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 09:17 (twenty years ago)

Then along came Enya with a new sound

LMAO Mark that is priceless!! Hehehehehe!!!

Hum, like Kate I thought this was going to be a thread about being knocked back by people you'd like to get dirrty with. But yes, this is better.

There's plenty of it online of course... trvial example: the entry on The House of Love in wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Love, which says the HOL's chief collaborators were Guy Chadwick (lyrics) and Terry Bickers (music). As any fule kno Chadwick wrote HOL's music and lyrics; any fule would kno this because he was rather anxious to let everyone know that was the case, back in the day when there were possibly a few people may have cared.

I suppose I could email wikipedia, but that would make me look like one of them.

― angle of dateh, Friday, 19 August 2005 09:18 (twenty years ago)

My War Against the Contents Page by nrq

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:20 (twenty years ago)

contents page is ok if the chapter headings are 'poetic'

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 09:23 (twenty years ago)

Angle of Dateh, anyone can edit Wikipedia articles. That's the whole point. Try it, it's easy!

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:24 (twenty years ago)

"In this section I intend to discuss stuff you will get to know if you carry on reading."

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:25 (twenty years ago)

"In this section I intend to discuss stuff you will get to know if you carry on reading."

'trust me, ok: i sweated blood over this bit.'

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 09:27 (twenty years ago)

Argh, I can't be arsed. I like the idea of Bickers getting the credit for Destroy The Heart. Let Chadwick edit it!

Oh, wtf. All right then.

― Angle of dateh, Friday, 19 August 2005 09:27 (twenty years ago)

I think I'm going to edit the Wikipedia article on Henry IV and have him reistated to his rightful place as England's finest emperor. (PS have you checked out his Holy Roman predecessors? Charles the Fat? Charles the Bald? Humbert the Humbert?)

― NickB (NickB), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:30 (twenty years ago)

Olaf the Flashy!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:31 (twenty years ago)

Ethelred the Ill-Read.

― I Dream Of Sleep (kate), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:32 (twenty years ago)

"From September Sky Sports, which costs around £33 a month to subscribe to, will have the monopoly on all live English cricket, domestic and international, until 2009. Five, a free-to-air channel, will broadcast highlights of home international matches."

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:33 (twenty years ago)

henry is it just the phrase "which i'll discuss later" or the entire trick of "but before we explore x, we have to introduce y" --- which i think sometimes has rhetorical justification, ie using the topic switchback to emphasise the entirely relevant overlooked-ness of Y in the analysis of X

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:35 (twenty years ago)

Ivar the Boneless and Olaf the Flashy
were a most lackadaisical couple of carls,
as knockabout seawolves, as Danegeld collectors,
bent on rapine and pillage and bushwacking earls

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:40 (twenty years ago)

yes, this is true, there are obv justifications. it is very hard to write about things which happened simultaneously. but i think i maybe like full-blown digressions rather than splitting stuff up -- it's the splitting i can't abide -- i'll let you know just enough to get through this next bit.

to be fair, all detective fiction would be fucked if it followed my rule here.

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 09:45 (twenty years ago)

I remember picking up a weighty looking hardback on British pop once and decided to see if it was any good. My first random flick found a sentence talking about Oasis and their track "Sally Can Wait" (I assume he meant 'Don't Look Back In Anger'). Considering the track had been out in the last year, I decided that maybe the auhor wasn't going to be quite as knowledgable on the subject as the cover suggested.

― Chewshabadoo (Chewshabadoo), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:46 (twenty years ago)

haha, s.holmes used constantly to complain about this!! "watson you twat you always put the story in the wrong order!"

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 09:48 (twenty years ago)

in anything, especially jokes, it's the slow release of info that's key, i guess, and so i want this to be done in at least a confident, measured way. in a joke when you have to go back to explain things, that's when you've lost it. so somehow you need to weave things in... but at the same time not make the story a sort of 'block'. this is all a bit anti-modernist, on reflection. ie *all* elements *must* combine! oh dear!

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 09:58 (twenty years ago)

never read tristram shandy!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 10:03 (twenty years ago)

i bought it on strength of uni reading list a mere seven years ago... but no.

"but at the same time not make the story a sort of 'block'"

this is my get-out-of-jail-free card here, maybe: it's er about 'essential' unity of some sort, um...

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 10:05 (twenty years ago)

egregious errors in real actual proper grown-up books! come on ppl!!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 14:36 (twenty years ago)

anything about movies that quotes william goldman 'nobody knows anything'.

― N_RQ, Friday, 19 August 2005 14:45 (twenty years ago)

I have a book called A World History Of Photography. Most of it seems very good, but there's one point - which is actually repeated in two places - which has made me a bit iffy: it claims that the Great Schism that convinced David Octavius Hill to take up photography was between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland.

(as any fule kno, it was actually the schism between the Church of Scotland and the Free Presbyterians - the Church of England was completely uninvolved)

― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Friday, 19 August 2005 15:11 (twenty years ago)

anyone can edit Wikipedia articles. That's the whole point. Try it, it's easy!

My confidence has evaporated; I am a fule - as any fule kno.

― angle of dateh, Friday, 19 August 2005 15:19 (twenty years ago)

I should point out, I kind of assume that more or less everything I know - that isn't really specialised, like computer maintenance or archaeological digging techniques - is common knowledge.

― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Friday, 19 August 2005 15:24 (twenty years ago)

"it's not you it's me"

― ken c (ken c), Friday, 19 August 2005 15:25 (twenty years ago)

"there's no chemistry"

― angle of dateh, Friday, 19 August 2005 17:28 (twenty years ago)

One of the many books I read on Japanese prints when researching for my website (never miss a chance to pimp it: www.japanese-arts.net) claimed that a favourite artist of mine named Yoshitoshi was a pupil of Utamaro. I stopped dead and reread and frowned, then checked dates. From memory, Utamaro died in 1806, and Yoshitoshi was born in 1839. Since the highlighting of Yoshitoshi is virtually always as a kind of last flare of a dying tradition, and since Utamaro is widely considered the greatest print artist ever, there is no excuse for this in a book all about Japanese painting.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 19 August 2005 22:16 (twenty years ago)

Chewshabadoo: I think that was Michael Bracewell, England is Mine! Funny.

Mark S: I'm afraid my reaction at top of thread was opposite to yours: I thought you were saying 'a sentence like this demonstrates your woeful ignorance as reader and you want to give up'.

Enya example is smashing.

― the pinefox, Friday, 19 August 2005 22:25 (twenty years ago)

well that happens too obv, hence my heidegger gag

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 22:29 (twenty years ago)

Note to world: book editors spend about 10% of their time editing and the rest looking for new projects, representing their already-acquired projects to the company, and sheparding their books through production. The error that opens this thread is something that should have been caught by a copyeditor, not an editor. Different things.

― shookout (shookout), Friday, 19 August 2005 22:36 (twenty years ago)

I was reading a girls' comic from I think 1981 the other day where my confidence that the writer had ever heard any teenage girls talk vanished with the following sentence, uttered by one such girl as she and her friends left a disco: "That was a smashing disco-dance session!"

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 19 August 2005 22:38 (twenty years ago)

also, this sentence from Taschen's disastrous book on Manga made me lose confidence that anyone who spoke English had been involved at any stage of the project:

"Mouretsu A Tarou" drew the hot blooded and manly view of the world centring on the good boys of influence who perform a greengrocery, and also introduced a noted character, such as NYAROME of a cat.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 19 August 2005 22:42 (twenty years ago)

erm a copy editor IS an editor --- hence the use of the word "editor" in the phrase "copy editor" --- but anyway i actually think the "emperor henry the iv" error should have been caught by EVERYONE WHO READ THAT SENTENCE, which OUGHT to include every kind of editor who had anything to do w.the book

note to world: i am a professional (sub) and (production) and (sometimes) (copy) editor, admittedly mostly in magazines, where the workload is divvied up a bit difft

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 19 August 2005 22:50 (twenty years ago)

"I was reading a girls' comic from I think 1981 the other day" is my contender.

― the pinefox, Saturday, 20 August 2005 08:41 (twenty years ago)

I knew that word 'editor' must be present in the phrase 'copy editor' for a, a - a ... reason.

― the pinefox, Saturday, 20 August 2005 08:42 (twenty years ago)

Thread abuse - I just want to post to this thread:

"'We now risk losing contact and interoperability with a generation of military classmates in many nations of the region,including several leading countries,' General Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee."

― youn, Saturday, 20 August 2005 15:45 (twenty years ago)

I read an essay comparing the film and television version of M*A*S*H which stated that Donald Sutherland played Trapper John and Elliott Gould played Hawkeye Pierce. I mean, did the author actually watch the movie?

― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Sunday, 21 August 2005 01:01 (twenty years ago)

Ha, mark, I am reading one of yr faves Patricia Cornwell's Jack the Ripper book. "Scotus, it could be Latin for Scotchman, it could be a reference to Johannes Scotus Eriugena" IT COULD BE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES OMG OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES WAS JACK THE RIPPER!!!!!

― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Sunday, 21 August 2005 01:05 (twenty years ago)

that cornwell book's a trip

but of course we all know Jack was Honest Abe.

― latebloomer's rectal mocha latte (latebloomer), Sunday, 21 August 2005 01:08 (twenty years ago)

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"

― angle of dateh, Sunday, 21 August 2005 11:15 (twenty years ago)

Rosemary is being too erudite for me, and sapping my confidence.

― the pinefox, Sunday, 21 August 2005 13:15 (twenty years ago)

i am trudging on through the islam book but i am convinced no copy editor ever got their hands on it

― mark s (mark s), Sunday, 21 August 2005 20:56 (twenty years ago)

I read a Buffy novelization that showed no sign of being edited. I'm not even sure it had a single instance of proper grammar.

― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Sunday, 21 August 2005 22:15 (twenty years ago)

If songs are eligible, I would like to nominate the sentence, "They said, 'Come on, dudes, let's get it on!'"

― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Sunday, 21 August 2005 22:27 (twenty years ago)

"The New Stupidity is this culture's accommodation of the irresistible-ignorance, illiteracy, laziness. An assistant at a publishing house had written copy citing as a song title 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' When I told him that this was the first line of the song and not its title, he made no move to correct the error, because 'Everyone will know what I mean.'"

Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen p 222

― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Sunday, 21 August 2005 22:27 (twenty years ago)

Mark, might it not be the copy editor who created the mistake? The author had correctly cited "Emperor Penguin IV" but the copy editor, believing this to be a mistake, simply changed the "Penguin" to "Henry" without asking.

I'm still mad at the Spin fact checker who saw that I quoted the line "Please make this an endless night," saw that I'd identified it as from Cynthia's "Endless Nights," which it is, and then went ahead and changed the citation to "Love Me Tonight." (He'd asked an editor about this first, too; the editor told him to leave it as is, but he changed it anyway.)

― Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Sunday, 21 August 2005 22:48 (twenty years ago)

"Just as likely, though, is that there are really not all that many ways to write about popular music. To put a twist on something Elvis Costello is rumored to have said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," and once around the block may well cover the territory."
-- Steve Jones and Kevin Featherly, "Re-Viewing Rock Writing" from Pop Music & The Press, 2002

― geoff (gcannon), Monday, 22 August 2005 03:09 (twenty years ago)

something Elvis Costello is rumored to have said

― geoff (gcannon), Monday, 22 August 2005 03:10 (twenty years ago)

they lost me w."re-viewing"

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 22 August 2005 07:12 (twenty years ago)

You see, what Morley did was to write four pages of footnotes discussing who actually originated the dancing abt architecture meme. His candidates included Grachan Moncur III and Roy Hudd. That's my kind of viewing, sans the "re-".

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Monday, 22 August 2005 07:16 (twenty years ago)

Couldn't it have started with Roy Castle? ('Talking about playing the trumpet is like tap-dancing about world records'.)

― the bellefox, Monday, 22 August 2005 08:16 (twenty years ago)

six months pass...

i never finished the history of islam book!!

i often don't finish books even when they are good and i like them but for some reason this is the only one i felt GUILTY about not finishing

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 24 February 2006 17:21 (twenty years ago)

You horrible man, Mark S.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 24 February 2006 17:42 (twenty years ago)

Go and finish it!

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 24 February 2006 17:51 (twenty years ago)

i am rereadin roland huntford's book on shackleton instead

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 24 February 2006 17:58 (twenty years ago)

Mark, was that the History of the Arab People with the white background and blue & gold framed cover?

― Laurel (Laurel), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:00 (twenty years ago)

By any chance?

― Laurel (Laurel), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:00 (twenty years ago)

Haha History of The Arab Peoples. Did I mention that book to you yesterday Laural or am I hallucinating?

― jocelyn (Jocelyn), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:01 (twenty years ago)

Laur-El

― jocelyn (Jocelyn), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:02 (twenty years ago)

no it's called the struggle within islam by r4fiq z4k4ri4

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:04 (twenty years ago)

"He was lonely and had begun to think that lonliness was a part of his character, something that would always stay with him" - I nearly posted this emo quote on my LJ, but I didn't - It's from Winesburg, Ohio, and relates to Seth Richmond (such a goth name for such a gothy character)

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:05 (twenty years ago)

Jocelyn, I don't remember! But buy a copy sooner rather than later if you want it, because the last time it came up for reprint, there was a murmur abt letting it go out of stock. That got vetoed because apparently it's a classic reference book...but I'm just sayin'....

― Laurel (Laurel), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:07 (twenty years ago)

Don't you want to know how Islam turned out? Finish it!

(I read a book about Ibn Battua's travels; he was a badass.)

― andy --, Friday, 24 February 2006 18:07 (twenty years ago)

Sudden loss of faith category:

Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: ¡§It¡¨ makes a move. ¡§It¡¨ could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant.

(Go pieces do not move)

I have also given up after "Man operates in an ontological condition of being" as a first line but this might have been unfair of me. Mrk's initial example is awesome.

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:09 (twenty years ago)

it wz published in 1989 andy, there have been several plot-twists since then!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:09 (twenty years ago)

I haven't finished Knut Hamsun's travelouge of his trip round Russia, he slags everybody off and writes a lot about what he ate.

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:09 (twenty years ago)

I read a book about Ibn Battua's travels; he was a badass.)

OTM

― M. White (Miguelito), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:20 (twenty years ago)

That's on my amazon wishlist but my birthday's not for ages :(

― beanz (beanz), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:39 (twenty years ago)

My favorite thing about ibn battuta's travelogues is that apparently travel writing has changed 0% since it was invented. You go, eat, look at buildings, comment on the native's manners (not so bad!) and eat some more (pretty good!).

I have given up more or less on "Fast Food Nation" because I got to the part where he hauls out the old tale about how GM had a cunning conspiracy to wipe out the lovely, efficient, warm and fuzzy trolley systems in cities all over the country.

― TOMBOT, Friday, 24 February 2006 19:21 (twenty years ago)

one month passes...

Not an error of fact, but this is the start of a mammoth 20th Century art book I am reading:

"To understand what truly occurred during a given period, it is necessary to summarise facts, to review them. This is an established habit of the best writers: William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon."

My heart sunk a little.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 1 April 2006 11:47 (twenty years ago)

it shd read: William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, DJ Martian

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 1 April 2006 12:12 (twenty years ago)

This book deals with the centru year by year. I am on 1905. It talks about the painter Fernand Leger, who it says is 80 years old at this point. He did well to survive to 1955 (Leger was born in 1881). Was there another artist called Fernand Leger, perhaps the grandfather of the famous one, in Paris at that time?

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 1 April 2006 12:21 (twenty years ago)

Oh! I came across one of these the other day, but I cannot for the life of me recall what it was... However, I believe that it was a historical or theological error in a book about maths, so my faith in the maths itself remained untested. I just thought the author was a bit of a gimp.

― STOP! Time Thief! (kate), Saturday, 1 April 2006 12:30 (twenty years ago)

five years pass...

ffs

― mark s, Friday, 21 October 2011 13:28 (fourteen years ago)

"Two world wars and one world cup!"

― frankly bringing dragons into this equation is wrong (rustic italian flatbread), Friday, 21 October 2011 17:15 (fourteen years ago)

four years pass...

lol i just realised that the book that birthed this thread is by fareed zakaria's dad rafiq zakaria

― mark s, Sunday, 14 August 2016 11:57 (nine years ago)

I was nearly half the way through Rome by Robert Hughes (a history of Rome) and I was quite enjoying it. Then I reached his description of the sculpture Pluto and Persephone which includes the line:

It is an extremely sexy sculpture, and should be, since its subject is a rape; Scipione Borghese possessed an unsurpassed collection of antique Roman erotica, with which the young sculptor must have been happily familiar.

How many people must have read this line and thought it was ok to publish in 2011? I couldn't read any more.

― AlanSmithee, Sunday, 14 August 2016 12:40 (nine years ago)

Not an error, but a bit of a groaner. This was in an academic book on Buddhist philosophy, published by Oxford UP.

"This is but the first level. The second level of pervasive dukkha is the dukkha of change. While there is a retail chain called Forever 21, none of us is forever 21."

― jmm, Sunday, 14 August 2016 14:35 (nine years ago)

reading along enthralled by Goldman on Lennon 'til became aware of his repeatedly referring to L.'s "granny glasses": Jim McGuinn wore (whatever geometrical shape that is) granny glasses before he became Roger' *then* he wore the very plainly round ones, like Lennon (and Goldman!) wore. Once I realized, the dream was over.

― dow, Tuesday, 16 August 2016 15:46 (nine years ago)

Hence bad punctuation---why bother, anymore...

― dow, Tuesday, 16 August 2016 15:48 (nine years ago)

While there is a retail chain called Forever 21, none of us is forever 21.

this would be a great sentence in an intro paragraph to so many blog entries

― mh, Tuesday, 16 August 2016 17:53 (nine years ago)

seven years pass...

Shouldn't have said "enthralled" because sounds too positive---although I did read the whole huge slap of hearsay and and maybe self-generated, certainly self-delighted slyme. Also several by Kitty Kelley during that long-ago phase.

― dow, Sunday, 23 June 2024 21:28 (one year ago)

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