Comments for jeffprucher.com

Comment on Thinking about horror, II by Thad Guidry

Thad Guidry — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:45:37 +0000

UPDATE: Just got an email back from a librarian friend who states that prior to that the books were classified and referred to as Fables or Tales sometimes in the title or spine and with many producing fear or horror in small children to teach moral lessons. Horror (Lat) does show an origin of use that “raised hair”.

Comment on Thinking about horror, II by Thad Guidry

Thad Guidry — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:24:54 +0000

I once asked an LOC librarian the same thing once, Jeff. Why ISN’T the use of horror as a classifying word used more liberally ? She answered that movies during the ’30s and ’40s had a lot to do with that. Namely, the word “horror” was seen with dripping blood, grotesque pics, etc on movie posters. When books also began running alongside them, the word was picked up as the genre classification. Prior to that, the genre classification didn’t really exist and was in fact, “mystery” with “thrilling” sometimes connected, and now we have “thriller”. If you go through some really old archives of “mystery” books prior to 1930, you’ll notice they’re not that “bloody”, but perhaps just “fearful” or “spooky”. Two that come to mind are, “The legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. With regard to the later, by Robert Louis Stevenson, I’ve always wanted to visit Edinburgh and scroll though those archives to take a peek at Stevensons’ notes and diaries and see if the word “horror” was ever used by him. I guess my point would be that to most librarians, the gothic use of the word “horror” is forever stuck with ideas of monsters and blood and guts, while “thriller” in the case of book genre has romanced itself away from that use?

Comment on More News of Earth-shattering Linguistic Importance by Thad Guidry

Thad Guidry — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:34:53 +0000

Earth Shattering, I heard the rumble…or…better check his diaper.

Comment on SF in OED, December 2009 by Thad Guidry

Thad Guidry — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:33:42 +0000

Earth shattering, I felt the rumble…or…better check his diapers.

Comment on SF in OED, December 2009 by Pondering New Projects | (Semi) Intellectual Blathering

Pondering New Projects | (Semi) Intellectual Blathering — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:01:29 +0000

[...] SF in OED, December 2009 (jeffprucher.com) [...]

Comment on More News of Earth-shattering Linguistic Importance by Claire

Claire — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:11:54 +0000

Congratulations!! And don’t forget to close the bli.

Comment on SF in the OED, Sept. ‘09 by Irene Grumman

Irene Grumman — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:09:41 +0000

When I had a temporary job with IBM around 1977, I facetiously suggested to my boss that it would be much more efficient to send thoughts to a machine that could type them up, rather than use dictation, drafting, transcription, typing, correcting and copying. He responded that it had been tried, but there was too much interference from the many thoughts that go on in a person’s mind at one time.

Comment on SF in the OED, Sept. ‘09 by jeff

jeff — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:48:57 +0000

Good catch — I missed that one. I think the bioengineering references are a different sense, since the SFnal sense is really about telepathy and not technological nerve-machine interfaces, and it’s likely that the Astounding snippet is in a similar vein.

I did find this, though: http://tinyurl.com/ntkbrh. Google’s copy seems to come from a modern edition (there’s a URL on the final page), but WorldCat confirms a 1971 publication date. Earlier SFnal uses are pretty likely as well, I agree.

Comment on SF in the OED, Sept. ‘09 by malcolm

malcolm — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:52:49 +0000

There’s a new subheading for “thought-controlled” adj. as well. I think that is definition 3. — the OED’s earliest cite is from 1977 (Craig Thomas’s Firefox), but I think there surely must be earlier cites from SF. After all, thought-controlled equipment is not new to SF: the second cite listed is from a discussion of Clarke’s 1953 City and the Stars

Via Google books, I’ve seen bioengineering cites from the 1960s concerning limb prosthetics, and a few cites from SF magazines, including one from Astounding ca. 1955 referring to constructing a thought-controlled relay. But no useful bibliographic information or page views to help the wouldbe cite finder…

Comment on Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science… by malcolm

malcolm — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:35:49 +0000

Just a mention that your blog post got a writeup in actual dead tree format, in the Telegraph’s Saturday review section a couple of weeks ago. Online here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5132153/Endpaper.html

It looks as though the author of this piece also used the comments on the blog for other material for the article (thagomizer, quark)