Goodbye to one of the greats...2001 author Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday in Sri Lanka. What an amazing writer, who also happened to have laid the groundwork for the telecommunications sattelite. I loved his book "Childhood's End", and his outlook on life: both optomistic and realistic. Things can get better, it just takes work.
4 comments:
Arrgghh! One of your shortest posts and TWO misspellings! What are you trying to do to me???
Do you mean the possessive apostrophe thing? I know, I know, but Arthur C. Clarke himself titled his book "Childhood's End", who am I to argue with a guy who's written a hundred books? Authors have that kind of license with everything. Incidentally, there is a name for this phenomena, "greengrocer's apostrophe".
From Wikipedia:
"Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, points out that before the 19th century, it was standard orthography to use the apostrophe to form a plural of a foreign-sounding word that ended in a vowel (e.g., banana's, folio's, logo's, quarto's, pasta's, ouzo's) to clarify pronunciation."
On a related note:
"George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of English spelling reform on phonetic principles, argued that the apostrophe was mostly redundant. He did not use it for spelling cant or hes when writing Pygmalion. He did however allow I'm and it's. Lewis Carroll made greater use of apostrophes, and frequently used ca'n't and sha'n't."
Some people even go so far as to claim the apostrophe is evil (http://evilapostrophe.blogspot.com/). It has certainly caused great harm to my reputation as the only male in the universe who can write correctly, most of the time.
So I claim helplessness...I did it for Arthur knowing it was wrong...after all, you taught me well :)
Um, that's an interesting story. But I meant "optimist" and "satellite."
I stand embarrassingly corrected. I fixed the two words, and limped away with my tail between my legs and my fur matted down...
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