"but what care i for words?" as you like it: iii; v

I say I'm a recovering English major in my profile, but it's not entirely accurate. More correct would be to say that I'm an English major who's found her calling not to be in reading and writing English, but who still harbors a crush on it as a hobby. I get a kick out of the written word; it's pretty astonishing to think how language has developed and evolved and devolved. I try to be observant of language patterns in our changing culture, and so I read a lot of different, and in some cases, crappy, literature and media. Along the way, I often pick up amusing anecdotes that have not so much to do with language, but more about how absurd life can be.

Like this.

If, like our president, you're not what we call a "reader", here's the Reader's Digest: A British biographer named A.N. Wilson wrote a biography of the British poet John Betjeman, who had, apparently, stated late in his life that he wished he had had more sex. He was married and it was assumed his sex life was dull. Well, the biographer received a letter that supposedly revealed an extramarital affair between Betjeman and another writer; it was apparently a love letter from him, and Wilson printed the letter in the biography saying there had been this affair. Ok, here's the thing: it was a hoax. The letter was a fake, and not only that, but encoded in one section of the letter, using the first letter of each word, was the sentence "A.N. Wilson is a shit." Nice!!!! But ok, here's the other thing: the letter came from an unknown correspondent using a French return address, but the letter was postmarked in London.

Now, I'm not a fancy-schmancy biographer or anything, so maybe I'm overthinking things, but it seems to me that before actually publishing a letter received from an unknown person in a book about someone else, one might take care to research the contents of that letter, and perhaps check other sources to corroborate, or, at the very least, cast some degree of authenticity on the whole matter.

What's worst about the whole thing, for this dumb-ass biographer, is that it seems that he was informed of the hoax by the Sunday London Times, who pointed out the nasty encoded message to him, and he was left lamely saying "I should have smelled a rat." Smelled a rat? No, good sir, it is not that you should have smelled a rat, it is that you should have simply done your job.

* * *

Well, I am trying to finish up a book about Shakespeare, so I'll close for now. Shakespeare: now there's a guy who liked to play with words. If he didn't find a word he liked for what he was trying to express, he just made one up! And a lot of them stuck! To name a few: impartial, jaded, gloomy, premeditated, frugal, and zany. I find that to be ... well .... transtounding.