Found a pdf of ‘The Old Man And The Sea’ lurking on my computer last night, and was startled by some of the spellings.
First there was ‘harbour’ and ‘odour’, very much the right way to spell these words but Ernest was a yank and couldn’t be expected to know that. So I assumed this was a scan of a UK version of the book, until I came across the word ‘airplane’.
What’s going on? Did Mr H adopt mostly British spelling habits in his old age, was the book half-heartedly translated, or did American English diverge more recently than I had thought?
I may be very wrong here (usually am) but it may be a British edition of his text with all those annoying extra vowels and, like weird words replacing his originals. I’ve seen similar things happen when with such text’s as “Sophie’s World” having a north American edition with “Mom” and another edition with “Mum” translated from the original (um…Vedic? Norwegian? Swedish? Finnish? Karelian? Lapp? Ostrobothian…)
Airplane is a weird word. We Brits would say ‘aeroplane’. Hence my confusion. 'Tis neither one thing nor the other, unless it’s Canadian as Bababababa suggested.
CQ, whaddya mean not readable? The big E was not a bad lad.
TC, stop calling me ‘strag’. Thanks for the offer though.
The Basher of Strags wrote: [quote]CQ, whaddya mean not readable? The big E was not a bad lad[/quote]
That would explain a lot; I’ve heard that CQ likes his lads bad.
I think Hemmingway is overrated; the man’s fame has more to do with his colourful lifestyle and self-promotion than with the genius of his work. And he was a bloody drunk!
American english diverged? really? a quick internet search will reveal that the US spelling of “color” and not “colour” is not caused by Americans diverging but rather the British infatuation with neo-hellenic spellings. IIRC there is a park in london called honoria park, not honouria. why? because the park was named before the GB english users caught the faux greek spelling fever.
similarly, the lancet spells fetus as “fetus” and not “feotus”. why? because the good doctors there recognize that the latter spelling is newer and the “american” spelling" is actually the proper one. go figure.
Hemmingway was well known to be a terrible speller. Literary giant?
Well, I guess if you’re ten, have a beard, wear a grey turtleneck sweater, cuss like a nun, and can put away two fifths of booze in one night, you would be a giant, too.
I can see where this conversation is going, so here’s a tidbit I just got from Bill Bryson:
In the early 19th century one Humphry Davy discovered a whole bunch of chemical elements, which he had the joy of naming. In 1808 he found one which he called alumium. Four years later he changed his mind and called it aluminum, which was accepted in the USA. The Brits complained that it disrupted the -ium tradition which gave us potassium, sodium, calcium, etc. And so the name was changed again, to aluminium, but by then the Americans had given up and gone back to shagging buffalo.
It was a descendant of one of these frontiersmen that went on to write Death In The Afternoon, although very few people are aware of the reason for his fascination with bulls.
Stragbasher, that book you quoted I thought was fantastic. A short history…
A used to read it before going to bed and spend the night thinking about chemical elements and space and how time bends light.
It was morning. So this is how it is, this is how it always happens in the morning. Bugger your morning. With my last 50 Lira I purchased some true and honest gripe water; I took a pull from the bottle. It was good. It burned my mouth and felt good and warm going down my esophagus and into my stomach. From there it went to my kidneys and my bladder, and was good. I remembered then when I last saw Derrida who was still a damn fine writer. It was in Prague and we looked out the windows at the vale and drank gripe water in the morning. It was morning and had been morning for some time.
