Everything?

3 Comments

I was looking something up, fact-checking a phrase for a story I'm editing, and I somehow found myself at Everything2, unable to resist reading (or at least glancing over, since I'm low on time) the following articles:

If I had a couple years of free time, I would go read half of their site, and maybe even try to post some stuff. As it is, I intend to stay far away from the site, 'cause I've got stuff to do. But maybe you can go enjoy it on my behalf.

3 Responses to “Everything?”

  1. Will

    You weren’t expecting a serious linguistic comment to come out of this, I suppose, but . . .

    One of the comments on the “talking like a pirate is fun but annoys people” page is

    I would like to give credit for the invention of the stereotypical pirate accent to the actor Robert Morton, who played Long John Silver in the 1950 version of “Treasure Island”, and then went on to star in “Blackbeard, the Pirate” in 1952 (among dozens of other performances). I wonder if we would have any pirate accent to affect if it wasn’t for Morton, or if that way of speaking was ever heard before 1950?

    It’s an interesting question, and one that would make an interesting project, going around and asking senior citizens of various ages “when you were a youth, did you ever make believe you were a pirate? how did you talk when you did that? was that before or after 1950?”.  . .

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  2. Jay Lake

    Unfortunately, given what we know about eyewitness testimony, ‘uncovered memories,’ urban legends and so forth, most seniors would likely recall that they talked like Robert Morton regardless of the truth of the matter.

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  3. irilyth

    I knew a guy in high school (actually, the brother of a friend of mine) who did the nose-spaghetti-flossing thing, although his take was to put an end up each nostril, leaving him with a small bit of spaghetti between his nostrils, and the two ends sticking out of his mouth.

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