Monday, April 14, 2025

In Books Be Silliness!

Herewith are a few things which amused me in reading some of the three-thousand-plus books I have logged.
From page 176 of Philip José Farmer's The Fabulous Riverboat, we have a sentence towards the end of the big paragraph, "They had more gall than France."  This tickled me because I think Farmer was joshing about Gaul, the Roman province which included France.  You're familiar with the opening words of Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars?  "All Gaul is divided into three parts," or ""Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres," as we learned in Latin Class.
I don't know if a computer is to blame, but here in Jon Burlingame's great book Music for Prime Time, we have an odd hyphenation.  That is, an odd NON-hyphenation.  I mean ... aw, shucks!  Shouldn't that phrase be rendered the same way ALL THE TIME, especially in adjacent sentences?
In the 2020 spy thriller Black Flag by David Ricciardi, we are told that "a croc's jaws were the most powerful force in the mammalian world."  Somebody tell this guy that crocodiles ARE REPTILES, not mammals.  Sheesh!

Well, that's enough silliness for today.  See you on Thursday!
  

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