What happens when a couple of people with advanced degrees in English lit watch 1970s PSAs on YouTube for want of anything better to do? Well, this does.

Watch this first. It will make the following make more sense, insofar as it makes any sense at all.

( 'Get To Know His Face / In Every Single Place': Mr. Yuk as 'Ideological Sink Apparatus' )

Via aris_tgd, The Anglish Moot -- a wiki written exclusively in words derived from Old English, none of that newfangled Norman French thank you very much.

Via twospots, the utterly magnificent loltheorists.

I think this made me laugh the hardest.

...is fun. From Hardin Craig's Shakespeare, published in 1931:
This book attempts to present Shakespeare as a unified and connected subject of study -- his life, his work, his reactions to his age and upon it, his significance to our age, and the opinions of other times and nations. It attempts to enrich in various ways the study of Shakespeare in ( Read more... )

Someone on my flist was talking about marginalia and I am sort of bored.

Anyway, I happened across this note I'd made yesterday and am now highly annoyed because I cannot read what exactly it says in the right-hand margin, yet I suspect it is rather clever. There is one word which is completely illegible and it seems rather important.

( If you've ever wanted to know what my marginalia look like )

ritaxis linked to omniglot.com just now -- it's a fabulous site -- and consequently I've just spent far too much time attempting the Welsh tonguetwisters they have there, since I have to speak a bit of Welsh in 1H4. What have I gotten myself into? The double L will be the death of me ( Read more... )

So I've been reading this eighteenth-century Milton criticism -- those of you who know a lot about this sort of thing, it's Joseph Addison's remarks from The Spectator (dated December 1711-January 1712). It's very boring and reminds me (as if I needed it) of why I can't abide neoclassicism: it feels rather like carving perhaps the greatest epic ( Read more... )