Reading roundup
53. The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams -- pretty good collection. One of the things I was impressed by is the mix of famous and new-to-me names, the number of female authors in the anthology (just a little less than half), and the number of non-Caucasian names (still a distinct minority, but more than one normally sees). ( Individual stories with spoilers )
I don't know if it's a frequent thing, but I know I've encountered it and similar before. Might've been "Nephilim", which, to be fair, I'm not sure *has* a singular in English. "A sepraphim" nets almost 60k hits on Google, although some of it is being used grammatically correctly to modify something, like "A seraphim Christmas". At least 1.5k of those hits seemed to belong to talking about this canon (which has a bunch of books in it in addition to the short story I read). At least one of them is somebody saying, "Sniegoski appears sadly unaware that Seraphim is plural and its singular is Seraph"
I realize I have only minimal high ground because the Russian word for cherub is "heruvim", clearly taken from the Hebrew plural. (I just had to call B and ask him what the singular was because I couldn't figure it out. Apparently it's "kruv". Which also means "cauliflower". O.o) And, unlike all the other times in Hebrew when words sound identical to me but are actually spelled iwth a bunch of different letters, they are even spelled the same. O.o) Aaanyway, but "heruvim" is the actual Russian word, and "kruv" is not, while the English word is clearly "seraph".
(I also have no issue with seraphs, and kind of like it in fact. I think I prefer it to "seraphim" as a plural, maybe because it shows acknowledgement of the original word's etymology and also it's integration into English? I dunno...)
You might like "The Boys Go Fishing", on the other hand! No grammatical fail there. And "Meanwhile, Across the Caspian Sea..."
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Oh, also! November totally snuck up on me, and I'll be in Chandler night of the 9th and the night of the 15th. I think last time 15th was looking better for you? Is that still the case / do you think you'll still have time (and means of transport) to meet? I'm still not entirely sure which Hampton Inn I'm staying at on the 9th (working on this... these rooms were booked for us, so I need to check with the admin who did the booking)
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