I never find this not irritating
People constantly recirculating that spoof review of Lady Chatterley's Lover ('these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate') and taking it as a real review in a real periodical.
This keeps coming up on my Twitter feed and yes, people do seem to be taking it at entirely face value.
The peeves, they be agitated.
I am sure that there are similar instances of something that was meant to be a joke being cited as if entirely SRS, further down the line.
Not quite the same thing perhaps, but a similar segue, of recent time I have found myself mentioning the mutation of a story by Arthur Machen (he of the currently threatened library collection which perhaps should have gone in the first place to somewhere that collected literary libraries and archives rather than a public library), 'The Bowmen', which became the urban legend about the 'Angels of Mons'. ('It must be true, I read in the paper', in this instance, The Evening News.)
(One might also invoke here those earnest scholars who allegedly wrote to George Macdonald Fraser begging for a glimpse at the Flashman papers.) This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2219723.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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