Goodness knows I have picked up a certain amount of rather obscure information in my time

Aug 20, 2020 20:19


- and I will go around being pedantic with it, as my dr rdrz are aware. (e.g. Sid says, actually you could cure syphilis before penicillin, it just took rather a long time and a course of painful injections. Plus, penicillin was not a viable treatment before the early 1940s... I'll shut up now.)
Part of this was being an archivist, which is the kind of job in which one tends to accrete all sorts of misc info and partly it was doing research in niche fields, but anyway.
However, sometimes one observes people making bloopers which are such enormous bloopers that even people who are probably not massive experts in the field or the period are going - Wait, WHAT?
This was an assumption about global mobility. I would murmur that medievalists are oft pointing out that goods and people were circulating a whole lot more than people may suppose during that era.
But the period in question was the nineteenth century. Yes, my dearios, the century in which M. Jules Verne was able to write as a plausible thing Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and the USP of this was not the circumnavigation aspect, but the speed with which it might be accomplished.
Siiiigh.
***
I was also moved to a further deep sigh by the ongoing saga of the Reclaim Her Name debacle - apparently they asked NK Jemisin to let them use a short story of hers for free to advertise the Women's Prize. She uses initials to differentiate her fiction-writing identity from her academic-writing identity (as, it happens, do I), and not for any reason of concealment of gender.

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stds, gender, error, unexamined-assumptions, transport, names, history, pedantry, facile-preconceptions

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