Monday 6 July 2009

Flapdoodle

Can any sin be worse than completing someone else's crossword puzzle? Nay. I did it today to help out my wife, while she bought postcards in the Avignon rain. 'Bird's feather?' 'Pinion.' Obvious. She didn't thank me. For a moment, I felt quite autocidal.

BTW: I've discovered that Sir Thomas Browne coined the term 'suicide' in 1635, though the OED wrongly dates it to 1651. Shall I e-mail the OED? Nay. They'd tell me that Al Alvarez had pointed it out to them in 1972, so bugger off. (So why haven't they still clarified their reference?)

Ho, I've found another OED mistake. It dates ‘fadoodle’ as appearing first in 1670 but a variant appears in Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611): ‘Trapdoor. “'Tis fadoodling: if it please you”’. Definitely worth an e-mail.

I love this ebook reader. What else is there to do than use it to confute the OED? While all the rain otherwise unemployed in Spain falls on Provence?

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Read 'The Apothecary's Tales' now

at Smashwords.com: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/2958

Many have proposed that The Apothecary's Tales is a detective novel in the genre of historical fiction or fictive history set in the Jacobean and Elizabethan era called the Jacobethan (or the age of Shakespeare). Certainly, its tone of mystery, suspense, humour, comedy and ribald sex might suggest that. However, the mystery, detective and thriller elements merely support its presentation as an historical novel; they do not invaidate the possibility that it is a true account originally written in the language of Shakespeare and revised for the reader of modern historical novels.