OT almost entirely: Radu Florescu, 88, Scholar of Dracula, and the OED

[Laurence Horn]

On May 31, 2014, at 8:25 PM, George Thompson wrote:

> JB, quoting the NYTimes:
> "Have you ever seen Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler in the same place
> at the same time?"
>
> It seems to me that this is a formula -- "Have you ever seen X and Y
> together"?, or, as here, "in the same place at the same time?" -- that I
> have encountered from time to time of late, usually written with a
> humorously raised eyebrow.
> Any evidence of its origin?
>
> GAT

Lois Lane, considering to herself whether she'd ever seen Superman and Clark Kent in the same place at the same time?  (No raised eyebrow in that case because she really was entertaining the secret-identity hypothesis, which may be being alluded to in later take-offs on such complementary distribution.)  Of course Superman/Clark Kent may not be the first of these, just the first I was aware of, not being up on The Morning Star and The Evening Star at that point in my life.

LH
>
>
> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 10:15 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
>> The famous Margalit Fox -- check the ADS-L archives -- has written
>> another elegant and sly obituary, this time about Radu Florescu, who
>> died on May 18.  In the NYTimes -- at least the New England Edition
>> -- May 29, page B17.  (For unknown reasons, the on-line Times won't
>> give it to me.  Search results for, say, "Dracula", Newest first, are
>> to say the least peculiar; and a search for "Margalit Fox"
>> produces  zero results in the Past 7 Days.)  Anyhoo, juicy excerpts:
>>
>> [Opening paragraphs:]
>>     "Have you ever seen Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler in the
>> same place at the same time?
>>     "Of course not, and that, according to Radu Florescu, is
>> precisely the point: The two men, he argued, were one and the same."
>> ...
>>     "By day, Professor taught at Boston College, where, at his
>> death, he was an emeritus professor of history ..."
>> [One intervening paragraph.]
>>     "But thanks to his moonlight job, Professor Florescu was for
>> four decades also one of the world's leading experts in matters Dracular."
>>
>> [This is the minimally relevant bit:  Dracular (adj.) not in
>> OED.  But 'll bet the professor and the count also were never seen in
>> the same place at the same time.]
>> ...
>>     "As he would learn in the course of his research, he had a
>> family connection to Vlad, who was known familiarly if not quite
>> fondly as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. A Florescu ancestor was
>> said to have married Vlad's brother, felicitously named Radu the Handsome."
>> ...
>>     "Both Vlad and Count Dracula displayed marked criminal
>> proclivities: Vlad was know for dispatching his Ottoman foes (as may
>> as 100,000 in some accounts) with sharpened stakes. Dracula, who did
>> not care for stakes, favored a more direct approach."
>>
>> [And the concluding paragraph:]
>>     "If, in his second career, Professor Florescu risked the
>> opprobrium of some ivory-tower colleagues, he seemed unperturbed. At
>> Dracula conventions around the world -- and there are many -- he
>> sometimes materialized wearing a cape, a reliable indication that
>> when it came to Stoker's sanguinary protagonist, Professor Florescu
>> did not mind sticking his neck out."
>>
>> RIP.
>>
>> Joel
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998..
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org