obscene words from deadwood

[Dennis Baron]

Geoff, you could tell David Bianculli this:

It's great to get pissed off at imprecise claims to accuracy on the part of scriptwriters, but what degree of accuracy can we realistically demand from fiction, anyway? I had one college instructor who explained Keats' "error" in having Cortez discover the Pacific with this wild surmise: as Keats discovers Chapman's Homer, second-hand and in translation, so Cortez came to the ocean after Balboa. Of course, I have no idea whether Cortez reached the Pacific in his travels, but I supposed he did. Another prof, who was actually a minor poet as well as a critic, could never forgive Keats for the mistake, as he never forgave some mystery writer--possibly Erle Stanley Gardner--for having a fictional train from LA to Denver travel on a schedule that the real train of the same name never followed.

The Earl of Roscommon wrote in his poem, "Horace's Art of Poetry,"  (long before Keats nodded), "[I]n a Poem elegantly writ,  I will not quarrel with a slight mistake . . . But in long Works, Sleep will sometimes surprize,/ Homer himself hath been observ'd to nodd." Of course there's a special irony about a poet saying in a poem that it's okay for poets to make mistakes . . . there must be a figure of speech to characterize that.

But of course, HBO's a horse of a different, well, stripe. [sic]

Dennis


Dennis Baron                                                office: 217-244-0568
Professor of English and Linguistics              mobile: 217-840-0776
Department of English                                           fax: 217-333-4321
University of Illinois             https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/debaron/www
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801                                                  debaron at uiuc.edu
Dennis Baron                                         debaron at uiuc.edu
Dept. of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
office: 217-244-0568
english dept.: 217-333-2390