"pig" as policeman

[Jonathan Lighter]

To be precise, Fussell claims the century "really" began on July 1, 1916.

  These are word games, useful only for simplifying and dramatizing a point.  Once the point is made, the game becomes pointless.

  JL


"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: "pig" as policeman
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On Aug 10, 2006, at 9:03 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> I wasn't making up the notion that the 20th century began with the
> assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...
> I believe it's been claimed, maybe by Hobsbawm (quoted earlier by Jim
> Parish) that the "long 19th century" began with the storming of the
> Bastille on my birthday (but not birth year) in 1789 and ended with
> Princip's shot in Sarajevo.

Paul Fussell (in The Great War and Modern Memory) also takes the view
that the war was the dividing line between Then and Now. and note
that the two great monuments of modern european literature, Joyce's
Ulysses and Proust's A la Recherche... were both begun before the war
(1914 and 1909, respectively) and then finished in 1922.

arnold

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