Why the OED is scant for the 18th century :-)

[Jonathan Lighter]

You must mean "The Song of Igor's Campaign."  A couple of good lines (at
least in Nabokov's translation), but mainly of historical interest - if
it's real, as it appears to be.

Yeah, Beowulf almost went up in flames, and it's been crumbling steadily
since.  Thirty seconds later and there'd have been no movie with Angelina
Jolie as Grendel's Mother and Anthony Hopkins as (spoiler) Grendel's Father.

An irony of fate.

JL



On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Why the OED is scant for the 18th century :-)
>
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>
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
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> > Poster: Â  Â  Â  "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject:      Why the OED is scant for the 18th century  :-)
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > "... the British Museum's newspaper warehouse [was] Â in a suburb of
> > London, crammed with irreplaceable files of eighteenth- and
> > nineteenth-century journals. Â On October 20, 1940, it was bombed out,
> > and for three days thereafter the exposed ruins were drenched with
> > rain, with the result that some 30,000 volumes of newspapers were
> destroyed."
> >
> > Richard D. Altrick, The Scholar Adventurers (New York: The Macmillan
> > Company, 1950), p. 235.
> >
> > Well, I suppose there are some books from the 18th century still at
> > the British Museum. Â But this may account for the sparseness of
> > 18th-century English newspaper files, such as the Burney Collection.
> >
> > Joel
> >
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> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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> "The horror! The horror!" And I'm serious. I was reading just last
> night that _Beowulf_ survives in only a single, partially-burned copy,
> as also does, for instance, the Old Russian _Slovo o polku igoreve_.
> Some scholars doubt the authenticity of the latter. But, given the
> utter lack of any other evidence, it all boils down to "different
> strokes for different folks."
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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