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

[Laurence Horn]

Yeah, that used to come up when explaining why /h/ and /N/ couldn't be members of the same phoneme despite their complementary distribution (syllable initial vs. syllable final)--much more physically dissimilar than Superman and Clark Kent, especially when the latter removes his glasses.

LH

On Jun 1, 2014, at 7:55 AM, Geoffrey Steven Nathan wrote:

> And the reference to Superman/Clark Kent is a useful metaphor when trying to explain 'phonemes'--they are physically similar and never in the same place at the same time.
>
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
> Faculty Liaison, C&IT
> and Professor, Linguistics Program
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>
> Nobody at Wayne State will EVER ask you for your password. Never send it to anyone in an email, no matter how authentic the email looks.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
>> From: "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>> Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2014 8:40:11 PM
>> Subject: Re: OT almost entirely: Radu Florescu, 88, Scholar of
>> Dracula, and the OED
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject: Re: OT almost entirely: Radu Florescu, 88, Scholar of
>> Dracula,
>> and the OED
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>> 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
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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