[Ads-l] antedating mundane

Bill Mullins amcombill at HOTMAIL.COM
Tue May 19 17:45:51 UTC 2020


It's a judgement call, but I was influenced by the sentence immediately following, "I prefer the weird yarn  . . . ", which caused me to think in this case "mundane" was specifically (as I said below) "that which is not weird".  YMMV . . . . .

> I would probably read that as the standard "ordinary, everyday" meaning of "mundane" -- the author is
> contrasting the weird/fantastic elements of the stories, which Lovecraft is most known for, with the
> realistic aspects of the stories, which are not given as much notice.
>
>> The OED SF Project has 1950 for the genre sense of "mundane" (adj.) (the OED has 1955).
>>
>> _The Acolyte_ Summer 1944 p.14
>> https://archive.org/details/TheAcolyte07V02n031944Summer/page/n17/mode/1up/
>> "And on top of it all, [H. P. Lovecraft] did create remarkably faithful and sound mundane backgrounds and personalities."
>> (Typically, "mundane" would be "that which is not SF"; here it is "that which is not weird".)
>>
>>

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