From When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World, regarding the grammarian and critic Ibn Durayd:

"Always generous and improvident, he was frequently penniless and was well known for his love of wine. ... He was once reproached for giving wine as alms to a beggar and was quite unrepentant, saying that he had nothing else to give. His lifestyle was not without its perils: when he was working in Fars, he fell off the roof of his house one night and broke his collarbone, probably, though he does not say it, because he was drunk. ... As he lay in pain trying to sleep, he had a classic literary critic's nightmare in which he recited two of his verses in praise of wine. When he had done, Satan appeared and asked him whether he was trying to do better than the great Abu Nuwas. When Ibn Durayd admitted he was, Satan told him that his verses were not too bad but he had made one solecism, saying that the wine was narcissus yellow and then anemone red all at the same time; the poet woke up abruptly, mortified by this supernatural criticism."

Hee hee hee. I love this so much I cannot even tell you.



ETA: Though now I'm trying to figure out what solecism would create the semantic error that Satan describes -- using the same case ending for both adjectives, maybe?

From Discover Magazine:

"But could one chatbot fool another chatbot? What would one say to another in private? To find out, we arranged a conversation between these two chatbots. To get each snippet of chat rolling, we seeded it by posing a question from one bot to the other. After that, they were on their own. What follows is the unaltered text of what each said—the sound of two machines talking."


My favorite bit:
"A: Do you dream?

J: Yes, I dream.

A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?

J: I remember them vividly.

A: What do you remember about it?

J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot."

I need a fairy-tale, folklore & mythos wiki. Preferably one with one foot in TvTropes and one foot in Aarne-Thompson's classification system. I want to be able to read The Buried Moon and then be able to follow links to other Stories Where The Moon Is A Character, and Stories Where People Are Buried Underground, Stories in Which Coffins Have Great Significance. And so on. And so forth. A wiki specifically for people who mine folklore for inspiration & story material and is willing to link things the way they link them in their heads.

Does anything like that exist? Or do I have to actually (gasp) learn how to create wikis and put this on the Projects list?


(And, while I twiddle my thumbs and wait for the internet to answer me on the larger question of the day -- folktales & stories about mothers who kill or abandon very young children: anyone know any?)

In an article for BA Sem about disease and stigmatizaion, I came across a fantastic French colloquialism: une peur bleue (a blue fear). It's a reference to cholera, which turns the patient's skin a bluish-black before it kills him, and translates semantically as "an overwhelming, transfixing fear".



Also, armadillos are apparently the only non-primate species that can contract leprosy. Just thought you'd like to know.