Coming around again ...

[wellinghall]

A book meme, this time from miss_t_ide

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

The first book was an insurance policy document, which doesn't go up to page 123. The second book was the OED, which, while interesting, has a somewhat terse, spare style. So let's go for the third book, which is "Saturnalia", by Lindsey Davis.

"Oh, green fire is totally outmoded, darling. Delia only does it to calm her poor nerves. Bats' eyes, now; bats' eyes never go out of fashion. Tricky, though ... . And bones of course."

Comments

[hyalma.livejournal.com]

:-))

'Well, no', answered Pippin. 'To tell you the truth, since you have guessed it, we got into the lane from the other end: we had come over your fields. But that was quite by accident. We lost our way in the woods, back near Woodhall, trying to take a short cut to the Ferry".

Reading my friends-list, I've held LOTR in my hand...

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

That sounds entirely reasonable to me :-)

[muuranker.livejournal.com]

I have Renier's Dutch Dictionary.

Words 6 to 13 are:

gulden - golden

gulhartig - open, frank

gulp - fly (of trousers)

gulweg - openly

gulzig - greedy

gummi - (india) rubber

gunnen - to grant or allow


A couple down is:

guur - cold and stormy, bleak

At one point, I learned three irregular Dutch verbs a day: it was a kind of prophesying by verbs. If this works for dictionarys, not only will we have _guur_ weather this June and July. But we will be frankly told our flies are open, but be permitted a golden rubber.

[mrkinch.livejournal.com]

I want to know what entry is the sixth one on page 123 of the OED! And seventh, if the sixth is short.

Memes like this have always bothered me because they do not say whether to count the initial partial sentence on the page. I think my concern is ridiculous and sad, but it remains.

Concern

[miss-t-ide.livejournal.com]

The book I chose (The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins) had a new sentence begin at the start of page 123. But, having said that, I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to start at the fifth sentence itself, or begin from the sixth.

English can be terribly ambiguous sometimes, can't it?

Re: Concern

[mrkinch.livejournal.com]

Indeed! Has one found the beginning of the fifth sentence, so that it would be "next", or has one found the fifth sentence as a whole? I think I find a sentence as a whole, so that I would then quote beginning with the sixth. However, the book nearest me has long sentences involving non-standard characters (Shippey's

Root and Branch

, specifically a paragraph on the sources of "Mirkwood") and I'm just not going to try.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Sixth: "be-in": A public gathering of hippies. Two citations from 1967.

Seventh: "beine" = both. See "bo".

[freya-9.livejournal.com]

Well. I have learned that lesson tonight. It is a pity Nevare did not learn that lesson much earlier.'
It was the cruellest thing I'd ever heard my mother say to my father. I had never even imagined they had conversations as this.
'Perhaps you are right. In which case, he would not have survived long as a soldier anyway.'

- Robin Hobb
- Shaman's Crossing