i love academics

[highlyeccentric]

they're so wonderfully snarky. Over at Wormtalk and Slugspeak, Michael Drout is delighted by the snarkiness of W.W. Skeat. Meanwhile, Dr Nokes is tickled by the acerbic nature of Henry Sweet.

Moving into this last century, may I present to you the opening passage of W.F. Bolton's review of F. Anne Payne's King Alfred and Boethius?*

This is a curiously thin book. The argument proper, following the introduction, comprises hardly more than 40,000 words; and given that constructions like 'the fact that Alfred failed' could be rewritten as 'Alfred's failure' on every page, it could have been still shorter without loss of content. The footnotes are few; there is no bibliography; the index does not mention secondary sources (nor, for that matter, such central topics to the discussion as 'Wisdom'). With suitable editing, the book could well have been an article.

And in the next pargraph, refering to her introduction: this is mere textbook stuff, and most undergraduates would find it easy to duplicate.

Translation: nice try, but what made you think you could play with the big boys?

or, as Stuart Thomson would put it: "rrow! saucer of milk to table four!"

*The Modern Language Review, 65.2, 1970 pp 364-365