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  • Hacker News
  • "Let's eat, grandma!" vs "Let's eat grandma!"
    by chrisweekly
  • Let’s eat, Grandma.
    by noworld
  • I helped my Uncle, Jack, off a horse!
    by N_Lens
  • Sometimes it's the difference between helping your uncle, Jack, off a horse. Or helping your uncle jack off a horse.
    by walrus01
  • > what about, say, the war in Gaza?

    That was not on my top-5 list of things that may be in that article.

    by piskov
  • Dang says tomhow is the better moderator.

    Dang, says tomhow, is the better moderator.

    by wpollock
  • The author quotes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

    Then comments:

    > I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”? “Paddle” sounds a little silly, but that’s the metaphor Fitzgerald is using. (Those boats must be canoes, not steamboats. A steamboat wouldn’t care that much about a current.)

    A reminder of the obscurity of Fitzgerald's analogy, which is specific to the technology of sailing: A "beat" is a course that will take the boat upwind -- always a challenge. And if the current of the water is pointed downwind, perhaps impossible.

    Somehow none of the New Yorker editors caught this either.

    by everybodyknows
  • The play and motion picture Wit by Margaret Edson fixates on a poem by John Donne, Death be not Proud.

    The fixation is on the last line of the poem:

    And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

    The assertion is that Donne did not intend the use of a semicolon, and converting it to a comma significantly alters the meaning, profoundly uplifting the aura of spirituality.

    The play:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wit_(play)

    The poem:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Be_Not_Proud

    Discussion:

    https://lavelleporter.com/2015/02/13/readingwit/

    "Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause."

    by chasil

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