{"id":3818,"date":"2012-08-29T11:51:54","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T16:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=3818"},"modified":"2012-08-29T07:30:33","modified_gmt":"2012-08-29T12:30:33","slug":"worst_introduction_ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2012\/08\/worst_introduction_ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Worst Introduction Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tuesday, 28 August 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today I finished reading the Wordsworth Children’s Classic version of Aesop’s Fables<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This was one of three books I brought with me to the cabin last week, and it was the only one I didn’t finish reading while there. I finished it up today during my lunch break.<\/p>\n

I’ve wanted to read Aesop’s fables for a long time. I’ve heard many speakers reference them and I just wanted to, for once, see them all laid out before me in print. I bought this book using a discount coupon at “Half” Price Books last spring. It sat on my shelf until this month.<\/p>\n

Now, while I enjoyed many of the fables, and the accompanying illustrations by Arthur Rackham are outstanding, here’s what I want to talk about instead: the Introduction, by G.K. Cherterton, is possibly the worst introduction I’ve read in any book. Ever.<\/p>\n

First of all, G.K. likes to write himself a rambling prose. The five page intro contains only <\/em>five paragraphs. And in those paragraphs there are some insanely long sentences. For example, the sentence that begins on page 18 and continues to page 19 boasts a whopping 110 words. (Yes, I did take the time to count.)<\/p>\n

Amidst the largely incoherent prose, G.K. inserts a few doozies. Here’s what he says on page 15:<\/p>\n

“The nursery fairy tales may have come out of Asia with the Indo-European race, now fortunately <\/span>extinct…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh man, I’m so glad those pesky Indo-Europeans are extinct, aren’t you? I mean, after all, they’re not fully<\/em> European, so damn their bastardized hybridization!<\/p>\n

Here’s something from the very next page:<\/p>\n

“The truth is, of course, that Aesop’s Fables <\/em>are not Aesop’s fables, any more than Grimm’s Fairy Tales<\/em> were ever Grimm’s fairy tales.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, you say, even though he sounds like he’s stuttering here, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is he’s here trying to point out that Aesop merely collected the fables – he didn’t start them. But then, on page 19 (a mere two paragraphs later), he writes: “…whether fables began with Aesop or began with Adam…” So what is it, GK? Did fables begin with Aesop or not? Oh – and I like the choice here: fables either started with Aesop or they started with Adam. Yeah, it’s really one of the other. I’m sure it was Adam. In between having rib surgery, hanging out at a nudist camp, and naming two million species of animals, he also had time to pen a few dozen fables.<\/p>\n

Did I mention that Adam is fake?<\/p>\n

Here’s another asinine comment:<\/p>\n

“There can be no good fable with human beings in it” (page 17).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What? That means that, like, half the book is “no good.” Indeed, three of the first five fables in the book have people in them, and one of them – “The Charcoal-Burner\u00a0& the Fuller” – has only <\/em>people in it (no animals).<\/p>\n

And on page 18, he writes, “As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow…” When I read this statement, I had to check on the copyright of the book. It was published in 1994. I was around back then, and I don’t recall any children’s book, toy, or TV show telling kids that “A is for Ass.” Can you even picture Elmo saying something like on Sesame Street<\/em>? In our books at home (many of which were published in the 90s), A is for Apple or Ant or Alligator. It’s never ever ever for Ass.<\/p>\n

(Although, this does give me an idea: an A to Z book of scatological words: A is for Ass, B is for Bowel Movement, C is for Crotch… Who’s with me?)<\/p>\n

And just as an example of the incoherent nature of GK’s prose, here’s one example that stood out to me, primarily because it uses the word atheist<\/em>, and I always perk up when I see freethought terms in unexpected places:<\/p>\n

“Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to anyone is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What. The hell. Does that mean? I could just picture my wife and I sitting on the couch looking down at our cat:<\/p>\n

ME: You know Jennifer, I love our cat.<\/p>\n

SHE: Are you sure? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure you simply salute her as an expression of abstract and anonymous energy in nature.<\/p>\n

ME: Oh yeah, you’re right. And since I don’t believe in deities, she’s simply frightful.<\/p>\n

Yep, this is exactly how we kick off many an evening.<\/p>\n

GK ends his steaming pile of doggerel by claiming: “There is every type and time of fable: but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything.”<\/p>\n

Huh? What does it mean “every time<\/span> of fable”? And what’s with the odd use of a colon and the incorrect use of a semicolon? And how is there “only one moral to everything”? Everything<\/em>? Really? Like, can’t a story or a poem or, heck, even a person’s entire life, have more than one moral to it? This was just a stupid ending to a stupid introduction. My advice is to buy the book, but rip out the introduction and use it to wipe your A is for ____.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tuesday, 28 August 2012 Today I finished reading the Wordsworth Children’s Classic version of Aesop’s Fables. This was one of three books I brought with me to the cabin last week, and it was the only one I didn’t finish reading while there. I finished it up today during my lunch break. I’ve wanted to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3818"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3822,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3818\/revisions\/3822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}