Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
John Greenleaf Whittier
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edgar Allan Poe
James Fenimore Cooper
Arthur Conan Doyle
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Robert Louis Stevenson
Louisa May Alcott
Kind 2:
John Keats
William Shakespeare
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Emily Dickinson
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Jane Austen
Thomas Hardy
William Manchester
Grace Metalious
Jacqueline Susann
Tom Clancy
John Grisham
Kind 3:
T. S. Eliot
G. K. Chesterton
H. L. Mencken
P. G. Wodehouse
P. L. Travers
W. H. Auden
D. H. Lawrence
S. I. Hayakawa
You do see the differences, don’t you? No? It's simple, really. Some writers use three names, some use two names, and some use only their initials.
Similarly, there are also different kinds of inventors (Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford)...
British prime ministers (Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Tony Blair, Alexander Douglas-Home, David Lloyd George)...
American presidents (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William Henry Harrison, John Fitzgerald Kennedy)...
and Supreme Court justices (John Jay, John Marshall, Earl Warren, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hugo Black, John Roberts).
Anomalies exist, exceptions that do nothing to prove any rule whatsoever, like F. Murray Abraham (an actor), k.d. lang (a singer), Samuel F. B. Morse (an inventor), e. e. cummings (a poet), Ulysses S. Grant (a president), Harry S. Truman (a president), H.V. Kaltenborn (old-time radio commentator), Cher (an unexplainable phenomenon), Madonna (another unexplainable phenomenon)....
Comments?
In other news, Blogger tells me that this is my 1,742nd post, which reminds me that the first public performance of Handel's Messiah occurred in Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, 1742.
When you think about it, a composer is just another type of writer. In addition, however, a composer is an expert in the field of symbolic representation, being able to produce on paper odd-looking symbols that allow people who are trained to read them to use musical instruments to project into the air the sounds that were originally inside the composer's head. I wrote that last sentence unassisted.
I was told about 60 years ago that musicians and linguists (users of natural languages spoken by humans) and computer programmers (users of artificial languages understood by machines) and stenographers (users of shorthand) and telegraph operators (users of the dot-and-dash system invented by Samuel F.B. Morse) and even wavers of semaphore flags (users of semaphore flags) share the very same aptitude -- namely, the ability to take a set of symbols and convert them into another form.
Just think how long it might have taken Handel to write his Messiah oratorio if he had had to use semaphore flags.
...and it would have been even longer if he had been aboard a boat:
Maybe musical notation is not so bad after all.
"Blogger tells me that this is my 1,742nd post, which reminds me that the first public performance of Handel's Messiah occurred in Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, 1742."
ReplyDeleteThat's certainly what I would have thought of. Say, how did those flag waver guys arrange their flags so they could get to them? I'm sure they did something better than squeeze them all under one arm and wave them with the other.
Snow, if you're talking about the semaphore flags, they only needed two. If you're talking about the nautical flags, I guess they ran them up the halyard or lanyard or mizzen mast or whatever it's called and let them wave in the breeze on their own.
DeleteI was, yes. The one kind of flag followed the other (in your post), so I thought the flags were used in the same way. Now that you've explained it to me, I'm still flummoxed because if every letter had to be raised to the top of the pole one letter at a time, it must have been excruciating to send an entire message, even an entire short message. I should think that the whole purpose of sending some messages would have be lost by the time those messages were completed. I should also think that it would have been desirable to start the message in the early a.m. so as to complete it before nightfall, and to use more than one pole for the purpose.
DeleteSnow, no, no, not one letter at a time with the nautical. They would attach several flags at once to the line and run them up the flagpole or whatever. The two charts in the post are not to the same scale! That would be scary.
DeleteThis gets better. Now they hop left and right.
ReplyDeleteI had to learn both Morse and signal flags...Forgotten most of it but it wasn't too bad as the flags like (P) meant we are singled up and ready to go.
I think (W) was we require urgent medical assistance or maybe it was we have run aground, possibly something else.
Nelson was a master at the job but then he had to be as Morse code hadn't been invented.
I hated Morse as we had to be able to read about forty words a minute, radio operators had to send and receive a word a second. Weird they were. Semaphore was an army thing and a little beneath us.
I had my own notation for music as though I play the flute or did before stiff fingers stopped such fun. I used to get proper folk to pop dots on the score and then by trial and error stretch notes out till it sounded about right. I had to then be told which were sharps and flats to make me sound competent. I hd a tendency to slow down on fast bits as well but in a folk band few noticed. Those that did were either rude or pedants.
Adrian, I was tested to be a radio operator in the Air Force in 1961 but ended up beoming a computer programmer instead. The only Morse code I remember today is SOS (... _ _ _ ...) because my Dad taught it to me on my Boy Scout flashlight, three shorts, three longs, three shorts, aka dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit. I have been reading music since the age of seven; playing piano and organ are second nature to me. Semaphore flags and nautical flags and braille, however, are mind-blowing, similar to being able to play the guitar.
DeleteTwo of my favorite authors are in your third group, C.S. Lewis and P.G. Wodehouse and another is in your first group, Anthony Trollope. I know how important the signal flags were, from my reading of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels. They had to be done quickly in battle.
ReplyDeleteRobert h brague doesn't fit any group!
ReplyDeletekylie, I guess I'm a square peg looking to fit in a round hole. Groucho Marx once said that he wouldn't want to be a part of any group that would accept him for membership.
DeleteTerra, I don't know how I could have forgotten C.S. Lewis in the third group, except that I often think of him as Clive Staples Lewis instead. There are so many writers I could have included but didn't: Ezra Pound springs to mind, and Virginia Woolf, and Charles Dickens.
ReplyDeleteI can deal with words and music. When it comes to flags, Morse code, flags, and all these other communication types my brain starts to spin.
ReplyDeleteEmma, we are kindred spirits in that regard, except that I continue to be fascinated by both natural and programming languages. The latter convert ultimately to nothing but a series of zeroes and ones as that is all a computer really understands (on/off, yes/no, pure binary decisions).
ReplyDeleteWhen I went to college it was initially to become a computer programmer. The binary code and flow charts seemed unnecessary to me (and I know they are necessary) so I switched to accounting.
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