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why i am up so late


bokonon

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i was so surprised at how good that series was (is). i love all of the allusions to classical mythology. in the order of the phoenix it is amazing how rowling captures the emotions of teen angst. i do feel however that she makes harry a little effeminate. i have three brothers and i am a girl, and personally i think harry is more like a teenage girl in that book. but i am still impressed with the depth of his emotions in this book. this series got me in to other fantasy books. i have started the discworld series by terry pratchett. it is great satirical and hilarious fantasy. i also read wizards first rule by terry goodkind, that was great as well. (the wizard's first rule is that people are stupid and therefore will believe what they want to hear).

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quote:

Originally posted by bokonon:

i was so surprised at how good that series was (is). i love all of the allusions to classical mythology. in the order of the phoenix it is amazing how rowling captures the emotions of teen angst. i do feel however that she makes harry a little effeminate. i have three brothers and i am a girl, and personally i think harry is more like a teenage girl in that book. but i am still impressed with the depth of his emotions in this book. this series got me in to other fantasy books. i have started the discworld series by terry pratchett. it is great satirical and hilarious fantasy. i also read wizards first rule by terry goodkind, that was great as well. (the wizard's first rule is that people are stupid and therefore will believe what they want to hear).

Harry effeminate? I don't think so. I think Harry is just a insecure orphan and perhaps " a lot " sensitive. Plus, he's a bit of a prim-and-proper English kid.

I've read some Disc World books. They're fun and funny.

I've had my eye on Goodkind for years, but I vowed never to read another fantasy series that doesn't necessarily intend on ending within my lifetime: see Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series or Piers Anthony's Xanth set.

Two series that rank close to Tolkien in excellence and imagination are Michael Moorcock's Corum and Elric . Of course, these series are part of an even larger series called the Tales Of The Eternal Champion . I can't recommend them highly enough.

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Hmmm. Ask and ye shall receive:

(from World Wide Wordswww.quinion.com)

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[Q] From Ehud Maimon in Jerusalem: “I would appreciate it if you could help me find the origin of the expression sick as a dog.”

[A] There are several expressions of the form sick as a ..., that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sick as a dog is actually the oldest of them, recorded from 1705; it is probably no more than an attempt to give force to a strongly worded statement of physical unhappiness. It was attached to a dog, I would guess, because dogs often seem to have been linked to things considered unpleasant or undesirable; down the years they have had an incredibly bad press, linguistically speaking (think of dog tired, dog in the manger, dog’s breakfast, go to the dogs, dog Latin—big dictionaries have long entries about all the ways that dog has been used in a negative sense).

At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged in to the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can’t vomit; one nineteenth-century writer did suggest that this version was used “when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting”. The strangest member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731: “Poor Miss, she’s sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing” (stop laughing at the back).

The modern sick as a parrot recorded from the 1970s—at one time much overused by British sportsmen as the opposite of over the moon—refers to a state of deep mental depression rather than physical illness; this perhaps comes from instances of parrots contracting psittacosis and passing it to their human owners.

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I searched the site. There were no entries regarding the hotcakes question...

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