Pedants' Paradise

[jean]

The new BBC MM, page 128, Music Quiz, poses the following question: "The Goose of Cairo... is a comic opera that was begun by which composer in 1783 but left incomplete at the time of his death?"

My inner pedant complains that "at the time of his death" should be omitted. This work was indeed left incomplete, but these words surely mean that the composer was actually working on it when he died (OK pedants, immediately before he died), but that isn't the case here: he had given up on it completely and hadn't touched the score for eight years.

Am I supported by my fellow pedants?

And does the final question mark grate on others at all?

So perhaps a case for the past perfect - which had been left incomplete? Though as he couldn't complete it afterwards, perhaps it's not necessary to say he didn't.

The passive was begun does seem to leave open the possibility of someone else completing it for him, though.

I don't see where else the final question mark could go.

[french frank]

Rearrange the following elements:

Name of opera: The Goose of Cairo
Genre: comic
Starting date of composition: 1783
State in which it was left: unfinished
Question: who composed it?

[jean]

You could say it was left unfinished by anyone who didn't finish it.

That's all of us.

[LeMartinPecheur]

I don't see where else the final question mark could go.

Obviously if the sentence is a question the question mark goes at the end. Maybe ff's breakdown of the sentence highlights the issue: much of it is a series of factual statements. It opens with 'The Goose of Cairo is a comic opera and closes with '[it was] left incomplete at the composer's death'. The word that makes it any sort of question is 'which', buried in the middle. I'd be happier if the marker for the question came at the beginning, "Which composer began a comic opera 'The Goose of Cairo' in 1783 and left it incomplete?"; or at the end as in ff's version.

Even better might be to make it imperative, "Name the composer whose comic opera ............".

[french frank]

You could say it was left unfinished by anyone who didn't finish it.

That's all of us.

Pedantry gone mad! (And how would anyone know that I hadn't 'finished' it myself?)

[Pabmusic]

The new BBC MM, page 128, Music Quiz, poses the following question: "The Goose of Cairo... is a comic opera that was begun by which composer in 1783 but left incomplete at the time of his death?"

My inner pedant complains that "at the time of his death" should be omitted. This work was indeed left incomplete, but these words surely mean that the composer was actually working on it when he died (OK pedants, immediately before he died), but that isn't the case here: he had given up on it completely and hadn't touched the score for eight years.

Am I supported by my fellow pedants?

And does the final question mark grate on others at all?

"The Goose of Cairo....is a comic opera begun in 1783 but incomplete when its composer died. Who was the composer?"

(Rather shorter than the original, too.)

[Petrushka]

"The Goose of Cairo....is a comic opera begun in 1783 but incomplete when its composer died. Who was the composer?"

(Rather shorter than the original, too.)

This solution seems ideal to me. The original is a classic case of trying to convey too much information in one sentence so that the question mark at the end looks out of place. Far better to split the sentence into the two separate components, as Pabs has done, to convey the necessary information first, then ask the question.

As an aside, we had a memo from our company CEO last week that was littered with spelling and grammatical errors. This guy is on a salary way beyond anything I'll ever achieve and he can barely string a sentence together without making schoolboy mistakes

[Despina dello Stagno]

As an aside, we had a memo from our company CEO last week that was littered with spelling and grammatical errors. This guy is on a salary way beyond anything I'll ever achieve and he can barely string a sentence together without making schoolboy mistakes

A phenomenon observed and recorded by Half Man Half Biscuit (Turned up, clocked on, laid off): "There's people who can't spell "weird" right driving round with thousands in the bank."

And Mozart (if it is he) never embarked on any English langage operas. L'oca del Cairo, anyone?

[jean]

"The Goose of Cairo... is a comic opera that was begun by which composer in 1783 but left incomplete at the time of his death?"

"Who stared to compose a comic opera in 1783 with the working titile The Goose of Cairo, but never finished it?"

(Because who knows what he would have called it if he'd ever got to the end?)

[Rue Dubac]

Christmas BBC Music Magazine has also written on p. 81 that someone was "wracked with despair." Hung about with seaweed? I suspect the writer means "feeling tortured as if on a rack". No doubt trivial, but this is becoming quite common and it really annoys me. There, now I feel better.

[Pabmusic]

Christmas BBC Music Magazine has also written on p. 81 that someone was "wracked with despair." Hung about with seaweed? I suspect the writer means "feeling tortured as if on a rack". No doubt trivial, but this is becoming quite common and it really annoys me. There, now I feel better.

It might be trivial in the scheme of things, but it's a good example of a set phrase that is not easily comprehensible now, since neither wrack nor rack (in the torture sense) are commonly used. That's why the two words become confused. It's like "the event was a bit of a damp squid" - which even seems a bit sensible, because squid are wet. No-one as far as I know buys a squib anymore - they wouldn't produce loud enough bangs - but I remember buying many as a child as November 5th approached.

An apposite case of this is the cockroach (there are rather a lot of them here in the Philippines) whose name was misunderstood from the start. The British don't seem to have encountered them much before the 17th Century. In 1624, Capt. John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) described a "certaine India Bug, called by the Spaniards a Cacarootch, the which creeping into Chests they eat and defile with their ill-sented dung". Because cucuracha was unintelligible to the British, cock and roach were substituted, but only because of their sounds. So we have a pest named after a bird (or quite possibly something else) and a fish.

[jean]

Another example of two words easily confused - the transitive to lay and the intransitive to lie. Confusing the present tenses of these has become an index of illiteracy (though I don't think they were always so clearly distinguished) but other parts present more difficulties. Here is Will Self in Saturday's Guardian:

...If my buddleia-tinged memories seem irrational, it’s because the inner London of that era was pretty run-down, with derelict buildings, overgrown plots and a pervasive griminess – the sooty sediment lain down by coal fires, domestic and industrial...

The pretentiousness of the rest makes the mistake the more delicious.

[gurnemanz]

Another example of two words easily confused - the transitive to lay and the intransitive to lie. Confusing the present tenses of these has become an index of illiteracy (though I don't think they were always so clearly distinguished) but other parts present more difficulties. Here is Will Self in Saturday's Guardian:

...If my buddleia-tinged memories seem irrational, it’s because the inner London of that era was pretty run-down, with derelict buildings, overgrown plots and a pervasive griminess – the sooty sediment lain down by coal fires, domestic and industrial...

The pretentiousness of the rest makes the mistake the more delicious.

Lay/lie confusion is a major annoyance to me. The inability to recognise the transitive/intransitive distinction is coupled with the confusion about past tense and past participle usage. It is not uncommon to hear such abuse as : "He's took ..." "I seen him yesterday". I teach German and a few times over the years students have commented to me that they have only grasped the lay/lie distinction by comparison with the exact German equivalents: legen/liegen.

[jean]

But to be fair to us, the German verbs preserve a greater distinction between the two - the principal parts of legen are legen • legte • gelegt, and of liegen, liegen • lag • gelegen

We have to cope with lay being the present tense of to lay, but also the simple past of to lie. No wonder we're confused.

[LeMartinPecheur]

An apposite case of this is the cockroach (there are rather a lot of them here in the Philippines) whose name was misunderstood from the start. The British don't seem to have encountered them much before the 17th Century. In 1624, Capt. John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) described a "certaine India Bug, called by the Spaniards a Cacarootch, the which creeping into Chests they eat and defile with their ill-sented dung". Because cucuracha was unintelligible to the British, cock and roach were substituted, but only because of their sounds. So we have a pest named after a bird (or quite possibly something else) and a fish.

Cf. crayfish (crevice)!