Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Blogger wastes lunchtime in pedantic discussion about Peter Jackson. Ends up quoting Python.

4 comments:

Mike Taylor said...

In case anyone else is having trouble finding Andrew's contribution to this discussion, it begins with Comment #110, which is on the eleventh page, which you might be able to get to directly using this URL:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=227751&page=11

It continues with several more comments on subsequent pages, not all of which I have read yet.

And, hey, what about David Blunkett? And what about That Nice Mister Blair not being allowed to lock naughty people up for as long as we wants?

Andrew Rilstone said...

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=228413&page=2

Unknown said...

So as not to introduce further tangent to the message board discussion, I will ask here if someone can enlighten me as to one of the final comments:

"I too am annoyed by the American usage of 'Professor' to refer to anyone with a university teaching role and the way it obscures the (British) concept of professorship."

Can someone tell about the "British concept of professorship" in this context?

If it helps, some examples of (my) American usage: I understand that the proper address in this case is "Dr. Tolkien." If he held a professorship but no doctorate, I would address him as "Professor Tolkien"; if he were a university instructor who was not a professor and had no doctorate, I would address him as "Mr. Tolkien"--but if I didn't know whether he was officially designated a professor (and didn't think he had a doctorate), I would probably say "Professor Tolkien" just to be on the safe side.

I'm not 100% sure that these are the according-to-Emily-Post correct usages, but it's what I've picked up from observation. No one tells young Americans how to do these things properly, of course. (We used first names with all our profs at my college, so I've only had to use this kind of formal address in correspondence with instructors I don't know.)

TM said...

On the subject of The Shining, in fact King did detest the Kubrick version, and he did later make his own version. And this version was, in fact, rubbish.

Whether King has since changed his mind, in the vein of Anne Rice's views on Tom Cruise, I couldn't say. But he was, to begin with, a vehement non-fan of the Kubrick film.