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I'm planning to do another actual wwftd theme! you can earn an assist (a mention at the bottom) by suggesting here some favorite of yours that you'd like to see escape the Limbo of tortured usage. like just then. another example might be the Pharisees, or maybe I could compare and contrast Eris and Loki.
TIA.
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uncle bill suggests that it might prove to be difficult to compare Eris and Loki, as the only thing they really shared was a penchant for causing trouble.
I haven't given it all that much thought, but I did find this with a quick google:
Actually, [Loki] does have many other aspects in common with Eris, including bad puns and mental masturbation.
so it looks as though I could expand this to a comparative study of Loki/Eris/AWADtalk.
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>bad puns and mental masturbation
and there's that fowl chicken, again.
formerly known as etaoin...
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If I promise to think on it, tsuwm, will you promise to think on a new Hawgwarsh?
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Later on he would see her bright, pellucid eyes, like shallow water, and know those. And there remained the open, exposed mouth, red and vulnerable...
DH Lawrence, The Rainbow
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The last cages they passed were those of the sleepy, disgruntled lions; the tigers looked equally listless and out of humor. The reckless driver ran his fingers along the bars of the big cats' cages; occasionally a paw (claws extended) flicked out, but Ramu confidently withdrew his hand in time...
Ch 23, A Son of the Circus, John Irving
I love how some words show the Old English bones beneath the grin... listless is another, as if called by association...
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And at the other pole, insinuating Latinate extractions...
In Act Five too, in what Ralph saw as the sublime way of plays, everything begins to coalesce.
also later in this passage:
As Ralph would soon have it proved again, though art perpetually improved itself, society went its reckless and complicated way.
Ch 26, The Playmaker, Thomas Keneally
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And then there are the strange-sounding words that feel like they've never quite done more than graft themselves onto the native stock of our langauge:
The Jeep was where I'd left it, looted but with enough gas in the tank to get me to a town. I managed to hot-wire it and drove away as fast as the surface would permit. I did not turn on the headlights. Fortunately there was a bright-yellow gibbous moon to light my way.
Ch 8, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie
So I guess my emmergent sub-theme would be about degrees of nativity or assimilation into the core language :)
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or not.
d'oh, I forgot that tiny little detail that presumably you're looking for a subset of ineffably obscure words... I'll sleep before posting at some ungawdly hour next time, I promise!
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from the slightly obscure genre of science fiction (and this could be a sub-theme entire):
[the Hero of Heinlein's Glory Road finds himself camping under the unfamiliar sky of an unknown planet.]
She didn't put the light back on, so I had nothing to look at but the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I had fallen into a book...
I watched the hurtling moons of Barsoom and fell asleep.
written in 1963, this alludes to Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Mars" series, begun in 1911
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..it's the X-Files theme.
{{the following is a blatant internet ripoff of X-Files}}
later that same day
Skinner laid there beside Mulder and let himself be petted and soothed. "The idiots," he grumbled.
"Shh," Mulder said for the fifth time. "Nothing happened to them. It's all right." So they were lying there in silence, perfectly able to hear a long, rich moan, then a flurry of coughing and some hastily smothered chuckles from the next room.
"Hell!" Skinner whispered furiously. "'Nothing' happened to them, huh?"
"What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?" Mulder quoted ruefully. It took him another half hour before he was able to calm Skinner enough to sleep.
In the morning, they said nothing about it.
A Dog in the Manger, by JiM
---
here's what "Mulder" was alluding to, from Glory Road:
"...If it hadn't been for the strange thing the dog did in the night, the busies would have nabbed us?"
"What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?"
---
could Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time been inspired by Heinlein's line?
the story doesn't (seemingly) relate in any way at all; but I'd sure like to like to ask Haddon about that title.
[my sincere apologies to Mulder/Skinner fans; that ripoff is truly dreadful.]
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the strange thing the dog did in the night
Which was itself taken from The Hound of the Baskervilles.
- Moe (no relation) Obvious
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"Which was itself taken from The Hounds of the Baskervilles."
____________ From the Net ____________________________________________________
Conan Doyle first heard of Dartmoor's hounds of hell in March 1901, while staying in Norfolk with his friend Fletcher Robinson. On those cold, rainy evenings, Robinson told stories he had learned as a child living on the high moors of Dartmoor horrifying stories of a creature known as The Dewer, an amalgam of the Devil and earlier pagan nature gods, who stalked the moors in the company of a huge black dog and chased unfortunate wayfarers over rocky cliffs to their deaths on the rocks below. More frightening yet, he sometimes led a howling pack of gigantic, red-eyed hounds on 'Whist Hunts', emerging from Wistman's collection of gnarled, twisted oaks of incredible age to hunt down the souls of unbaptized babies.____________________________________________________ End
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the fact of the matter is that Heinlein utilized a great many literary allusions in his sf.
- joe (but don't quote me) friday
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Why, Milo, I'm shocked!  A rigorous scholar like you using the amorphous, generic "net" as a source?! 
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Smile. I'm afraid you misunderstand AnnaS, I use the net when it pleases me. Regrettably I can't remember why it pleased me at that particular time and juncture of my oh-so-busy life, but it did. Maybe it was to one-up Faldage. Maybe it was to help Mr. tswum with his project. I can't be sure. But what I do know is that afterwards I felt soiled and dirtied; a lower man than before my rogue fingers asked Google to find. I will hereby promise not to use the net until my next birthday and my birthday is not until December. I make this commitment in a faint hope to regain my own self-respect, so please wish me luck. And so I repeat... I, Milum Milo Amemeba, will not visit the World Wide Web for the purposes of gathering information until late next December, except, of course, for finding definitions when I play a game of Hogwash.___________________________________________________________________ 
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never mind, milums. my project is foundering(!), as we speak, anyway. I'll just salvage what I can from this and transition to collection mode, wherein the debris will lie moldering amongst much other wwftd flotsam.
! - kinda sorta crossthreading
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Heinlein utilized a great many literary allusions
Stranger in a Strange Land.
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a person could make a career (and a poor one) out of disallusioning TP.
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From R.A. Lafferty's PAST MASTER 1968_______________________________
With a shiver of triumph they came to the top. It was a crooked-shaped plateau,
an iron-rock slope that looked like sponge and smelled of ozone.
And someone had been there before them, very recently.
The one who had been there was both the necromancer and haruspex,
and his recent studies were spread out on the iron-rock.
Push me nowt so far, brat-child. I say me words and I think me thoughts,
but to what should they correspond?
____________________________________ Thomas More speaking to Evita on planet Astrolobe.
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the crow: d'oh.
the interlocutor: what could be diviner than the necromancer and the haruspex?
ron the obviousizer: naught.
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