Saturday at Moe’s I found a recent reprint of the great Monier-Williams dictionary of Sanskrit (1899) for $35, about a quarter of what I had expected to pay someday for it. Whee. I find, by the way, that Indian printing has much improved since the Seventies.

Okay, the Grammar Police gag has been done before, if not quite so stylishly. I don’t mind an excuse to plug my favorite college strip.

The oddest things sometimes bug me. Does anyone else remember a children’s book which mentions eating “roast beast”?

Update. One reader (see, this is how I smoke you out) points it out in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I feel that the thing tickling at the back door of my mind is in prose; something between Winnie the Pooh and Fractured Fairy Tales — but maybe that’s just neural interference from the Questing Beast of The Once and Future King.

a chuckle from John and Antonio:

We once knew a woman who got a job translating three porn flicks from Italian to Spanish. Why did they bother, you ask. Because they were done in (well, mostly out of) Renaissance dress and the dialogue was in hexameters.

Three such flicks?

How old is the convention of writing nicknames as middle names, e.g. (taking a handy fictional example) “Tim ‘Curly’ Beamish”? Why do you see even “Tim ‘Curly Tim’ Beamish” (gordelpus) rather than “‘Curly’ Tim Beamish”? What is the convention (if any) in other languages?

2004 Nov 12: KBLX has a disc-jockey called Victor ‘Big Daddy’ Zaragosa in announcements, but he calls himself Big Daddy Victor Zaragosa.

Did I really write “satiral” yesterday? Funny. Wonder why that isn’t a proper word, anyway.

What is the Latin plural of Elvis?
I’ve just seen Elvii, which is clearly wrong (the singular would then be Elvius).
The most obvious candidate is Elves, but of course one cannot count on one’s readers to pronounce it with two syllables.
On another hand, maybe it’s a consonantal stem, with a plural such as Elvires, Elvites or Elvides. The existence of the feminine form Elvira (no pun intended) suggests the first of these.
(In each of these the last /e/ is long.)