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Yes, I really read every word of Agnes Nixon's All My Children, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 by Rosemarie Santini. Now, I admit, I've watched the show since it started in 1970, and the books were interesting in terms of what I remembered and what I had totally forgotten. This review, however, will be divided into categories much different than those in my regular reviews, specifically grammatical problems, huh, oh-my-God-am-I-really reading-this, and soft porn moments. (BTW, I'm pretty sure Ms Santini wrote the books at the behest of some publisher who wanted to present the All My Children activities without the ABC sponsors.)

Grammatical problems: there were a few—actually more than a few— but I couldn't find them when I reread the dog-eared pages. The one I remember was a place where God was capitalized—just like the rules of grammar it should be—and then a few lines later referred to as he was a small case h. My memory is that is the name of God or any word that refers to him should be capitalized. But then I figured the book was probably written by some gains in Yankee, and it didn't matter.

Huh: Race was, not surprisingly, never mentioned. I considered that odd because a married couple that I remember being African-American arrived in town. Neither one of them was ever described. A few chapters later though, Tyrone, a pimp from the nearby big city, showed up. He was not described either, but I figure the writer assumed the reader would know he was black because he wore a bright pink suit, had thick lips and was a pimp. A few pages later a fight between Mr. Grant and Tyrone provided the opportunity to let the reader know for sure the Grants and Tyrone's race when Tyrone says, "Well, if it ain't a brother." (volume 3, page 232) Possibly I'm reading stuff into these scenes, but I think it would have been a lot less racist simply to refer to one of them as, say, a good looking black man. (The publication date, in case you're interested, was 1981.)

Oh-my-God-am-I-really-reading-this

1) My thoughts when Santini described every detail of every piece of clothing every female character wore.

2) "She fell on her knees, holding him around the ankles. 'Don't do this to me, Paul. I love you. I can't live without you. Please. Don't!'" (volume 3, page 132) Yuck! How un-feminist can you get?

3) "Linc had given her the whipped cream on the cake of life." (volume 3, page 135) Yuck again . But one doesn't read this type of book for its beautiful use of language, or even a clever use of language. Okay. Expecting competence in language might also be a stretch.

4) The last paragraph in volume 3: "She watched him walk down the path and drive away. Darling, devoted, dependable Chuck. So much a part of her life for so long, and now he was gone. What would happen to her? What would happen to them all? If only she could read the future in the fire as the gypsies did. But Tara knew she would simply have to live it. (page 235) Not bad as a lead-in for a continuing soap, but as literature? Another big yuck!

Soft porn moments

1) "At first he looked disinterested. Then is eyes opened wide as Kitty's tongue forced its entrance into his mouth." (volume 1, page 228) Just an example, the first I encountered and when I realized the reason for the book's existence.

2) Repetitious dialogue made me think of a great new rock 'n roll song title: "A whole lot of moanin' goin' on."

Word: epergne. "… long table set with a silver epergne of red roses at its center." (volume 3, page 179) According to www.dictionary.com: "noun, an ornamental piece for the center of a table, for holding fruit, flowers, etc." Guess I don't run in snooty enough circles. Also makes the writer's statement of the position of the epergne totally unnecessary.

I won't get into recommending or not recommending this one. Even for a die hard fan, the book was pretty hard-going.

I obtained Biting the Wall by J. M. Johnston—and the next book I'll review, She–Crab Soup, which I'm currently reading—through rejection. I had submitted He Followed Her to School One Day, a novel I had written, to a press that expressed interest in humor. IMHO, He Followed Her to School One Day, although essentially a murder mystery, contained a good deal of humor through character, plot, and style. It was rejected with a note that said that the publishing house was interested in comic novels, and that my work was not comic. Always anxious to learn what a publishing house really wants, I ordered two of its books. Biting the Wall is the first one I read. I struggled to find the humor in it and will point out what, IMHO, worked and what didn't.

The overall structure dealt with a campus computer being used to obtain government information and then supposedly to pass it on to unfriendly nations. Not inherently funny, to my way of thinking. It was also not suspenseful, which I believed that He Followed Her to School One Day was . The climatic scene in Biting the Wall was characters showing up unexpectedly with guns, waving them about, pointing them, but never actually using them to do anymore than scare the other characters present. To me what Johnston did with his plot and climatic scene wasn't funny. I killed off a character in He Followed, but he was an absolutely despicable person. (Guess I was trying for a Sharon-McCrumb-style plot.) None of Johnston's characters ever died, even if the reader might hope one of them would.

Specifics:

1) I did smile a few times. A running subplot has an overweight, not terribly intelligent police officer riding around in a variety of vehicles in order to give traffic tickets. The main character, Llew, is imagining situations and thinks, " ... visions of being pursued by a huge yellow school bus, its angry red lights flashing at him…" (page 131) Amusing picture, IMHO. Of course, I can be easily amused.

2) I did find one scene downright funny, even if it was totally unrelated to the plot. Llew McQuilla, the point of view character, meets an author in a bar. Recently she had started writing a novel, then became totally interested in the characters, so she cut out plot. Next she lost interest in the details about each character and simply concentrated on the names. Ultimately what she wound up writing was a fictional telephone directory. She and Llew have the following exchange: Funny. Again, easily amused.

3) The following sentence bothered me. Llew is standing in front of an elevator. "There were no direction arrows, as this was a single–story building and the only direction was down." (page 185) I don't know how to rewrite it, but down in a single story building doesn't seem right. To me, one-story buildings are built on slabs where there isn't anything to go down to. Okay, there might be a basement if the building is not on a slab, but the elevator would still have arrows. Granted, the sentence itself is a minor point, but it pulled me out of the story. (Truthfully, I do need to admit that it didn't take much to drag me out of this story.)

4) Another genuinely funny scene occurred when a pompous pianist is mid-concert and the letters on the piano in the non-air-conditioned auditorium start to stick. He reacts by demolishing the piano, an act that is far from uncommon in current culture. But on a university campus? Still unlikely, I think. Or at least hope.

5) Mulling as I type and think, I've dec ided that the editors in this publishing house find dialect funny. I find it annoying, if not downright insulting to the character and his heritage.

6) I've read in how to books that in msteries the dénouement should be as short as possible. In Biting the Wall it goes on for over two chapters. That's not short.

7) This publishing house seems to believe that characters' names must be unusual to be funny, and the author does come up with some strange ones. Examples: Van Ruedge, Llew McQuilla, Bryon Devilbliiss, Horace Croup, Harry Gross, Godfrey Daniels, Roberta Turnbuckle, Paisley Bradweith and so on. With names that peculiar, I found it hard to keep up with who was who, kind of like Russian novels where each character has at least three loooong names.


I did occasionally question words and their use, specifically:

1) I assume "cushlamonchree" is a word of disgust, delight, or horror, used in moments when a less pretentious character might say, "wow!" or, in computer lingo, "OMG." And, since I could find no listing of the word, I'll stick with that assumption.

2) Cigaret. "… Extinguishing her cigaret in the ashtray." (page 113) I'd seen bad spelling before, but not often or for a long time. A quick look in www.dictionary.com showed the spelling, but immediately switched to cigarette for all the definitions. Why did the author use it? Absolutely no idea.

3) Eructation. A character sneezes and says, "… pardon the rude eructation." (page 195) I looked it up and got to play the fun dictionary game where one gets sent to other places. I was sent to eruct, which is a verb that means " 1. to belch forth, as gas from the stomach. 2. to emit or issue violently, as matter from a volcano." Okay, it is a legitimate word, and I didn't know it. But is it suitable for dialogue? The character is pompous—as most of Johnston's characters are, but the sentence still doesn't scan right.

4) The author has in my mind a strange use of "amplified." "… administered a greatly amplified second dose [of cough medicine]." (page 196) Okay. www.dictionary.com does have meanings that cover areas other than sound. Perhaps with my theater background it's possible that I've only heard it in the context of sound. It appears the author didn't make up that use. My bad.

I can't really recommend Biting the Wall, but others might find it funny. Also, it would have been a much easier read if I had known more about computers

(Yes, there will be a review of Through the Language Glass, but it was filled with lots of information and the review will be long. I'm writing it in stages.)

after watching "any human heart," on masterpiece classic the past two weekends i ordered the novel by william boyd. should be in tomorrow. great story. i look forward to reading the book.

Let us know.

Make sure whatever you're drinking (be it tea, coffee, a soft drink or anything stronger) is nearby; it's gonna be a long review.

The overall scope of Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass was a discussion of culture. But, in his words, "The focus here will be on those every day cultural traits that are impressed so deeply in our mind that we do not recognize them as such. In short, the aspects of culture that will be explored here are those where culture masquerades as human nature." (page 9)

The book was interesting, although at times hard reading. The author divides his study of language and culture into three areas: language as it relates to color, to space and to gender. In the review I'll use these three divisions, along with words and other comments.

Color:

1) The author bases the first part of this book on a linguistic debate that ranged from the late 1800s through the middle of the 20th century. It began with detailed studies of Homer's writing. Research found that the only colors Homer used in description were black, white and red. The reasoning, early linguists determined, was that the human eye was not evolved enough to see more than those colors. A few decades later though linguists started arguing against that, saying that the eye was fine, the problem was that the Greeks had no words for other colors. Thus, early linguists found themselves involved in a nature/nurture argument. Oops. I just recalled that in one of my graduate courses at Indiana U. the professor, a scholar of Greek drama, said that the Greeks thought the color yellow was funny. I've always thought that Homer and the famous dramatists were writing at about the same time. According to Deutscher, Greeks at that time either did not see yellow or if they saw it, did not have a name for it. Am I interested in doing the research that would have to be done to resolve this conflict? Not right now.

2) William Gladstone, prime minister and before that literary scholar and linguist, started the nature side of the argument. "The eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colors as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate among them. … The organ was given to Homer only in its infancy which is now full-blown in us." (page 39) Unless, of course, Homer, like the Greek dramatists, was amused by the color yellow.

3) The author explains the other side of the debate with a quote from an earlier linguist: "But it was a biblical scholar, Franz Delitsch, who put it the most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that 'we see in experience not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical perspective progressive development of the color sense takes place.'" (page 55) I'm not sure I dog-eared a page to use as reference for the following, but the accepted ordering of color knowledge was black, white and red, followed by either blue or green and then shades derived from all of them. I assume divisions continue even today, having had a friend who, while decorating a house, informed me that there were 30 some shades of white. EEK! (Or perhaps my eye has not evolved sufficiently.)

4) Deutscher refutes the idea of "primitive language." The idea of primitive language comes when an individual learns another language, particularly one associated with a tribe or undeveloped region, or when the person whose language is being studied takes his first stab at English. The first step in learning a new language, in that sense, is to take the language down to its most simplistic terms. He refers to this point in language development as the "me sleep here" stage. But, linguists have decided, "there are no truly 'primitive languages.' "Hundreds of languages of simple tribes have now been studied in depth, but not one of them, be it spoken by the most technologically and sartorially challenged people, is on the 'me sleep here' level." (page 102)

5) During the discussion of primitive languages, Deutscher writes that the first two rules that the beginning student of linguistics learns are: "Wherever humans exist, language exists and that all languages are equally complex." (page 104)

6) For two pages Deutscher then sets out to prove that the second of those two points has never been proven. "Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that could increase complexity considerably…" (page 106)

7) Interesting, at least for me, is that the only area where language is more complex or more sophisticated is that of subordination. "With subordination, we can produce expressions of increasing complexity that nevertheless remain coherent and comprehensible." (Page 119) If we're careful.

8) Then there are verb tenses. " We can be defined as the mammal that uses the future of the verb 'to be,' he (Steiner, an earlier linguist) explains. The future tense is what gives us hope for the future and without it we are all condemned to be 'in hell', that is to say, in a grammar without futures.'" (Pages 144 – 145) I like the idea and its expression.

9) Deutscher, of course, elaborates further on the subject of verb tense and language complexity. The language of the Matses, an Indian tribe in South America, has "three degrees of pastness … you cannot just say that someone 'passed by there'; you have to specify different verb endings whether this action took place in the recent past (roughly up to a month), distant past (roughly from a month to fifteen years), or remote past (more than fifty years ago). (page 153) And "there are separate verbal forms depending on whether you were reporting direct experience (you saw someone passing with your own eyes), something inferred from evidence (you saw footprints in the sand), conjecture (people always pass by at the time of day), or hearsay (your neighbor told you he had seen someone passing by). (Page 153) Think of the trouble that could cause in modern-day American English.


Spatial relationships:

1) "Now, as far as language and spatial thinking go, the only thing we have actually established is correlation between two facts: the first is that different languages rely on different coordinates; the second is that speakers of these languages perceive and remember space in different ways." (pages 186 – 187)

2) Regarding spatial relationships and language, Deutscher discusses egocentric and geographic approaches. Egocentric is when an individual describes where something is, locating it by naming things . Example: The red barn is beyond the willow tree. Geographically uses North, South, East and West One result is that speakers who use egocentric are aware of surroundings more so than speakers who use geographic; they are therefore acutely aware of where North, South, East and West would be. (Thank heavens English uses egocentric. If it used geographic, I'd never know where anything was.) Deutscher holds that an individual's concept of spatial expression is based on the language rather than some innate sense that leads to the formation of language. (In which case I'd be okay.)


Gender:

1) Gender, of course, refers mainly to pronoun usage, and German takes a beating. One example is a bit of dialogue translated from German into English.
Fun, huh?

2) While Deutscher assumes that gender identification for nouns may originally have had some basis in fact, he now thinks it is totally random and at one point labels it "a mere grammatical habit." (page 209)

3) "When a language treats inanimate objects in the same way as it treats women and men, with the same grammatical forms, with the same 'he' and 'she' pronouns, the habits of grammar spill over to the habits of mind beyond grammar." (page 214) I think I'll leave this one open for discussion, if anyone is interested.

4) "It goes without saying that gender is language's gift to poets." (Page 214) Does it? I'm not convinced.

Words:

1) sartorially. Used above in a sentence—color, section 4. Upon first reading I assumed the word had something to do with satire . While typing the quote, I realized my assumption made no sense. So: www.dictionary.com says, "adjective, 1. of or pertaining to tailors or their trade: sartorial workmanship. 2. of or pertaining to clothing or style or manner of dress: sartorial splendor. 3. Anatomy . pertaining to the sartorius." And now I'm totally confused.

2) Morphology. "Finally, one factor that may slow down the creation of new morphology is that ultimate hallmark of a complex society—literacy." (Page 117) I'm assuming the term has something to do with adding words. I'll go find out if that's the case. It is. According to www.dictionary.com, "Linguistics. a. the patterns of word formation in a particular language, including inflection, derivation, and composition. b. the study and description of such patterns. c. the study of the behavior and combination of morphemes." Got it. And I might even remember the first meaning.

Other:

1) As Deutscher works his way through his main topics, he often veers into semi-related issues. Within the section on color, he discusses grammar, which he ties loosely into his overall topic by the fact that that linguists have argued that there should be some aspects of grammar that are common to all cultures. So far that has not appeared to be the case. But one sentence pertaining to that issue illustrates the author's humor, which I appreciated throughout the book. "The controversy over grammar has thus produced a most impressive pile of paper over the last decades, and many a library shelf across the globe quietly groans under its burden." (page 98) So, Martha, does that go in your category of "easily amused"? Probably.

2) Deutscher tells an interesting story regarding Japan. As most cultures develop new concepts, they create new words, and over time those new words take on additional meetings. That happened in Japan. The word ao, for green, took on many unrelated meanings. Traffic lights appeared. A conflict arose between green as used in a stop light and green in all its other meanings. Deutscher wrote that rather than inventing a new word, the Japanese changed the color in the traffic light. He expressed the situation better than I have. "Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name on the green light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name of the go light to live with that reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be corresponding to the dominant meaning of ao. … The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being sufficiently green…" (page 218)

3) Late in the book, while explaining another theory Deutscher writes, "Their idea was simple, but like most other clever ideas, it appears simple only once someone has thought of it." (page 226) I'm sure the statement is true, but I can't think of any examples. Can you?

4) "The real effects of the mother tongue are … the habits that develop through the frequent use of certain ways of expression. The concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and the repeated associations imposed on us – all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of the language itself." (page 234) Actually, that's the book I wanted to read, but Deutscher downplays the level of linguistics who talk about the many words for snow in native Alaskan languages. His approach to linguistics is much, much deeper. Call me shallow, but I would have liked it a little less deep. (Pun intended.)

Why is the sky blue? Rayleigh Scattering.

Trigonometry is best explained using a circle (unit circle).

Archimedes eureka moment in the bath that allowed him to test the quality of gold in a crown.

Hot air balloons.

and from the actual playground of elementary school: Gravity sucks!

'
Various cultures certainly differ widely in their color terminology. Generally, though, they differ in the way they see similarities and differences in color. In Chinese, for example, there are no well-established words for "orange" or "brown." What we call "brown" tends to be seen as either a type of red or of yellow. What we see as "blue" or as the non-yellow greens are seen as a single color. So "blue sky," "green grasses" or "grey clouds" are often called by this single color term. If you were raised in the dry, sunny American South-West, as I was, you might be non-plused by this apparent confusion. But if you are from an area like the Pacific North-West (or China), with its clouds, mists and humidity, you will see the greens of near-by trees turn to the blues of distant tree-clad hills, and see overcast clouds with a definite blue-ish tinge.

I possess a copy of a little-known book by Eleanor Irwin, entitled Colour Terms in Greek Poetry. The author makes the point that the ancient Greeks were more impressed by value (black and white, dark and light) than they were by hue (specific colors). Sheen, gleaming and highlights were also more noticed by them than they tend to be with us (as can be seen in the surviving paintings and mosaics of the ancient world). There were more color distinctions in the red and yellow portions of the spectrum than in the blue and dark-green regions, which tended to be lumped together as "dark". Homer's famous epithet, "the wine-dark sea" [oinops], probably conveyed the sense of "dark and gleaming".

Greeks terms for hue increased in number over the centuries, but as late as the fourth century BC, one finds Aristotle saying that all colors are ultimately made up out of black and white---an idea that was recapitulated in Wolfgang Goethe's famous Color Theory. Moreover, if one restricts oneself to pure visual impressions, it is quite easy to create clear, bright colors by the rapid alternation of black and white.

Thanks. I really like the last one.

She-Crab Soup by Dawn Langley Simmons was the second book I read to see if I might be a match with the publishing company that is interested in humorous novels. Sadly, the answer is probably no, but I did find She-Crab Soup far more interesting than Biting the Wall. The style of humor though is not one that appeals to me. There's a bunch of plays (one title I remember is Daddy's Dying, Who's Got the Will?) that are filled with broad humor, slutty women, and redneck men. She-Crab Soup is a novel version of that type of play. I did, however, notice details.

Details:

1) As in Biting the Wall, many names in She-Crab Soup are meant to be funny, specifically: Big Shot Calhoun, Mr. Pee Pincklea, Big Shot's Daddy (the only name he's ever given), Miss Ruby (a poodle), Miss Potty (madam in the local whorehouse), Miss Minnehaha Wragg, cousin Hebzibah, Miss Glory-Be (a man), Miss Topsey Piddleton, Mr. Burkee-Snout (a hound dog), Miss Lucy ("the mule, to whom he [Mr. Pee] awarded the family medal for devotion, service and endurance…" [page 205]), and so on. Guess the publisher really likes this gimmick. Sigh.

2) Humor example: "… interjected Cousin Lewis, whose chin was being tickled with a celery stick by Cousin Alexis."
… "Cousin Alexis stuck a celery stick in each of Cousin Lewis's baby pink nostrils to shut him up." (page 103) Amuses me about as much as fart jokes do.

3) The author makes stabs at humor through description. "Mr. Pee lay groaning on my Charleston Chippendale four-poster rice bed, wearing his white boxer shorts with a tiny red valentine hearts embroidered in each corner." (page 124) Still, I'm left wondering: do boxer shorts have corners?

4) During a scene at the local brothel: "At that moment a gentleman dashed out into the room and across to the front entrance, clad only in is azure-blue underdrawers. He was pursued by a large plump female in a daffodil-yellow nightgown who was screaming to be tickled." (page 163) I was amused, but only after I stopped being annoyed at the misplaced modifier. Was the front entrance really wearing underclothes?


Words:

1) Agave. "…a large feathery agave or century plant…" (page 11) I figure it's some sort of plant, and I'm not particularly interested. But since I've become fixated on checking out words I don't know, here goes. www.dictionary.com says: "any of numerous American plants belonging to the genus Agave, of the agave family, species of which are cultivated for economic or ornamental purposes …" BTW, whatever happened to not using the word you are defining as part of the definition of the word? Just wondering.

2) Voluntary. "… for we suddenly heard what sounded like a trumpet voluntary played on a motor horn…" (page 89) I assume it's a music term. "A piece of music, frequently spontaneous and improvised, performed as a prelude to a larger work, especially a piece of organ music performed before, during, or after an office of the church." I'm beginning to realize my music vocabulary is quite limited.

3) Epergne. "I asked Miss Glory-Be to bring out the Venetian glass epergne as a centerpiece for the dining table." (page 100) Apparently, as with plants, I have a limited vocabulary in china, especially the good stuff designed to be used for entertaining. " … an ornamental piece for the center of a table, for holding fruit, flowers, etc." Déjà vu! I've looked this one up before for another review. So much for retaining the meanings of the words I look up.

4) Doxies. "Will your doxies never leave me in peace?" (page 161) "… an immoral woman; prostitute." Ah, yet another label.

Conclusions:

1) While I'll probably never submit to this publisher again, I did learn something valuable. Humor can be achieved by whom you pick as your point-of-view character. That might come in handy for a novel that I've had simmering on the back burner for quite some time.

2) I wasn't raised as a highfalutin southerner, a fact which I think explains the words in She-Crab Soup that I didn't know.

3) My humor differs vastly from that of this publisher.

Sometimes when I feel like visiting my childhood, I read a Nancy Drew or Dana Girls mystery. Two specific things have led me to do so. The first is a conversation I had with my mother. At the time I was in the I-know-everything stage of the late 20s or early 30s, and the conversation went like this: Do you have any idea what Nancy Drew and Dana Girls mysteries sell for these days? Especially when the owner was a nerdy child who neurotically took care of all her books? Even more importantly, can you imagine the joy of still owning them? Words cannot describe—which leads to the second reason why I return occasionally to a Nancy Drew or Dana Girls book. I’ve told a few friends about the conversation with my mother, and they occasionally give me a Nancy Drew or Dana Girls books they found in used bookstores. That’s how I obtained both The Secret of the Wooden Lady (TSOTWL), a Nancy Drew, and The Clue in the Cobweb (TCITC), a Dana Girls’ adventure. Both were written by Carolyn Keene or whatever ripped-off author was writing under that name at that time. So, here goes:

General observations:

1) Compared to today, exclamation points in these books are plentiful, at times almost seeming to outnumber the words themselves. Okay, I exaggerate but, boy, were those characters easily excited!

2) I love the endings of all the chapters, each one a cliffhanger. In TSOTWL Nancy and Ned, her boyfriend, are on a ship that is heading into a hurricane. She asks if he thinks they'll be safe. "Ned did not answer. He did not want to admit he did not see how they could possibly ride out the storm." (TSOTWL, page 100) Now it's amusing; as a child I couldn't wait to start the next chapter.

3) The idea of a story being told by a single point-of-view character appears to be pretty modern. In the Nancy Drew mysteries Nancy is, of course, the point-of-view character, but it's not odd to find sentences like, "Quint twisted his hands nervously. There was no chance to escape from three girls!" (italics his) (TSOTWL, page 188) As amazing as Nancy Drew is, there's no way she could have known what was going on in Quint's mind! (Sorry about that! I feel an attack of exclamation points coming on.)

4) Reading books written before political correctness can be fun. "… the amusing mishaps of Coral Appel, a kind-hearted but slow-witted maid." (TCITC, page 13) "Slow-witted is so yesterday! Did you know that Moose in the Archie comics is no longer slow-witted? These days he has ADD.

5) Today dialect is, for the most part, a big no-no. "'Something go wrong on trip,' the Chinaman told the girls. 'Missee Catherine velly angly since she come back.'" (TCITC, page 29) I also find it interesting that Word does not recognize Chinaman as one word. Is this another label that has gone the way of "colored," a term that shows up in TCITC. "The last time I was there she had a colored man cooking for the boys at the bunk-house." (page 94) I am sure these terms have vanished in the latest update of the two series, but what about the context of the sentences? "An African-American cooking for the boys" doesn't sound that much better. IMHO

6) I did have a eureka moment while reading these books. As a child, I always liked the Dana Girls books better than the Nancy Drews. This time through I figured out why. With Nancy Drew you have the good guys, Nancy, her chums and boyfriend, Ned, which made good and evil completely obvious and always predictable. The Dana Girls attend a boarding school, and among the students is a Lettie Briggs, whose life's goal is to make life miserable for the Dana girls. She is also a "bad guy" and that gives two types of villains in the Dana series. There are the overall bad guys who were involved in a crime that you know the Dana girls will solve, but you also have a continuing conflict between Lettie and the Dana Girls. Strikes to me that structure is something I should keep in mind in my own writing.

Word:
1) Scud. "The clipper's been scudding around this world for a good many years." (TSOTWL, page 144) Actually I know what scud means, but it brought up a really strange memory. When I was attending Indiana University, I learned of a collection of plays called America's Lost Plays. I was intrigued and had to have it. The next year it was Christmas present. I read several of the plays and quickly decided these plays should have remained lost. But I remember one called Flying Scud. I had never seen the word before; I had no idea what it meant. I looked it up then, and the definition stayed with me. How surprised I was two days ago when reading TSOTWL and had to admit I'd come across the word years before Indiana. BTW, I still have America's Lost Plays, and I still haven't read them all. Maybe I'll read a few more and review them. That'll give you something to look forward to!