Short Story Version of "Bottomless Bottle" Mentioned in Review
Mike Chivers
The writer Mike Chivers has posted a short, mostly positive review of Emanations: Second Sight, and he briefly mentions the short story version of "The Bottomless Bottle of Beer":
Fictional highlights include . . . "The Bottomless Bottle of Beer," a Bulgakovian satire carried out with aplomb by Horace Jeffery Hodges.With "aplomb." Sounds positive, but let's check the online Free Dictionary:
Self-confident assurance; poise. (American Heritage)Positive terms . . . I suppose, though etymologically, the word could imply that I carried out the satire as if with a lead weight:
equanimity, self-confidence, or self-possession (Collins English Dictionary)
French, from Old French a plomb, perpendicularly : a, according to (from Latin ad-; see ad-) + plomb, lead weight (from Latin plumbum, lead). (American Heritage)The word "plumber" has the same root . . . and I've learned to form a new expression: "Bulgakovian."
Labels: Fiction, Literary Criticism, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 3:46 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
That's strange. In Italian, the French phrase "aplomb" means "with elegance and style," that's what supposedly Chivers wanted to convey.
That's what I thought, too, so the two English dictionaries took me aback.
I'll go with the French on this one!
Jeffery Hodges
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"Con la Francia o con la Spagna, purché se magna"
(Either with France or with Spain, what matters is that we ate --- A very common saying in Rome)
As we say in the States, "The proof is in the pudding."
Jeffery Hodges
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Your sources are very bad. I am more than a little surprised at the obsessional dwelling on the use of the word "aplomb," since the word cannot reasonably be taken to mean anything in the least negative. Stick with the O.E.D.
http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aplomb
I was too obsessed with my ironing to reach for Oedipal assistance . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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Don't worry; it didn't do Led Zeppelin any harm. ;-)
Agreed, they flew plumb straight to stratospheric heights!
Thanks for the kind words in your review.
Jeffery Hodges
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