09-30-15 10:47 NANCY BACKUS wrote to ED VANCE about Rubaiyat  was: Old movies

 NB> {at}MSGID: 
 -=> Quoting Ed Vance to Nancy Backus on 09-27-15  21:46 <=-
Howdy! Nancy,

 >  DS> to pitch a fit about "The Rubyiat Of Omar Khayham"
as being "a smutty
 >  DS> book".
 EV>> I tried to find the word "Rubyiat" to see what it
means, What is it?
 NB>> You probably couldn't find it because it wasn't spelled
 NB>> right... should have been "Rubaiyat"... ;)  My dictionary has
 NB>> it as "Poet. a four-line stanza, in iambic pentameter, rhyming
 NB>> abab, abba, or aaba."  :)  What the dictionary didn't say was
 NB>> that it was from Persian/Arabic poetry...
-snip-
 EV> The Wordweb online dictionary didn't have Rubaiyat, it had rubai which
 EV> is a plant, but that isn't even close to meaning a poem.
 EV> Wordweb has a newer version that I haven't downloaded yet, maybe it
 EV> has added Rubaiyat to the list of words in the new free version if I
 EV> get the new version installed.

I got the 7.2 version of WordWeb but it didn't have rubaiyat, I tried
typing from memory the word quadtrain(sp?) that You used and it had the
definition for that word  "A stanza of four lines".

 NB> I'm using an old-fashioned hard-cover paper-pages book.. ;)  A
 NB> large volume entitled The Living Webster Encyclopedic
 NB> Dictionary of the English Language...  Not quite an unabridged,
 NB> but close... ;)

I have a Unabridged Dictionary, sections of it were sold each week at
a grocery store my family shopped at and I got all the parts and covers
put together.
I used to use it often, but now I mostly use WordWeb on the XP pc.
The Free edition can be used if a person doesn't make more than a few
trips by airplane, iirc 2 or 3 a year.
-snip-
 EV> Somewhere in the first few paragraphs I saw a Link to ruba'i, and was
 EV> surprised to see the illustration of one of those Four Line poems was
 EV> in the shape that resembled a Letter X or a Cross.
 EV> That struct me as being odd after reading about Omar Khayyam being
 EV> a high ranking person in the Muslim Faith back then.

 NB> It's just a visual representation of a sort of poetic form...
 NB> not intended to be Christian... it was used extensively in the
 NB> Old Testament Psalms... so, presumably, in other countries
 NB> round about...

Yes, I knew it wasn't Christian, it just seeing the shape of the one I
saw on the Wikipedia page kind of looking as a X shape put that thought
in my mind.

The Psalms and Song of Solomon were written at least 1000 years before
Omar's time.
I wasn't aware the four line style of writing was in the Psalms.
I do remember the 119 Psalms has groups of 8 lines and each group
begins with letters in the Hebrew Alphabet.


 EV> I read a few verses of the poem and decided that I am in that group of
 EV> people who Daryl wrote about who felt like the poem is smutty.
 EV> I'm glad I didn't have to read The Rubaiyat when I was in School.

 NB> I'm sure that context has a lot to do with how it is
 NB> considered... One could read the Song of Solomon as rather
 NB> smutty, unless one is realizing that it has to do with married
 NB> love, and a picture of God's love for and from his people...

I haven't read Song of Solomon very often, and haven't for a long time.
The Book of First Corinthians has enought in it about what I remember
seeing in Song of Solomon.

 EV> I had enought trouble with The Tale of Two Cities and Silas Marner in
 EV> the 10th Grade and didn't understand much of those two stories until
-snip-
 NB> I suspect that Cliff's Notes (and the other abridged forms of
 NB> literature) didn't exist back when you were floundering in
 NB> school... ;) That was often the cheat used by my generation...

Nope.

 NB> Reading was never a problem for me, though...  When I was a
 NB> senior in HS, and my sister a freshman, we saw a matinee of
 NB> Gone With the Wind on our way home from school one day, and
 NB> stopped at the library after to check out the book... She read
 NB> it through that evening, into the night... when she finished, I
 NB> read it, straight through the night...  ;)  In the morning we
 NB> were both done... ;)

 NB> Back in 10th and 11th, various classmates used to set
 NB> challenges for me... generally books that had bogged them
 NB> down... I remember Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Tolkien's Lord
 NB> of the Rings being among those challenges...  ;)   I'd whiz
 NB> through them and then blow them away by actually remembering
 NB> what I'd read, in detail... ;)   It was just a fun game for me
 NB> back then... ;)  I'd been reading since I was 4 or so, even
 NB> before kindergarten...  I'm quite a bit slower now, since my
 NB> eyes (and occasionally the brain as well) get tired a lot
 NB> faster than they did back then...  ;)

Hey! We all better watch what we write in our messages, You having
Total Recall.   

Ed

... The difference between spoiled milk & yogurt? Marketing!
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