User talk:Derek Hodges

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via Twitter. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any administrator for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Robert Tito 11:58, 1 February 2007 (CST)

Thanks for bringing over Elizabethan Religious Settlement

I hope I didn't get in your way in putting the subpage's template into the Elizabethan Religious Settlement page. JesseWeinstein 14:13, 16 January 2008 (CST)

Novel article

Alright Derek-- At your prompting, I have hacked out a section on Western antecedents of the novel. Let me know what you think; it's about all I got on the ancient novel for now.

I might also chip in on the section on Jane Austen. It's been a while since I have done anything with Austen scholarship, but I'll try to contribute something.

Do you know Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron", specifically the part about Austen?

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
  Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
  An English spinster of the middle-class
  Describe the amorous effects of 'brass',
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

Somehow, I can't get the formatting right, but whatever. See you around, Brian P. Long 19:00, 25 April 2008 (CDT)

note to self

Is the "n" pronounced in "columnist"? So long as columnist was in rather restricted use, the formal pronuncia-tion at least was col' um nist, and this is the pronunciation generally recorded in the dictionaries. When the word became common in its news-paper sense, the pronunciation was simplified to col' um ist and is so recorded in the Standard Dictionary and in Webster as "used by some." (This is disregarding the possibility of the once humorous col' yum ist becoming regular usage in this meaning.) Since fifth columnist has be-come a word of mass use (and overuse), the simpler pronunciation has become general. Most radio speakers use it. The problem is just one small by-product of an attitude toward spelling in which vestigial never sounded letters are highly regarded. P. G. PERRIN