Friday, July 30, 2010

What the fadom?

So I was re-reading The Tempest after Monday's trip on my iThing and something didn't seem right in this bit:

Ariel
    Full fadom five thy father lies,
    Of his bones are coral made:
    Those are pearls that were his eyes:
    Nothing of him that doth fade,
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange.
    Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Shurely shome mishtake, thinks I. Maybe it was scanned or something... I'll just email the App makers and let them know.

But no! It was right, sort of, because "fadom" is an alternate spelling in ye olde English for fathom. However the Shakespeare App maker also said they tried to use modern spelling and so will update the text to say "fathom".

You learn something new every day.

The picture above, btw, is just a random pic of a rather nice sunset taken after yesterday's evening kayak on the Thames, trying out the new iThing's camera. Slightly disapointing to be honest, but maybe there's an App to fix that too.

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