An OOP fable re: Re: [Sca-cooks] Rotten meat and spices...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Robin Carroll-Mann:
>el2iot2 at mail.com wrote:
>
>>Do not literary sources ,by need, be taken with a grain of salt?
>Yes, and that's been mentioned several times.
>
>>Young Dodger from Oliver Twist is hardly a proper representation of 
>>Victorian England as a whole.
>No, but he might be a useful example if you were discussing street children.
>
>>It is usually the extremes of society that are written.  Why write 
>>down what everyone knows?
>Fiction often deals with ordinary people.  Jane Austen wrote about 
>the gentry of the English countryside.  Chaucer's pilgrims are 
>nearly all what we would call working-class or middle-class. 
>Fiction is not as reliable as say, menus and household account 
>books, but it can give you a starting point for discussion, if we 
>assume that Chaucer was describing a "typical" poor widow and her 
>circumstances.

In 1939, some agents of the German Intelligence unit, Abwehr, were 
secretly dropped via parachute into various select English locations, 
with orders to blend, unnoticed, into the general population and 
gather such intelligence as might serve the German war effort. In 
order to allow these agents to blend in to the general populace, they 
were prepared by deep saturation in the works of England's most 
popular novelist of the time. They then dressed and spoke like the 
characters depicted in those novels (and short stories), secure in 
the knowledge that they'd be indistinguishable from any John Bull 
walking along the road in, say, Oxford.

The problem was, the novelist was P.G. Wodehouse, and his fictional 
England one populated, it seemed, almost exclusively by dim-witted 
Knutt aristocrats with pencil-thin moustaches, monocles, morning 
suits, lavender spats and pearl-grey top hats for the morning, 
form-fitting tweeds in the afternoon, and semi-formal or formal 
evening-wear for dinner and beyond. The agents learned how to call 
people "old bean," begin sentences with "I say," and refer to 
anything out of the ordinary as "rummy".

They were then dropped in the Cambridgeshire fen country among 
farmers with rubber boots and handkerchiefs on their heads, whereupon 
they immediately followed their strict orders to interact...

...Needless to say, they were all captured within a few days.

The moral? Fiction isn't _always_ an accurate rendering.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04