Map Filth
PowerLine displays the wonderful cover of the latest American Enterprise, which I will copy here to avoid bandwidth theft (a mosquito is still a parasite even if the elephant doesn’t notice):
My first thought on seeing it was that Europe looks like it’s getting ready to kick America with it’s its Italian boot. I suppose that’s intentional. My second was to recall a cartoon I haven’t seen in twenty years, Kliban’s “Map Filth”. It was just an outline map of Europe and North America, much like this one, but without the faces or the colors. The words coming out of Chesapeake Bay were “Hey Europe, bite my Florida!”.
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Love “Hey Europe, bite my Florida!”, but . . . your Weevilness, I’m shocked to see “it’s” for “its” on your blog of all places. For shame!
Comment by Michelle Dulak Thomson — Tuesday: September 13, 2005 @ 5:00 PM GMT-0500
I could plead the late hour — 11:44 pm is pretty late on a school night, and school starts at 8:00 am sharp. I could point out that this is a textbook case of what palaeographers (or paleographers, either spelling is correct) call assimilation, where the preceding “it’s” naturally inclines the mind to spell the following “its” to match. Or I could just say what one of my professors in graduate school used to say after (very infrequent) lapses such as this: “Sorry, my lobotomy’s acting up”. Take your pick.
Comment by Dr. Weevil — Tuesday: September 13, 2005 @ 5:46 PM GMT-0500
I lean towards the “assimilation” theory, because I saw it in action while typing my comment: I decided to post something, started typing, considered excerpting and pasting in the text containing the offending apostrophe . . . and when I scrolled up to find it, my eye landed on the wrong “it’s” first. We all look for patterns, and tend to make them unconsciously even when we’re doing our best not to.
Your third explanation brings to mind a friend who was also a PhD. candidate in musicology, who half-seriously considered wearing to his orals a T-shirt with the beginning of Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw printed on it. (The piece is for narrator and orchestra; the first words are “I cannot remember everything . . . I must have been unconscious most of the time.”) Since his diss. topic was second-generation European serialists, it was especially appropriate. He didn’t do it, alas.
Comment by Michelle Dulak Thomson — Tuesday: September 13, 2005 @ 7:27 PM GMT-0500