Eugenie Clark, a famous marine biologist who was a prolific scholar and popular writer, and my one-time colleague at the University of Maryland, has died of lung cancer at the age of 92. She was a very nice person, though I didn’t know her well as she was frequently absent from campus, giving lectures around the world and making dives. She was diagnosed with lung cancer eleven years ago, but fortunately survived far longer than expected.
The New York Times obituary on Clark is a good account of her life and work, but there’s one small error at the end. Can you spot it?
She celebrated her 87th birthday again when she turned 88?
She couldn’t celebrate her 87th birthday at 88??
“Stopped diving, but cancer…”
Non sequitur.
She turned 86 on her 87th birthday.
(She was 0 on her first birthday – the actual day of her birth. She turned 1 on her second birthday… and so on.)
So, if she did it again when she was 88 (her 89th birthday) it was two years later??
Not exactly a mistake, but misleading.
Exactly my thought!
Read it again! Nobody’s got it so far.
Achilles tendon, NOT Achilles heel (which
has a different meaning).
Unnecessary apostrophe in line one?
Should it be Achille’s tendon?
I think you got it.
Would I win a kitty drawing?🐯
You can haz drawing but no book!
I already haz book, but would loves kitteh.
Send me an address and what you want on the drawing!
I don’t think he did. Achilles is the name, not Achille. In which case, to indicate ownership correctly, it should be Achilles’s but, although often thought to apply only to instances of plural ownership, where a proper noun ends with an s then a simple trailing apostrophe is quite acceptable.
An apostrophe between the e and the s of Achilles’s (or Achilles’) name is most definitely not correct.
Seems correct to me as written in the NYT. Achilles’ name ends in an “s” so the apostrophe is in the right place.
Oops, I got so hung up on the apostrophe that I didn’t even notice the tendon/heel switch.
Both are acceptable but Achilles’s is more correct.
Yes. Dangling apostrophes are for plural’s.
Yes, I did that on porpoise.
That’s a whale of a joke
I appreciate Diana’s complement, but now Cetacean it to a whole new level. And that’s Orcay.
Right…
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I feel like such a comic shrimp!
No way! Humor-wise, you’re a prawn star!
I’m just a crushed, aging humorist …
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Maybe I won’t scampy away then.
That’s good then, because shrimp don’t scamper – they Lobster … !
🐳
Thar she blooooooows!
Fin!
Nawwr.
… whal.
Oh Hector’s!
Help! Ear Worm of the most annoying song ever!
Would that be “Baby Beluga” by the estimable Raffi?
It was even worse than that.
It was THIS!
ummm, what am I missing?
You don’t see the Narwhal song as annoying? I saw it in a TV ad and the purpose of said ad was to put the annoying song in your head.
Yes, it’s annoying, but what does it have to do with apostrophes? And what’s the un-clean narwhal song?
Thanks for that! Ear worm is right!
Merilee,
Apostrophes? I had forgotten that thread started with apostrophes.
But it ‘er, evolved, into
“porpoise” -> “whale” -> “Cetacean” -> “Orcay” -> “Right” (as in Right Whale) -> “shrimp” (that Diane always has to be a rebel) -> “prawn” (following Diane’s lead) -> (I haven’t sussed Ant’s comment, he’s way above my paygrade when it comes to this stuff) -> “scampy” -> “Lobster” -> (you brought it back to whales Merilee!) -> “Thar she blows!” -> “Fin!” (as in Fin Whale) -> “Nawwr” (as in Narwhal mutilated by someone with a horrible accent that makes is sound like “naww” as in “no”) -> “whal” (finishing off what I started) -> BRAIN EATING EAR WORM!
LOL
Brilliant parsing, darrelle. And here I had thought the fin was going to mean FIN like at the end of Afrench movies. How naïve of moi:-)
My only regret is that we didn’t find a use for every Cetacean, which would have been great. When the commenters start with the animal puns, they wind up in some gray areas – that’s just how baleen!
It gave me the hump, back then.
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Leave to Ant to blow holes in the pun thread! I’m a little jealous, but yo won’t hear me blubbering!
He breached the so-called 4th wall of puns.
Luckily, for that there is no particular price to be pod. So you think he’ll do it again for free, willy?
I hope this doesn’t cause Diana to Flipper wig … that’d be a shamu.
I didn’t mean for anyone to feel blue.
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Glad everyone’s having a whale o’ a good time:-)
It might be just a fluke …
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Once more unto the breach!
If anything I’m beached!
Think decapod…
Yeah, that was the one that made me want sushi for dinner Friday. It was delish!
Regarding the possessive form of multi-syllable names ending in “s”, I tend to go with how it is pronounced (in keeping with Samuel Johnson’s dictum that “the pen must at length comply with the tongue”).
Thus, I would go with “Sam Harris’s book,” but probably with “Christopher Hitchens’ polemic.” I could go either way on “Richard Dawkins’ tweet” (though how I wish he would stop writing them!)
I know, I know ( hiding my head in shame). Should be Achilles’ or Achilles’s. It really was a typo. The dude’s name was Achilles.
Bingo! I’m surprised people didn’t get it right away.
Oh, I did but got here too late … 😁
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Me too!
I actually thought it the first time I read it, but didn’t want to be pedantic…
In fairness, the whole thing was dodgy though understandable enough. And I’m blinded by Classics!
Well, she blinded me with science. 🙂
Good Heavens!
Ahhhh earworm!
No It’s no cigar in this caee. See above.
So, where do I claim my kitty?
I would have had it if I had seen this post sooner.
Eugenie Clark is at least 25-30% of the reason I’m a biologist. I was fascinated by sharks as a kid and read all of her popular science books and popular science books that cited her work. I never ended up doing any work with sharks, but still primarily study fish ecology.
To be pedantic, there is no apostrophe in
Achilles tendon
Nor in “Achilles heel”, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary or the online Oxford Dictionary – although all the examples cited by the latter do have one!
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Doctor Who paid tribute to the “excuse my friend, he’s from Barcelona” line when Doctor 10 wakes up from regeneration in his very Arthur Dent outfit (also paid tribute to Hitchhiker’s Guide).
Adams was a script editor and writer in the Tom Baker era – and in “City of Death” (one that Adams penned), Basil Fawlty … um, John Cleese and Eleanor Bron playe a pair of art critics in a gallery in Paris who are admiring the TARDIS (which they think to be a piece of art), when the Doctor (Tom Baker), Romana (Lalla Ward – Richard Dawkins’s wife; it’s all connected!) and Duggan (Tom Chadbon) rush into it and it dematerialises. Bron’s character, believing this to be part of the work, states that it is “Exquisite, absolutely exquisite!”
[detail from Wp]
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clip
What ever happened to Eleanor Bron? She could be so good!
Anyone see her with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (and Raquel Welch) in Bedazzled? Hilarious!
She’s in _The Archers_ now …
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Don’t know that show.
“An everyday story of country folk.” It’s been on the radio for decades.
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Thx.
Achilles heel?
Yes, one doesn’t have an Achilles’ heel but one does have an Achilles tendon.
Oh yes that must be it! Achilles was held by his heel when his mum dipped him in the River Styx, but we all have an Achilles tendon. I was blinded to it because of my Classics background.
Bollocks. I which I’d read this before commenting above.
Ha, ya’ll are just assuming her Achilles’ heel is her tendon. 😉
Ha, good thinking. 😉
Dr. Clark had an Achilles’ tendon to injure, but no Achilles’ heel.
We don’t know that. Maybe she injured her Achille’s heel and then no longer had one??
It’s not even her heel – it’s Achilles’s heel! He’s going to be pissed – “I lend you my heel for one day & you ruin it!!”
LOL! Oh, man, I see I put the apostrophe in the wrong place in Achilles…how embarassing for one whose Achilles’ heel may be apostrophe nazi…
You can’t celebrate your 87th birthday when you turn 88.
She stopped diving temporarily but the cancer went into remission – this suggests the two are linked.
Suggested, but I still call unclear, if not a non sequitur. As in, ” he stopped driving, but the toothache persisted.”
I couldn’t have got away with that in freshman comp.
I assumed it meant that once her cancer went into remission she was fit enough to dive.
If she dies at the age of 92 in 2015, then how could she be 87 in 2009?
Oh, never mind…her birthday hasn’t come up yet in 2015.
Maybe, but I didn’t calculate dates. Go look at the cockatoo in the previous post!
My excuse is that Jerry said ‘at the end’ and I assumed he meant ‘at the end of the excerpt’. So it was clearly unfair, and I would’ve got it if only Jerry had explained what he meant to me in minute detail. Essentially, everyone who got it right cheated, and I think we can all agree on that.
I thought that at first, too, but then rethought it..nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah:-))
I can hardly be held accountable for my own laziness. How is that fair?
Fuck this, I’m taking my toys and I’m going home. I never cared about being right anyway.
😹
I wondered if Lake Tahoe was only 700′ deep. On the wrong track, clearly, and I am an apostrophe bore.
My Achilles’ heel is not remembering that the body part is an Achilles tendon.
How can I injure MY achilles’ heel? I’d like to completely disable mine.
So now are you going to tell us what it is? 😉
900 feet deep? Don’t think so.
Why not? Tahoe is a deep lake – 1644 feet deep per that font of all knowledge Wikipedia – I knew it was 1600 and something.
I stand corrected.
Lake Tahoe is one of those landmarks with an excessive number of statistics and fun facts. My older brother started skiing there in the early 70’s and eventually moved to SLT (then to the growing Carson Valley, NV EIEIO over the hill, where my parents dragged me and my sister because living by the beach in So Cal was some kind of awful).
Anywaaaaay, my brother could have won the $64,000 Question in Tahoe trivia. Did you know the map at burns up at the start of Gunsmoke is historically inaccurate, as the lake is labeled Tahoe and it was not called Tahoe on maps until zzzzzzzzzz ..
I so love the area though: we own a timeshare and go at least once a year – just got back from an amazeballs week in fact. AND: picked up some new (to me) facts about Emerald Bay, Mallard duck filter feeding and native vs invasive molluska!
I think that was Bonanza, not Gunsmoke.
Of course it was!! Hilarious – I am always mixing those two up. Probably because Gunsmoke was on forever, and when I was a kid watching an episode of Bonanza! felt like an eternity. Borenanza! more like
You get a growling for “amazeballs”.
Do you know it’s a running joke at WEIT? If you do and the word still rankles, that’s understandable, but if not you kind had to be there (not Tahoe, the amazing/awesome post).
It was awesomesauce!
I was going to … errr … plumb the same depths. 1644 is pretty deep by lake standards. 900ft is still pretty deep. I don’t know where Lake Tahoe is (America, presumably), but if it is that depth, it’ll probalby be glacially over deepened. The only one we’ve got in Scotland that deep is Loch Morar – just over 1000ft deep. Loch Ness (of Nessie infamy) is 700-plus, but getting a good measurement is surprisingly hard.
[Wikis instead of Googlieing]
close call on the crater lake – hadn’t included those in my thinking.
Unless you’re talking about the heel tendon that belongs to a person named Achilles, there should be no apostrophe. Medical dictionaries (Dorland’s, Stedman’s) and the AMA Manual of Style recommend dropping the possessive form for eponymous medical terms (e.g., Alzheimer disease, Down syndrome). But it would be correct to say Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“Didja ever think what a fuggin coincidence it was that Lou Gehrig died from Lou Gehrig’s disease?” – The late Christopher Moltisante
Rather than “late,” wouldn’t it make us all feel better to think of Chris-tuh-fuh as “reunited with Adriana”?
I’m aware it makes people feel better to imagine that the star-crossed lovers reunited at The Inn at the Oaks, or that Adriana was reincarnated as the cat, or that the cat carried both of their souls, merged.
But they are just dead and gone*, to me – which state is a logical consequence of the degenerate criminality they participated in, benefited from and/or enabled.
Whaddya gonna do?
* – Also too, they are imaginary
Imaginary?…dead and gone?!…degenerate criminality?!!
If you’re gonna assault me with that kind of hate speech, give a guy a [Trigger Warning], willya? Why do you a-teevee-ists always have to be so militant?
I am so pro-TV! And pro-Sopranos! I’ve watched the entire series three times, the final episode four times and the final scene countless times! Shot by shot.
If I wasn’t clear, my point is that the deaths of the various family members (and Sylvio’s mostly-death) were as I said “logical consequences” of the life they led – as in, gangsters get killed doing gangster sh**t. Not that they deserved it in some kind of Karmic way. I love those f**king guys! But also like I said, whaddya gonna do?
Wow that paragraph does not stand up to the scrutiny it got here: it reads like a “correct the errors” problem from Freshman composition.
So she’s diagnosed with lung cancer at 81 and fights that nasty bastard to a draw for 11 rounds before succumbing on points in a split-decision? What a warrior spirit! There’s the kind of dive buddy you want when you blow an o-ring at depth during a tricky cave dive…
She really injured her Achilles tendon.
I always thought that if you screwed up the tendon, you could end up with a condition known as “Achilles’ Heel”, but what’s more important is that I just found out that the good Doctor Coyne taught at the University of Maryland which gives me yet another reason to be proud that I’m a Maryland graduate.
Damn it, the second person who is capable of immortality can’t keep her Achilles heel safe! What’s wrong with these people?
Your mum has to hold you somewhere when she dips you in the River Styx!
My first thought was, “I don’t think Lake Tahoe is that deep.”
WRONG!
It’s deep down there that Fredo sleeps with the fishes. Wonder if he said a Hail Mary during his last boat trip on the lake.
It’s odd that you make that reference. I just watched the Godfather part II the other day. I’ll bet he did. I think Fredo knew that was his last boat trip.
And remember the last boat trips in The Sopranos? Was it Big Pussy (what a handle!) who went to sleep with the fishes?
Yeah, I think when the button man subbed in for Michael’s son as his fishing partner, even poor, dumb Freddy must have seen the writing on the transom & figured out he wouldn’t be making the trip back to the dock.
I was a marine biology major at Maryland from 1977-1979 (were you there then Jerry?) and Dr. Clark’s class on sharks was the best class I ever took there. We had access to all of this amazing information (unseen Nat Geo videos) and very rare six gill sharks. She was an amazing person.