Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-18 04:31 am (UTC)See, the thing is, so does your recip, so I wouldn't have noticed :P (one of my college friends delights in making fun of how relentlessly non-visual I am -- you're more so! but I've maybe met... mm, one or two people besides you who are more non-visual than I am).
no way for a fic exchange with the kind of time I had was I going to be able to write something that made Fritz's decision to get therapy feel real and motivated.
Haha, yes, very fair!
I'm still laughing that Cahn and I independently came up with LOTR analogies to end our fics with! When I saw she had Denethor and Gandalf reconciling in the draft she sent me for betaing, and I had ended on Wilhelmine's "You have my sword" (modern!Wilhelmine is a geek, let's be honest), I laughed hysterically and had to decide whether to suggest a different analogy for her (she had asked for alternatives), change my own, or leave it. Since due to time pressure I couldn't manage to come up with anything better, and since she was my recipient and I couldn't overtly discuss it with her, RMSE 2021 just has the salon hive mind striking again!
OKAY I have been wondering since I sent you RWFE to beta what the line was that you said was similar to the one in yours! Interestingly, "You have my sword" has entered so far into internet-meme territory that my principal association with it is "thing that people say on the internet" and not in fact LOTR! (And also, perhaps more to the point, I have mostly succeeded in scrubbing the movies from my memory, with a few notable exceptions like Denethor-the-fireball.) So it didn't even ping to me that it was a LOTR analogy and therefore similar to my fic! :D
(Modern!Wilhelmine is totally a geek!)
we discovered the engagement was just a couple weeks after Fritz's pamphlet appeared, and Selena was so, "See? SEE!" about it that I had to include a mention in the fic, since the Voltaire explosion was already there.
Heeee, and
Speaking of Voltaire, I cut out a whole backstory about how that explosion went down in a modern AU, which I might either write or at least summarize here as a sort of outtake.
Loooool yes please!
I left the "He signed an NDA!" for Cahn, though. :DDD
:D
Thank you again for this awesome story! :D
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-18 06:51 pm (UTC)Oh, funny! It's so extremely LOTR in my head that I thought it would jump out at you and Selena that both fics had a LOTR analogy at or near the end.
Heeee, and [personal profile] selenak that was, of course, when I wrote the outtake about Mike and his engagement and his Very Long Hiking Trip :D
Yes indeed! Lots of things were happening behind the scenes while these fics were being read. I greatly enjoyed Mike's autoreply about his Very Long Hiking Trip. :DD
One thing I didn't expect you to catch and indeed I'm pretty sure you didn't, which I put in for you, was
I hereby resolve to pick more battles that buy us time to clean up tech debt and not so many battles about print job statistics.
I won't even be surprised if you've made it this far, read that sentence after I've called attention to it, and *still* have no idea what I'm talking about. ;) If so, read on.
Selena, the backstory here is a long and detailed discussion that happened during the betaing of Cahn's RWFE fic, about just how archaic Voltaire's language should be. During the course of this in-depth discussion of his word choices, we discovered that "I resolved to" was extremely archaic to me (and Google Ngram backed me on this) and extremely normal and modern to her (and the LDS website backed her on this). Corpus linguistics ensued via email, complete with graphs; it was all very geeky. :D
And so it was that we discovered that the linguistic community that is the LDS church has apparently preserved a usage that has fallen out of common use in the mainstream population. I would be more inclined to say "I made a resolution to," or "I was/became determined to," if "I decided to" wasn't strong enough.
So when I was adding Henry's resolution near the end of the editing process, "resolve" was front of mind for me, because of all the linguistic geekery that had recently happened. I realized that adding "hereby" makes the use of "resolve" fine for me, because "hereby" signals that I'm switching to a more (pseudo-)legalistic and formal register, which preserves many archaic usages, such as "resolve to."
And that's how that one sentence has a whole backstory. :)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-19 04:57 pm (UTC)And so it was that we discovered that the linguistic community that is the LDS church has apparently preserved a usage that has fallen out of common use in the mainstream population.
That is fascinating. Also reminds me of how odd it feels when the very rare occasional German phrase or sentence shows up in Lehndorff's diaries, because Schmidt-Lötzen, unlike, say, Schnauth with his edition of the Sophie of Hannover letters, always then quotes this in the original Rokoko German phrasing. Whereas the rest of the text is of course his early 20th century translation from the French into German, and thus by necessity reads somewhat more modern.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 05:03 am (UTC)OK,
I won't even be surprised if you've made it this far, read that sentence after I've called attention to it, and *still* have no idea what I'm talking about. ;) If so, read on.
omg, I reread that sentence a couple of times (before reading the rest of your text) and I had NO IDEA. Lol!
I just did an experiment: asked my kindle to search for "resolve" across all text. Of course many of the results were other ways to use the word, but in the sense of "determined to" I found it in the following places:
a) a bunch of Gutenberg stuff written relatively early, like Little Women, Hans Brinker (which is later -- 1968), or in early translations, like Wilhelmine's memoirs or Schiller's Don Carlos.
b) interestingly, people writing about historical figures; this construction appears at least once in the biography I have of LM Montgomery, the biography of Nathaniel Bowditch, and Zinsser's Emilie du Chatelet -- and once in Blanning's Fritz bio!
c) modern SF that has a particular bent towards archaic construction: Duane's Rihannsu books, where the Rihannsu intentionally can have somewhat mannered/slightly-archaic/formal speech; and Bujold's Miles books, where the Barraryans also are coded as slightly-archaic; and the Silmarillion has it a bunch of times, which, well, yeah.
d) LDS books -- sadly, on one of the two with the most hits the search function seems to be a bit borked, so I'm having trouble seeing what's there exactly, but the other one (an official publication about the early days of the Church), holy cow, a good half of the uses of the word "resolve" are in this sense. (The other books I mentioned might have ~1 out of 10 in that sense?
But, yeah, I think I see why it didn't code to me as a weird LDS thing -- even though I guess it is! -- given that I did see it other places -- it just never occurred to me (since we use it as a normal modern construction) that all those non-LDS occurrences had a common factor, that they were concerned with the past.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 06:50 pm (UTC)Here we have another linguistic problem. I read Lord of the Rings first as a young teenager, which means I read it in the classic German translation. (There is since a few years a new one, which is why I specify.) To this day, I haven't read it in English; when I go back to the book, I always return to my green three volumes of yesteryear.
Otoh, when the movies were released, I was living in Munich with its three cinemas showing movies undubbed and in the original language (in addition to the dozens of cinemas showing them dubbed), and I had long since started the habit of watching in the original to keep my own English fluent. So I watched the movies in English and never in German. Thus, unsurprisingly, I associated "You have my sword!" with the films, and didn't think whether or not the scene goes this way in the book, not least because in the book, Frodo Beutlin aus dem Auenland who does not quite sound like Frodo Baggins from the Shire gets talked to in language slightly associating Jacob Grimm's version of some German myths anyway but a sentence like "Mein Schwert sei Euer!" was not addressed to him.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 07:52 pm (UTC)(You're the one I actually got "You have my sword" from, since I *don't* hang out much in most non-DW corners of the internet and thus it is purely a LOTR thing to me. If you hadn't said "You have my pen" when I suggested someone should write me a broccoli test fic *cough*, I don't think I would have come up with that solution for Wilhelmine's final line. So I owe you that one.)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 06:44 am (UTC)Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 04:00 pm (UTC)Which Cahn did not, apparently! :D
But a present day Wilhelmine would definitely have read books, watched the films, argued about same and have opinions on the soundtrack as well, complete with regular "which movie has the best song for the final credit" debates.
Oh, most definitely. :)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 08:38 pm (UTC)Hee, called it! :D
Hans Brinker (which is later -- 1968)
?? Hans Brinker was published in 1865, and the language very much fits that period. Also, I don't think Gutenberg should have anything from 1968--that's well after the public domain cutoff.
interestingly, people writing about historical figures
So people who've recently been reading a whole lot of archaic English, I see, I see. :D It reminds me of how, after I'd hung out with my dissertation advisor for about 3 years, I started catching myself saying "One does this" and "One does that," which is not something I would ever say on my own! (I quickly lost that linguistic ruboff after leaving grad school.)
But, yeah, I think I see why it didn't code to me as a weird LDS thing -- even though I guess it is! -- given that I did see it other places -- it just never occurred to me (since we use it as a normal modern construction) that all those non-LDS occurrences had a common factor, that they were concerned with the past.
I had no idea you guys had kept "resolve to" alive either, so this was very educational! (This is what happens when you get your fic betaed by someone who got their PhD in the history of the English language--you have these conversations. :D)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 04:00 am (UTC)