my daughter would steal in on batwings at night to raid my book shelves as I constantly find volumes that I had thought I had lost lying abandoned at her place. In short, I described her as a book vampire.
Imagine my consternation when I reached for my copy of A Tale of Two Cities to discover that, far from being a figment of my imagination, such dark creatures of the night exist.
Horror upon horror, its vowels had been bled dry!
I offer proof. Here are the desiccated remains of the opening paragraph.
t ws th bst f tms, t ws th wrst f tms,
t ws th g f wsdm, t ws th g f flshnss,
t ws th pch f blf, t ws th pch f ncrdlty,
t ws th ssn f Lght, t ws th ssn f Drknss,
t ws th sprng f hp, t ws th wntr f dspr,
w hd vryting bfr s, w hd nthng bfr s,
w wr ll gng drct t Hvn, w wr ll gng drct
th thr wy--n shrt, th prd ws s fr lk th prsnt
prd, tht sm f ts nsst thrts nsstd n ts
bng rcvd, fr gd r fr vl, n th sprltv dgr
f cmprsn nly.
Bookworms beware! And please report if you have been attacked.
4 comments:
I fear the book vampire!
They are the worst, Caroline. Drape your shelves with strings of garlic. Have 2H pencils handy to drive through their nasty, little hearts.
Your Dickens has been disemvowelled!
Sadly, I can't take credit for the thought: over at Making Light (a fabulous editor's blog--there's a link on my front page, but I can't get it to load at the moment, living as I do at the end of a notoriously slow dial-up connection) disemvowellment is standard procedure for dealing with troll-comments. It leaves their comments just-about readable, while making them look faintly ridiculous: a lovely literary revenge.
Jane
Disemvowellment, damn, I knew when I wrote about the vowels being bled dry that there was a better description and disemvowellment is it.
Post a Comment