Tales to Take Your Breath Away

In conjunction with the ban on smoking in public places in the UK on July 1, 2007, the publisher Tank Books is launching a series of miniature books that mimic packs of cigarettes. Each book is the same size as a pack of cigarettes and packaged in a flip-top carton sealed in cellophane. Titles include such literary classics as Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”, Ernest Hemingway's “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis,” Rudyard Kipling's “The Man who would be King,” Robert Louis Stevenson's “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Leo Tolstoy's “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” Tank Books says that cigarette packs are iconic objects and believes that, over time, Tank Books will become iconic objects in their own right.

The subversive aspect intrigues me and they are a triumph in design, but if you're going to quit smoking and pick up a book instead, do you really want to read “Heart of Darkness” or “Metamorphosis?” It might make more than a few people reach for a cigarette again.

The Cat, the Bee, and the Dog

Two hundred and fifty years after Dr Johnson wrote his celebrated dictionary with the aid of just six helpers, the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary have teamed up to help solve some intriguing word mysteries.

The O.E.D. is trying to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language. There are currently 600,000 words in the O.E.D. and counting. That's where the BBC TV series Balderdash and Piffle comes in. They are asking for the public's help in tracking down the origins of 50 words - the OED-BBC Wordhunt. My guess is that any member of their audience could master my grammar class with one hand tied behind his or her back.

Among the words and phrases are flip-flop (verifiable evidence before 1970), wolf-whistle (verifiable evidence before 1952 and information on the word's origin), and shaggy dog story (verifiable evidence before 1946 and information on the phrase's origin).

My favorite was their call for help with the phrase “dog's bollocks.” The cat's whiskers and the bee's knees have both referred to “the very best, the acme of excellence” since 1923, but the coarser phrase, dog's bollocks, doesn't appear until more modern times. The editors were hoping someone could find a reference to the term and its variants before 1989. And someone did. Here's the phrase's new entry on O.E.D. website:

dog's bollocks n. (also dog's ballocks) Brit. coarse slang (a) Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs (see quot. 1949) (rare) (b) (with the) the very best, the acme of excellence; cf. the cat's whiskers at cat n.1 131, bee's knees n. (b) at bee n.1 5b.

1949 E. PARTRIDGE Dict. Slang. (ed. 3) 1033/2 Dog's ballocks, the typographical colon-dash (:-).

1989 C. DONALD et al. (title) Viz: the dog's bollocks: the best of issues 26 to 31. 1995 Times 4 Oct. 7/1 Before Tony Blair's speech, a chap near me growled: ‘'E thinks 'e's the dog's bollocks.’ Well he's entitled to. It was a commanding speech: a real dog's bollocks of an oration. 2000 Front Oct. 51/3 You said you quite fancied Jon Bon Jovi. Yeah, Jon Bon Jovi is the dog's bollocks.

Note that if you add a right-hand parenthesis to a dog's bollocks, it becomes an ASCII smiley face.

A National Treasure

Project Gutenberg Canada officially launched on July 1, Canada's birthday (Fête du Canada). Although the project started with a baker's dozen, there are already a couple of hundred texts available for download in various formats from plain vanilla ASCII to HTML.

The two missions of Project Gutenberg Canada are to promote and make available, free of charge

• Canadian Books
• Canadian literature (in both of Canada's official languages)
• non-fiction books on Canadian history, politics, and culture
• International Books
• fiction and non-fiction (from all countries) which are in the Canadian public domain
• in any language, as is appropriate for a country with Canada's multicultural makeup

Since Canadian Copyright Law is life-plus-50 (versus life-plus-70 in the U.S.), the site is careful to warn, “If you live outside Canada, download an ebook only if you are certain that the book is in your country's public domain.”

Their blog added this pat on the back to the people and government of Canada for their critical support of the public domain.

“Finally, we would like to thank the people of Canada and the Government of Canada. There is a strong political consensus in Canada in favour of a healthy and vigorous public domain. Successive Canadian governments of all parties have consistently protected and indeed strengthened the Canadian public domain: it connects all of us to our cultural heritage.

We can say without hesitation that every single one of the thirteen titles we are presenting is an outstanding work of art. And yet every one of these fine titles has been out of print for many years. Had Canada followed the unfortunate example of some other countries by extending the duration of copyrights, twenty more years would have passed before we could have presented these free ebooks, which, being out of print, cannot be purchased in a bookstore.”