4.0071 Queries (53)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 17 May 90 18:20:12 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0071. Thursday, 17 May 1990.


(1) Date: Wed, 16 May 90 22:17:06 EDT (9 lines)
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: XYMouse

(2) Date: Thu, 17 May 90 12:53:29 BST (12 lines)
From: DEL2%phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk@NSFnet-Relay.AC.UK
Subject: Re: [4.0050 OCR Scanning Errors

(3) Date: Wed, 16 May 90 21:42:29 EDT (32 lines)
From: FLANNAGA%OUACCVMB.BITNET@CORNELLC.cit.cornell.edu
Subject: And now for something completely different: foreskins

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 16 May 90 22:17:06 EDT
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: XYMouse

Has anyone purchased and tried out XYMouse, the mouse-driver and
enhancer made by Galactic Software? If so, a report would be
appreciated.

Willard McCarty
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------22----
Date: Thu, 17 May 90 12:53:29 BST
From: DEL2%phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk@NSFnet-Relay.AC.UK
Subject: Re: [4.0050 OCR Scanning Errors (197)]

John Koontz recently mentioned what looks like a fascinating package of
tools from the SIL (in the context of auto-correction of scanned text,
though the package looks as though it would have much wider application.
My mailer doesn't recognise his address, and conceivably other HUMANISTs
may also have been interested. So could I use the list please to ask
for more details?

Thanks, Douglas de Lacey <DEL2@PHX.CAM.AC.UK>
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------43----
Date: Wed, 16 May 90 21:42:29 EDT
From: FLANNAGA%OUACCVMB.BITNET@CORNELLC.cit.cornell.edu

Subject: And now for something completely different: foreskins

In lines 144-45 of Milton's tragedy <it>Samson Agonistes</it>, the
Chorus in describing one of Samson's famous victories uses an image that
many editors and critics wish it hadn't: "...A thousand fore-skins
fell, the flower of <it>Palestin</it> / In <it>Ramath-lechi</it> famous
to this day ...." The subject is no doubt painful to most men reading
it, and especially to the uncircumcised. I have been wondering about it
for years, ever since, in the fourth grade of an Episcopalian
prep-school, my religion teacher told an awe-inspired class of all-boys
that the Israelites in battle enumerated their slain and bragged about
their kill by cutting off the foreskins of their enemies and displaying
them in their tents after battle. My suggestible pre-teen mind
immediately formed an image that I have never forgotten, of the inside
of an Israelite battle tent with its little clothesline of foreskins
hanging up to dry and to brag about, a little like the lines of beads
that count scores in a pool hall. I have to make a note on the passage
in _Samson Agonistes_, for the edition I am working on. I am not
embarrassed by the passage but I am confused. Do the foreskins stand
for the fallen Philistines, by synecdoche, the (yuck!) part standing for
the whole, as in Alastair Fowler's note (1968 Longman edition), in which
he identifies "foreskins" as "uncircumcised Philistines" (1968)? Or are
those foreskins *real* foreskins that Samson bothered to cut off, rather
fastidiously, after the battle? Are there some biblical scholars or
experts on ancient combat out there who might help us puzzle this one
out?

Roy Flannagan