19.256 spelling Ozymandias

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 256.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
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         Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2005 08:52:34 +0100
         From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
         Subject: spelling Ozymandias

A member of this group has pointed out to me that I misspelled
Ozymandias -- not once but (counting the adjectival form) twice.
While it is true that on my QUERTY keyboard x is nearest neighbour of
z, there is no excuse able to survive my own canons of care -- even
the fact that, subvocalizing as I type, I *heard*
/ozzymandeeahss/. Nor the fact that as I passed Basil Champney's
"insufficiently manly" Shelley Memorial in University College Oxford
recently (the model was a young girl, it is said), I stopped to pay
my respects, despite the sentence of the critics who have compared
the sculpture of the dead poet to "a slice of turbot laid out on a
fishmonger's scale"
(http://srv2.lycoming.edu/~lewes/shelleysites/oxford.htm). Nor is my
error favoured by the ratio of "Oxymandias" to "Ozymandias" as
attested by Google from online sources -- 101/21,500, or .0047.

If only I had read before I clicked!

Yours,
WM

Dr Willard McCarty | Reader in Humanities Computing | Centre for
Computing in the Humanities | King's College London | Kay House, 7
Arundel Street | London WC2R 3DX | U.K. | +44 (0)20 7848-2784 fax:
-2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
Received on Mon Sep 05 2005 - 04:14:48 EDT