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AdamSmith

The pianoforte

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Posted
15 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Whose student was one of, and one of the most brilliant ever in contact with.

Um, is something missing here? The sentence ends with a preposition.

Posted
2 hours ago, Lucky said:

Um, is something missing here? The sentence ends with a preposition.

English grammar is Germanic, not Romance.

The ‘’rule” you are citing was dragged quite irrelevantly into English from Latin by 19th-century English pedants who had deliberately kept themselves ignorant of German philological research, which by that time had already pretty fully mapped out the great Indo-European language tree.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

Posted
21 minutes ago, Latbear4blk said:

So far, every single English teacher had failed to explain to me why I cannot end a sentence with a preposition. 

Every great English-language writer has done it.

Who wants to argue with Shakespeare, or Milton, or Wordsworth, or Yeats, or...?

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Posted
1 hour ago, AdamSmith said:

English grammar is Germanic, not Romance.

The ‘’rule” you are citing was dragged quite irrelevantly into English from Latin by 19th-century English pedants who had deliberately kept themselves ignorant of German philological research, which by that time had already pretty fully mapped out the great Indo-European language tree.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

But, you have gone off subject. And it is not the fault of @Lucky

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Posted

Thanks, Buddy2. This thread is a mystery, and the reply by the O/P begs the question as to  what the hell is trying to say in this semi-sentence:

"Whose student was one of, and one of the most brilliant ever in contact with."

Posted
17 minutes ago, Lucky said:

Thanks, Buddy2. This thread is a mystery, and the reply by the O/P begs the question as to  what the hell is trying to say in this semi-sentence:

"Whose student was one of, and one of the most brilliant ever in contact with."

He was a great college teacher, and taught me a great lot about poetry and how to read it, and how to think in general.

Posted
26 minutes ago, Lucky said:

Thanks, Buddy2. This thread is a mystery, and the reply by the O/P begs the question as to  what the hell is trying to say in this semi-sentence:

"Whose student was one of, and one of the most brilliant ever in contact with."

If you are going to advocate for reverse Latin in English, then denounce it when produced, I don’t know what to give you. :D

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Posted
22 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

He was a great college teacher, and taught me a great lot about poetry and how to read it, and how to think in general.

I had great teachers too. Mrs. Shirley Cowdrey in 6th grade. She particularly emphasized math, turning math into interesting games. And whenever she had a critical comment, it was balanced with praise. And she was our teacher all day, every day.

Posted
23 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

English grammar is Germanic, not Romance.

The ‘’rule” you are citing was dragged quite irrelevantly into English from Latin by 19th-century English pedants who had deliberately kept themselves ignorant of German philological research, which by that time had already pretty fully mapped out the great Indo-European language tree.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

main-qimg-98f94028acabe5e334cc731c8a5b19

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-three-major-subfamilies-of-Indo-European-languages

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Posted

My trouble (one I very much like) with English is its wonderful lack of government. In Spanish, as you know, we have the Real Academia Española to dictate what is correct Spanish and what is not.

Who determines that English grammar is Germanic and not Romance? Centuries of French installed in London Royal Court have strongly influenced your language with plenty of latinisms and Gallicisms, why your grammar would remain Germanic?

Posted
15 hours ago, Latbear4blk said:

My trouble (one I very much like) with English is its wonderful lack of government. In Spanish, as you know, we have the Real Academia Española to dictate what is correct Spanish and what is not.

Who determines that English grammar is Germanic and not Romance? Centuries of French installed in London Royal Court have strongly influenced your language with plenty of latinisms and Gallicisms, why your grammar would remain Germanic?

It is easy across history to have the English vocabulary infected with all kinds of foreign words through invasions etc.

The grammar is much more difficult to fuck with.

Posted

Dark Shadows

 
 
 

Dark Shadows is an American Gothic soap opera that originally aired weekdays on the ABC television network, from June 27, 1966, to April 2, 1971. The show depicted the lives, loves, trials, and tribulations of the wealthy Collins family of Collinsport, Maine, where a number of supernatural occurrences take place.

Dark Shadows
Darkshadows.jpg
Title card
Genre
Created by Dan Curtis
Developed by Art Wallace
Written by Gordon Russell
Sam Hall
Ron Sproat
Violet Welles
Malcolm Marmorstein
Art Wallace
Joe Caldwell
Francis Swann
Ralph Ellis
Starring Joan Bennett
Grayson Hall
Jonathan Frid
Nancy Barrett
Alexandra Moltke
Louis Edmonds
Kathryn Leigh Scott
David Selby
David Henesy
Lara Parker
Thayer David
Composer(s) Robert Cobert
Country of origin United States
No. of seasons 6
No. of episodes 1,225 (list of episodes)
Production
Producer(s) Robert Costello
Running time 30 minutes
Production company(s) Dan Curtis Productions
Distributor ABC Films
(1971-1973)
Worldvision Enterprises
CBS Television Distribution
Release
Original network ABC
Picture format Black and white
(June 1966 – August 1967)
Color
(August 1967 – April 1971)
Original release June 27, 1966 –
April 2, 1971

This series became popular when vampireBarnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) appeared ten months into its run. It would also feature ghosts, werewolves, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel, and a parallel universe. A small company of actors each played many roles; as actors came and went, some characters were played by more than one actor.

This soap opera was distinguished by its vividly melodramatic performances, atmospheric interiors, memorable storylines, numerous dramatic plot twists, adventurous music score, broad cosmos of characters, and heroic adventures. The original network run of the show lasted for nearly five years to amass 1,225 episodes.

In 2004 and 2007, it was ranked #19 and #23 on TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever.[1][2]

Since 2006, the series has continued as a range of audio dramas produced by Big Finish Productions, featuring many of the original cast, including David Selby, Lara Parker, and Kathryn Leigh Scott.[3]

 

 
HistoryEdit

Creator Dan Curtis claimed he had a dream in 1965 of a mysterious young woman on a train. The following day Curtis told his wife of the dream and pitched the idea as a TV series to ABC. Network officials greenlit production and Curtis began hiring crew members.[4]

Art Wallace was hired to create a story from Curtis's dream sequence. Wallace wrote the story bible Shadows on the Wall,[5] the proposed title for the show, later changed to Dark Shadows.[6] Robert Costello was added as a line producer, and Curtis took on the creator and executive producer roles. Lela Swift, John Sedwick, and Henry Kaplan all agreed to be directors for the new series. Robert Cobert created the musical score and Sy Tomashoff designed the set.

Broadcast historyEdit

Perhaps one of ABC's first truly popular daytime series, along with the game show Let's Make a Deal (which had moved from its original home NBC in 1968), Dark Shadows found its demographic niche in teenagers coming home from school in time to watch the show at 4 p.m. Eastern/3 p.m. Central, where it aired for almost all of its network run, the exception being a 15-month stretch between April 1967 and July 1968, when it aired a half-hour earlier. Originally, it was aired in black-and-white, but the show went into color starting with the episode broadcast on August 11, 1967. It became one of ABC's first daytime shows to actually win the rating for its timeslot, leading to the demise of NBC's original Match Gameand Art Linkletter's long-running House Partyon CBS, both in 1969.

Dark Shadows began with a 4.1 rating in the 1965-66 TV season, tying for thirteenth place out of eighteen daytime dramas. The audience figures only improved slightly, to 4.3, in 1966-67. 1966 was a volatile year for soaps, and many ended their runs between the premiere date of Dark Shadows in June and the month of December. By that time, six months had passed, and for Dark Shadows, the news was not good; the soap had failed to gain major traction. In June, it ranked #13 out of 18 soaps, and by December, the lower-rated offerings were gone and the show officially ranked #13 out of 13 soaps. “The show was limping along, really limping”, head writer Sam Hall remembered, “and ABC said, ‘We're canceling it. Unless you pick up in 26 weeks, you're finished.’ [Series creator Dan Curtis] had always wanted to do a vampire picture, so he decided to bring a vampire — Barnabas Collins — to the series.”[7]

190px-Jonathan_Frid_Barnabas_Collins_Dar
Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, a 200-year-old vampire

Barnabas was introduced in April 1967 and the fan response was swift and immediate. Coupled with a time slot change to 3:30 Eastern / 2:30 Central, the fortunes of Dark Shadows rebounded, as many more teenagers found the program after tuning out the other offerings that may have been too "boring" to them. By May 1968, the series was still in last place (out of 12 offerings), but rose to a 7.3 rating, the rough equivalent (at that time) of gaining the viewership of three million households in the span of one year. Dark Shadows would return to its 4 p.m. Eastern / 3 p.m. Central time slot in July 1968, without losing much of its audience at all. One Life to Live, which was launched by ABC in July 1968 in the 3:30 slot, also sought to reach the newfound young demographic.

The series reached its peak in popularity during a storyline set in the year 1897, broadcast from March 1969. By the end of May, Dark Shadows was ABC's most popular soap opera, and by late 1969 it was reaching between 7 and 9 million viewers on any given day, and ranking 11th out of a total 15 daytime dramas in that time period.[8][9]

In November 1969, after nine months of some of Dark Shadows' most intricate, intelligent storylines, the 1897 storyline came to an end. With ratings at an all-time high, the writers were under pressure to hold the audience.[10]Their next storyline, known as "The Leviathans", proved to be a thematic misstep for the show and one from which it never recovered. Fans tended to dislike the portrayal of Barnabas as the pawn of some greater power. They were more interested in the archetypes of classic horror—the vampire, the witch, the werewolf—than in off-camera suggestion.[11] The launch of Somerset in March 1970, a much-ballyhooed spin-off of NBC's Another World, also hurt the series considerably.

The release of the film House of Dark Shadowsin September of that year is also thought to have caused TV ratings to fall, perhaps because of parents who attended the film with their children, and seeing the amount of blood spilled across the screen, discouraged their children's choice of television viewing material.[12] Beginning in the fall of 1970, several ABC stations across the country dropped the show due to falling viewership. Within six months, ratings dropped from 7.3 to 5.3. Ironically, Nielsen ratings for March 1971, the last full month that Dark Shadows was on the air, revealed that viewership had risen in its final weeks.[13]

By early 1971, though, ABC was trying to cut costs in the face of harsh new economic realities including a national economic recession, a sharp dip in advertising revenue following the discontinuance of cigarette commercials, and a record-high number of competing soap operas—which were more expensive to produce than game or talk shows—on the networks' daytime schedules. Thus, the network began weeding out supposedly unproductive programming.

Despite its relatively high station clearances for its time slot and low production costs, Dark Shadows fell victim to the purge mainly because of its young audience, who usually did not make decisions about the purchasing of household goods and food products for the family, which were the two chief industries that bought airtime on daytime television in that era. Practically no other daytime show skewed so much under the 18–35 demographic threshold as Dark Shadows did. Furthermore, prime-time shows and movies with horror or science fiction themes (e.g., Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) had been on the decline for some time, and, of course, the serial appealed heavily to fanciers of those genres, people who usually did not express much interest in the often sentimental domestic or romantic themes on which traditional soaps had relied since their inception on radio in the 1930s. In addition and probably more decisively, the program experienced a precipitous drop in its ratings during its last two years on the air, falling from a peak of 8.4 in the 1968–69 television season to a 5.3 in 1970–71.[14] Reflecting on the series' cancellation, in an interview included in a 2005 DVD release, series creator Curtis welcomed the show's cancellation, feeling it had run out of fresh ideas: "I was just hoping it was going to end. I couldn't squeeze my brain any harder to come up with just one more story. I just wanted to move on and out."[15]

Despite many letters of protest from outraged fans, ABC canceled the five-year-old show on April 2, 1971, and replaced it with a new version of the hit 1960s game show Password. The rather abrupt ending of the series left some plotlines (such as Victoria Winters' parentage, and the story of the Jennings family) unfinished, although most of the plot threads came to a happy conclusion, via a voice-over explaining future events in the final minute of the last episode.[16]

The original cast reunited in 2003 for a special reunion play recorded for MPI, and in 2006 resumed production of Dark Shadows audio dramas for Big Finish (see below). These dramas have been ongoing for 10 seasons.[17]

PreservationEdit

Learn more
 
This section does not cite any sources.

Dark Shadows has the distinction of being one of the few classic television soap operas to have all of its episodes survive intact except one, although a handful of early episodes are available only in 16 mm kinescope format.

For the one lost episode (#1219), only a home audio recording exists. The home video version and cable reruns of this episode were reconstructed from a combination of this soundtrack, video still frames sourced from other episodes, and the closing and opening scenes from episodes #1218 and #1220 respectively.[citation needed] The search for the preserved episodes of this series also uncovered several hundred episodes thought lost of another series, The Hollywood Squares.[citation needed]

Syndication and cable repeatsEdit

Learn more
 
This section does not cite any sources.

Dark Shadows was to be syndicated by ABC's distribution arm, ABC Films, as the series was ending in late 1970 and early 1971. However, delays kept the show from entering syndication, mainly because the FCC imposed Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, forcing the networks to sell off their syndication companies. Finally, in 1975, Worldvision Enterprises (spun off from ABC Films) released 130 episodes to syndication.

Over the years, more episodes were released in varying quantities until the show finished its syndicated run in 1990. However, the first 209 shows and roughly the last year's worth of shows were never seen in syndication. Dark Shadows was lucky to be in reruns at all; most daytime programs at the time were being destroyed in an effort to recycle the videotape, and those programs that survived were usually locked away without ever being seen again. The series is now distributed by CBS Television Distribution.

For many years the show was rerun on Sci-Fi Channel, now known as Syfy. Unlike previous networks, Syfy had the entire run of 1,225 episodes to show. The network stopped airing Dark Shadows in December 2003. All 1,225 episodes in the series were shown at various times between 1992 and 2003.

Episode numberingEdit

Learn more
 
This section does not cite any sources.

A total of 1,225 episodes were produced but, during the course of its run, the show was preempted 20 times. ABC would compensate by occasionally skipping, double-numbering and, in one case, triple-numbering episodes in order to keep a show ending in a 5 or 0 airing on Fridays. This is why the last episode produced has #1245 when, in actuality, it was only the 1,225th episode produced.

StorylinesEdit

1966/7Edit

Victoria Winters' Parentage, episode 1 to 92.

  • Victoria Winters and her role as governess is inspired by title character in Charlotte Brontë's gothic novel Jane Eyre.[18]

Burke Devlin's Revenge For His Manslaughter Conviction, episode 1 to 201.

Roger Collins' Mysterious Car Crash,episode 13 to 32.

The Murder of Bill Malloy, episode 46 to 126.

Laura Collins the Phoenix, episode 123 to 192.

Jason McGuire Blackmails Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, episode 193 to 275.

The Arrival of the Vampire Barnabas Collins,episode 211 to 220.

The Kidnapping of Maggie Evans, episode 221 to 261.

Julia Hoffman's Attempt to Cure Barnabas,episode 265 to 351.

Barnabas Terrorizing Julia Hoffman, episode 352 to 365.

1795Edit

Angelique Bouchard's Vampire Curse on Barnabas, episode 366 to 426.

Victoria Winters's Witchcraft Trial, episode 400 to 461.

  • The witchcraft trial involving Victoria Winters is inspired by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Reverend Trask's fate is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado."[18]

Nathan Forbes' Manipulation of Millicent Collins, episode 419 to 460.

  • Nathan's manipulation of Millicent is reminiscent of the 1938 play and the 1944 film Gaslight.

1968/9Edit

The Mystery of Jeff Clark, episode 461 to 665.

The Creation of Adam, episode 466 to 636.

The Dream Curse, episode 477 to 548.

Elizabeth's Fear of Being Buried Alive,episode 513 to 672.

Nicholas Blair's Scheme to Create A Master Race, episode 549 to 633/634.

Chris Jennings' Werewolf Curse, episode 627 to 700.

The Ghosts of Quentin Collins and Beth Chavez Haunt Collinwood, episode 639 to 700.

  • The character of Quentin Collins and his role is inspired by Peter Quint in Henry James's gothic novel The Turn of the Screw.[18]

1897Edit

Barnabas’ Mission to Save David Collins,episode 700 to 839.

Jenny Collins, the Mad Woman in the Attic, episode 707 to 748.

  • Jenny Collins is inspired by the character of Bertha from Charlotte Brontë's gothic novel Jane Eyre.[18]

Laura Collins the Phoenix, episode 728 to 761.

  • Worthington Hall and Gregory Trask's running of it is inspired by Charles Dickens's novel Nicholas Nickleby.[18]

Magda Rakosi's Werewolf Curse on Quentin,episode 749 to 834.

Gregory Trask's Manipulation of Judith Collins, episode 762 to 884.

The Hand of Count Petofi, episode 778 to 814.

The Creation of Amanda Harris, episode 812 to 850.

  • The theme of an artist's falling in love with his own creation who is brought to life by supernatural forces is reminiscent of the classic Greek myth of Pygmalion.

Barnabas's Infatuation with Kitty Soames,episode 844 to 885.

Count Petofi Body Swaps with Quentin,episode 849 to 883.

  • The character of Count Petofi is based on the real-world Count of St. Germain, a Georgian-era courtier and man of science who claimed to be, and possibly was, the son of Francis II Rákóczi. In the 19th century, Theosophist legends claimed that he attained the secret of immortality.[18][20]

1969/70Edit

Barnabas Falls Under the Control of the Leviathans, episode 886 to 950.

The Mystery of Grant Douglas and Olivia Corey, episode 888 to 934.

Chris Jennings' Werewolf Curse, episode 889 to 978.

The Leviathan Child, episode 891 to 929.

Jeb Hawkes the Leviathan Leader, episode 935 to 980.

The Ghosts of Gerard Stiles and Daphne Harridge Haunt Collinwood, episode 1071 to 1109.

1970 Parallel TimeEdit

The Death of Angelique Collins, episode 969 to 1060.

Cyrus Longworth's Experiment, episode 978 to 1035.

1995Edit

The Destruction of Collinwood, episode 1061 to 1070.

1840Edit

Barnabas' Infatuation with Roxanne Drew, episode 1081 to 1150.

The Head of Judah Zachery, episode 1117 to 1138.

Judah Zachery's Possession of Gerard Stiles, episode 1139 to 1197.

Quentin Collins' Witchcraft Trial, episode 1162 to 1197.

1841 Parallel TimeEdit

Bramwell Collins' and Catherine Harridge's Love Affair, episode 1186 to 1245.

The Cursed Room Lottery, episode 1194 to 1245.

  • This storyline is inspired by Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery."[18]

 

 
Production

 

 
Reception

 

 
Media

 

 
Revivals

 

 
See also

 

 
Notes

 

 
References

 

 
External links
 

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Posted
12 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

 

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