Casually strolling when I stumble upon Jason Pargin's page (aka David Wong, author of John Dies at the End and othe books) where he's explaining that several books have been changed to update the pop culture elements.

Edit to add this post covering the Kindle "Modernization" already on the forum and full of very good points

He uses Pretty Little Liars as an example, when the line went from "Come watch Fear Factor at home tonight" to "Come watch this tiktok at home tonight" here is the link of his video He's much more articulate than me about why reading old references in books is still part of the journey, but I'm also flabbergasted at the thought process of even changing references.

Is the publisher thinking that a book that did quite well will suddenly be dropped cold because it mentions something outdated ? Years ago there were "emoji version" of Shakespeare plays (this did kill something in me at the time) and it feels like the same idea : readers can only understand and appreciate what is immediately known. No time for looking up a reference, no time for learning to just roll with a vague reference that isn't even that important in the context. And as Jason says, it even makes no sense. Changing a reference from decades ago for a more modern one might not work because the world is different and modern readers will raise a brow at the absurdity of the situation described.

Are we really dumbing down books ? Is the plan to make it impossible to have something last and span over decades and become itself a reference ?

Hola Bookaholics!

You're question of the day is a simple one:

Do you reread books or not? ☺️

When I met Foamy properly – only, I didn’t call her Foamy then, I called her Aphrodite; which was nice sounding, and all, but it just means “foamy”.

I was not going to go on this etymological tangent, but the book misrepresents it, and my name isn’t Polyglottery for naught, so…

The Etymology of Ἀφροδίτη Nobody knows for certain. The end.

Don’t be obtuse; what about the possible etymological origins of Ἀφροδίτη‽ Yes, yes; stop twisting my arm. ‘Aphrodite’ is explained by Hesiod as deriving from ἀφρός aphrós (foam, froth), in reference of her origin story. Crucially, the second part (-δίτη -dítē) remains unexplained, and the entire explanation is nowadays rejected as folk etymology¹.

Recently, Craig Jendza suggests that Ἀφροδίτη Aphrodítē must come from Ἀφραδίτη Aphradítē, from ἀφραδία aphradía ‘mindlessness’, because the Goddess makes everybody lose their minds with desire and love. The problem is that this epithet of the Goddess, Ἀφραδίτη, is not attested anywhere. Another problem is that this adjective implies rather that the person thus titled lacks wit, rather than being the cause for a lack of wit. I cannot see this epithet being used for a Goddess, though who is to say that it may not have been so?

Dedvukaj (2023) wants to connect the name to the Albanian phrase afro dita, reportedly “come forth the dawn”, and were it not for my scientific integrity, I would not even mention it herein – but honestly, man, what utter pish posh!

The name is most probably not from Greek. A couple of possible origin languages have been suggested and discarded, among which Etruscan *prθ(n)*², but there are attested Etruscan references to Aphrodite as Apru. The only tenable suggestion that remains is that, in light of the goddess’ origin, the word comes from a nearby Semitic language (cf. Martin L. West, Beekes, and other scholars).

However, it remains unclear exactly from which Semitic language the word comes. I have not found anything convincing; the closest I came to is Phoenician ‘prt meaning “netherworld, dirt, soil”, which might have a 0.5% chance of being relevant (consider her epithet Μελαινίς, Melainís “the Dark One”), though I have not gotten my hands on more than one Phoenician dictionary so far…

——————————————— ¹ A folk etymology of an English word would be deriving ’female’ from some form of ‘male’, though the word comes from Old French ‘femelle’ (womanly), related to ‘femme’ (woman) < Latin ‘fēmina’ (woman), whereas ‘male’ comes from Old French ’masle’ (man, manly) < Latin ‘mas(culus)’ ([little] man; manly).

A second example would be ‘serviceberry’, which is not from service+berry, but rather from Latin ‘sorbus’ + berry.

² Eng. ’lord’. NB: Etruscans had the habit, much like in Semitic languages, of not writing vowels within a word. So this word might have sounded like parθ, preθ, peruθ, or any other permutation.