Joseph DeMartino
Moderator
I was just reminded by another thread about an odd habit of B5 fans - adding words to titles. I can't tell you how many times I've seen references to "War Without an End", "Sleeping in the Light", "There All of the Honor Lies" or "And the Sky was Full of Stars."
This isn't simply a matter of people not remembering episode titles, or mangling them. There is this odd consistency about it. Different people get the same titles wrong over and over, and always in the same way - sticking in an extra word, almost always the same extra word. And this always seems to involve the more self-conciously "poetic" titles, or those that contain quotations from literature. Do people reject the "literary" sound of a title like "Sleeping in Light" and subconciously insert "the" to produce a more prosaic version in their memories? I'm genuinely curious, because there is such a pattern to these errors as opposed to simply misremembering a word or typing "No Retreat, No Surrender" for "No Surrender, No Retreat"
All of the titles I mention above strike my ear with such a dull thud, such fatally awkward rhythm, that they immediately strike me as "wrong", even if I don't instantly see why they're wrong. But they obviously don't seem wrong to the people who use them, and I find the difference in "hearing" interesting.
Regards,
Joe
This isn't simply a matter of people not remembering episode titles, or mangling them. There is this odd consistency about it. Different people get the same titles wrong over and over, and always in the same way - sticking in an extra word, almost always the same extra word. And this always seems to involve the more self-conciously "poetic" titles, or those that contain quotations from literature. Do people reject the "literary" sound of a title like "Sleeping in Light" and subconciously insert "the" to produce a more prosaic version in their memories? I'm genuinely curious, because there is such a pattern to these errors as opposed to simply misremembering a word or typing "No Retreat, No Surrender" for "No Surrender, No Retreat"
All of the titles I mention above strike my ear with such a dull thud, such fatally awkward rhythm, that they immediately strike me as "wrong", even if I don't instantly see why they're wrong. But they obviously don't seem wrong to the people who use them, and I find the difference in "hearing" interesting.
Regards,
Joe