PSA + pop quiz

[pauraque_bk]

PSA

bowdlerized is someone whom many of you know and love. I am sure none of you would ever want to cause her harm. Therefore, it pains me to report that she is suffering from a brand of persecution I know all too well: Rampant misspelling of her LJ name.

"Bowdlerized" means "expurgated", and is an eponym of Thomas Bowdler, expurgator extraordinaire. The word should not be spelled in any other fashion, as there has never been any such person as Tohmas Bowlder.

To repeat:

B O W D L E R I Z E D

Now none of you has any excuse. Any further offenses will be punishable by spanking. Or withheld spankings, as the case may warrant.

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Pop Quiz

I'm curious about something. Please fill out this poll with your current impression of what the answers are. DO NOT look up the answers first. That's not the point. I want to know what you THINK is true.

This will be skewed, since there are a lot of academics and linguistics geeks on my flist, but eh.

[Poll #388778]

Comments

[asphodeline.livejournal.com]

I have to suppose the poll doesn't account for people like me being difficult for the sake of it but although I know people say these things have been deciphered, my cynical side can't help feeling that mistakes amy have been made!!

I can just see somewhere up (?) above us some Egytian scholars ROFLing all over the place because of some daft translation of ours.
I get the same feeling when archaeologists dig up some unrecognisable piece of dirty, muddy metal and tell us without any hesitiation that it is soem form of vessel used to worship some form or other of deity.
wonder what they'll make of mobile phones in years to come??!!

[pauraque]

I understand the cynicism -- there have certainly been decipherments that were later discovered to be totally wrong-headed. But while I'm sure there are off-base readings in our current understanding of Egyptian, I'm also pretty sure that on the whole, we know what we're talking about. Don't forget that there's a surviving relative of the Egyptian language -- liturgical Coptic -- which has been very useful for checking and aiding in decipherment. Not to mention lengthy bilingual Greek-Egyptian inscriptions such as the Rosetta Stone.

:)