Harry S Truman

Adam Stephanides · 27 Jun 2000, 23:13 · from urth-v0029.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: (urth) Harry S Truman
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 23:13:43
Message-ID: <urth-v0029-0088 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0029/0088.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

David Duffy wrote:
> > In fact, it seems more than just plausible that Smoky's middle initial
> > doesn't stand for anything--remember that he wears "A Suit of
> > Truman's" to be married in and that the 'S' in Harry S. Truman is
> > without further signification.  I think that's the solution to
> > the middle initial mystery.
> >
> Truman's name is actually written Harry S Truman -- not having the book h=
ere,
> what is the exact punctuation?

If you're asking about the punctuation of Smoky's legal name, he does
put a period after the S.

Truman's name, on the other hand, appears as "Harry Truman," no S at all
("A Suit of Truman's," I, 4, p. 59 of Bantam TPB), although the S
appears in the suit's monogram.  Come to think of it, it strikes me as
very unusual to refer to Truman as "Harry Truman"; either "Truman" or
"Harry S Truman" are far more common.  It's as if Crowley is emphasizing
the "S" by omission.

Okay, so who's going to do the article on "The Letter 'S' in John
Crowley's _Little, Big_"?

--Adam

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net