![]() ![]() Even their Wikipedia article, though entitled Eagles, repeatedly uses a definite article before the name to remain in compliance with syntactic constraints.īy the way, you might think that when someone gives an address ending "Nassau, Bahamas", they are using Bahamas as a plural strong proper name. No wonder he failed to get the world to go along with him: ignoring his insistence, everyone who talks about the band names them incorrectly. So Frey was trying to make Eagles stand alone as a complete outlier in the language. Plural nouns function syntactically as indefinite noun phrases and (as again CGEL explicitly says on page 517) "a proper name is inherently definite." If there are any plural nouns that function as strong proper names, they must be very rare. ![]() Once you look at the relevant grammatical constraints of English you see that Frey was really swimming upstream.Īs CGEL explicitly says (page 517), "Plural proper names are always weak." ( Language Log, by the way, is a strong proper name.)Įveryone feels they need to supply a definite article for Eagles. Steve Martin reported in his autobiography Born Standing Up that Frey insisted the name was "Eagles", not "The Eagles." Thus the band had settled on a name that was supposed to be what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language ( CGEL) calls a strong proper name like Azerbaijan, which takes no the, not a weak one like (the) Azores, which must have a the. Working on that caused me to bump up against the odd fact that the band Frey and Henley co-founded had a name that nobody ever gets right. Verlaine published his complete works in 1895.Singer-songwriter-guitarist Glenn Frey died two weeks ago, and I found myself reflecting on the poetry of the songs he wrote with Don Henley for a Lingua Franca post ( see it here). Rimbaud died on November 10, 1891, at the age of thirty-seven. The doctors were forced to amputate his leg, but the cancer continued to spread. In 1891, Rimbaud traveled to Marseilles to see a doctor about a pain in his knee. He spent the final twenty years of his life working abroad, and he took jobs in African towns as a colonial tradesman. In his correspondence with family and friends, Rimbaud indicates that he spent his adulthood in a constant struggle for financial success. ![]() His only writing after 1875 survives in documents and letters. Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry in a span of about five years, concluding around the year 1875. ![]() The book was published in 1873 in Brussels, but the majority of the copies sat in the printer’s basement until 1901 because Rimbaud could not pay the bill. Verlaine was imprisoned, and Rimbaud returned to Charleville, where he wrote a large portion of Une Saison en Enfer ( A Season in Hell). While in Brussels in 1873, a drunk Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the hand. Shortly after the birth of his son, Verlaine left his family to live with Rimbaud.ĭuring their affair, which lasted nearly two years, they associated with the Paris literati and traveled to Belgium and England. Though Rimbaud’s moved out soon after, as a result of his harsh manners, he and Verlaine became lovers. He wrote to the poet Paul Verlaine, who invited him to live in Paris with him and his new wife. That same year, his school shut down during the Franco-Prussian War, and he attempted to run away from Charleville twice but failing for lack of money. Rimbaud began writing prolifically in 1870. His teacher and mentor Georges Izambard nurtured his interest in literature, despite his mother’s disapproval. By the age of thirteen, he had already won several prizes for his writing and was adept at composing verse in Latin. His father, an army captain, abandoned the family when he was six. Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born October 20, 1854, in the small French town of Charleville. ![]()
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