I don’t bother with the likes of Twitter, but I occasionally use Social Searcher to take a fleeting keyword-based glance across the cesspool. Very rarely does anything newsworthy turn up among the parroting and blather. But today I noticed that a Twitter-diot is complaining about Lovecraft making up items such as “lightning-scarred” in “The Lurking Fear”. Yet a simple search of Google Books, Google Scholar and Hathi swiftly reveals many such uses… <\/p>\n
* The U.S. Congress…<\/p>\n
These lightning-scarred trees are readily found in any large body of timber. During the dry season of 1910 there were many electrical storms, and innumerable small fires were found immediately afterwards.” (1910)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
* The U.S Bureau of Mines…<\/p>\n
Lightning, however, sometimes strikes an airship without destroying it. The Friedrichshafen Museum has lightning-scarred parts of airships that have withstood thunderstorms successfully (1933)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
* It appears to have been ‘house standard’ usage in American Forestry<\/em> journal, and elsewhere in forestry publications and articles. One can find it, for instance in the pre-war publications of the ranger stations at Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.<\/p>\n
Thus, while one can<\/em> find it getting past the picky copy-editors of The New England Magazine<\/em> in 1909 (“the lightning-scarred beech tree by the mill in the hollow”) and The Saturday Evening Post<\/em> in 1919 (“He had seen living trees struck and had examined the lightning-scarred tops of fallen dead ones”), and it does<\/em> occurs in the poetry of Aubrey De Vere and the 1910 translation of The Aeneid of Virgil<\/em> (“[his] body lightning-scarred, Lies prisoned under all, so runs the tale”), Lovecraft does not seem to have been reflecting very much of a literary usage. For instance, there’s nothing in the obvious suspects such as Poe or Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man”<\/a>. <\/p>\n
It seems more probable that Lovecraft had noticed the then-current forestry usage, and I assume that was because he had perused a few journals for research before he wrote “The Lurking Fear” and made a working list of the correct terminology. He would also have been looking for books on mountain lightning and thunder-storms. See my annotated “Lurking Fear”<\/a> for details on the extent of Lovecraft’s accurate knowledge of the Catskill Mountains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t bother with the likes of Twitter, but I occasionally use Social Searcher to take a fleeting keyword-based glance …<\/p>\n