When Writers Go Weird: That time George Bernard Shaw left money in his will for a new English alphabet

Someone's really irked at the English alphabet.

Are writers ever normal? No, otherwise they'd be productive members of society. 'When Writers Go Weird' is when we remember writers acting strange, odd, off, or--yeah--just plain weird. Also known as Tuesday to them.

Today:  George Bernard Shaw really didn't like the English alphabet and wanted a new one.

You are used to the English alphabet and language. Whether you're an expert user or dabbling in it as a secondary means of communication, you're used to it. You've read this far in a blog post after all.

Which leads to the curious case of George Bernard Shaw's distaste for the alphabet he relied on so heavily. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925--and numerous other literary awards--Shaw's native tongue was English. He was an Irishman under British rule for the majority of his life, surrounded by the English alphabet. His plays--from Pygmalion to Man and Superman--were all written with that same standard English alphabet using Latin letters.

But he hated it. It made no sense to him how we spelled words and relied so little on phonetics. Case in point, the word "ghoti" is attributed to him, where "ghoti" is pronounced the same as you would say "fish." (Using the "gh" from words like "enough," etc.)

In actuality, Shaw never said anything about "ghoti" (it comes from a letter written in the 19th century from Charles Ollier, who credited his son William with its creation), but Shaw's hatred for the English alphabet was so pronounced, everyone presumes he created the ghoti/fish comparison.

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The organization gained so much traction, President Theodore Roosevelt became a firm believer.
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He wasn't alone. The early 20th century was a quirky time with individuals promoting curious ways to overcome difficulties in language. In 1906, for example, the Simplified Spelling Board was created in the United States (and funded in part by steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie) in hopes of simplifying spelling mistakes and ease the ability to learn English. The organization gained so much traction, President Theodore Roosevelt became a firm believer of the Board's suggestion of 300 new spellings and demanded the Government Printing Office adopt them in their literature. The reason we don't see those new spellings today? Congress quickly rebuked Roosevelt within months.

L.L. Zamenhof

Even earlier, in 1905, an ophthalmologist named L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto (designed to be an auxiliary worldwide language easy enough for all to learn), released his Fundamento de Esperanto as a definitive guide to the new language. He gained so much traction that there was the Worldwide Esperanto Congress established that same year--a congress which is still held annually to this day. Mark your calendars and invite the kids.

(Yes, an ophthalmologist deals with eyes, but L.L. Zamenhof apparently only had eyes for languages.)

By 1908, the Simplified Spelling Society was created in Great Britain in the same vein as its American cousin (although completely lacking in tycoon affiliations), and attracted authors from throughout the country, including George Bernard Shaw, to no one's surprise.

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He habitually refused to abide by rules traditionally held with English spelling.
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This is all to say it was a heady time for lovers of making languages accessible and for straightforward alphabets. For Shaw, though, this was a lifelong passion. He habitually refused to abide by rules traditionally held with English spelling and punctuation, such as dropping the "u" in words like "favour" and refusing to use an apostrophe in contractions. He also spent 13 years on the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English pushing a phonetic component. How much the BBC actually listened to Shaw's advice is another matter.

He felt so intensely about establishing a new English alphabet that, upon his death in 1950, Shaw bequeathed a significant portion of his assets in his will to reforming spelling. Naturally, people contested Shaw's last will and testament. Create a new alphabet for English? Was he crazy when he made the will?? But after some legal wrangling, the trust announced £8,300 was set aside from the estate and that a contest would commence for people to design a new alphabet.

There were three rules Shaw required for his new alphabet. One, it had to have a minimum of 40 letters. Why at least 40? God only knows. Two, the new alphabet should be based as much as possible on phonetic qualities. And, lastly, it should not look anything like the Latin letters the English alphabet already uses.

By 1958, the contest began. Out of 467 submissions, four winners were chosen to receive a £500 prize, with Ronald Kingsley Read largely receiving most of the credit. The Shaw Alphabet--also known as the Shavian Alphabet--was born. Made of 48 letters compared to the English alphabet's 26, it replaces lowercase and uppercase letters with "tall," "deep," and "short" status. A dot is placed over a letter if it's a proper name.

While the alphabet exists and Shaw's wishes were granted, the Shavian Alphabet never gained much traction. The trust--which had been originally responsible for holding the competition--had very little money left over. In the end, they only published Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion in the Shavian style.

As for the general movement for an easier alphabet and language, its high point was probably Teddy Roosevelt backing them. The movement petered out into a whimper by the second half of the 20th century. The American Simplified Spelling Board ceased operations by 1920. The auxiliary language of Esperanto? Estimates suggest there are only 1,000 native speakers worldwide today.

Meanwhile, the British Simplified Spelling Society changed its name to the English Spelling Society, but stopped formally endorsing a new English spelling system by 1960. While still in existence today, it largely only makes headlines when protesting major spelling competitions, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee in the United States. Because nothing sways worldwide opinion like raising a stink around nervous 13-year olds.

In the end, Shaw's curious desire for a new English alphabet came to fruition, if only after his death--even if the alphabet itself is largely dead now, too.

There's always Pygmalion in its original Latin letters, though.

Theater Director: William Shakespeare was probably gay, and we might as well just admit it.

From the file of "Okay, I guess so if you say so":

While William Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway (no, not that one), some historians have believed that his plays often focused on a societal outsider more than anything else. Likewise, out of the bard's 154 sonnets, 126 are addressed specifically to men.

Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director Greg Doran told BBC Radio 4 that he believes this all adds up to Shakespeare probably being gay, but living in a time when such a lifestyle wasn't allowed. Being gay--an outsider--is why he was capable of writing about characters that were on the fringes of society, says Doran.

"It allows him to get inside the soul of a black general, a Venetian Jew, an Egyptian queen or whatever and that perhaps that outsider perspective has something to do with his sexuality," Doran tells the BBC.

Doran points out that in Merchant of Venice the character of Antonio seems quite infatuated with Bassanio. "[I]t’s clearly a very particular portrait of a gay man and I think in the 21st century it’s no longer acceptable to play that as anything other than a homosexual," says Doran.

So was Shakespeare gay? Was Antonio? Does this really change anything? Why do I look so good in denim? These are all questions that might never be answered.

Chairman Mao Zedong is a popular guy on the literary circuit.

I'm always happy to go on a tangent about literature, but my thoughts aren't terribly desired by the masses. By comparison, even though the founding father of modern China has been dead for forty years, he's as popular as ever on the literary front.

While Chairman Mao is best known as a revolutionary and politician (and lover of snappy looking gray suits), he was also a poet in his spare time, as well as a lover of classical Chinese literature and the poetry of others.

Late in life, with his health deteriorating and his eyesight failing, Mao asked for a professor to visit and read various poetry and literature to him. Di Lu began visiting him to do just that--but asked the chairman to write out notes to her regarding his thoughts, as she had trouble understanding the Chairman.

The notes were saved. Fast forward forty years, and those scribbles and reflections on literature were auctioned off. According to the BBC, Sotheby's in London sold the notes this week for $910,000. The estimated selling price going in? $78,000-$105,000.

Now, see, slip me a $5 spot and you could save yourself a fortune.

Report: Nearly half of London's students have not been to a theater or seen Shakespeare.

Despite living in the same city that William Shakespeare wrote many of his plays and saw them enacted, a new report from London's Social Mobility Commission says that almost half of London's students haven't been to a theater to see a play, never mind The Globe Theater reconstructed to showcase the Bard's work.

In the past decade, The Globe Theater--through donations by Deutsche Bank--has had 150,000 London students see a Shakespeare play free of charge, with 20,000 alone visiting in the past year treated to see The Taming of the Shrew.

The study showed that specifically 44% of students had never seen a theatrical performance. Indeed, Georghia Ellinas, head of learning at Globe Education, told the BBC, "We hear from teachers that some London school students who come to the Globe, living only two or three miles away, have never seen the Thames before."

The reason seems to stem from an income gap, where poorer students and their families can't afford the discretionary income required to see the theater, never mind the cost of traveling public transportation for the six mile round trek.

The Social Mobility Commission looked into various activities and income gap issues, and found it wasn't just the theater, per BBC:


"It found that trips to the theatre, galleries, the cinema or the zoo were all more likely for wealthier families - with the likelihood of such visits rising and falling in a way directly linked to family income."


I'm not sure how Shakespeare would have taken this to know seeing a hyena exhibit or checking out the next Fast and Furious entry are as difficult for many to see than one of his plays.

Does this mean Vin Diesel = Shakespeare?

At least in one sense.

British teenage boys are sweaty, fashionable.

There's a 95% chance that wherever you are reading this in the world your body is slowly devolving into a gelatinous puddle from the summer of 2016. Teenage boys in Great Britain feel you. Or they would, that is, if they didn't feel like they were going to keel over from heatstroke first.

Uniforms are required at the Longhill High School in Rottingdean, East Sussex, which led to nearly twenty boys swapping out their long, heavy pants for their school gym shorts after a recent heat wave.

This is England though, where a love of elderly women wearing tiaras is only matched by a national sense of schadenfreude--so the shorts-adorned boys were told to wear pants, sent home, or kept in isolation all day at school.

According to the BBC, the boys were told that they needed to "wear any part of the agreed school uniform." In a genius move, four boys came to school the next day wearing the school approved skirts for girls, which flummoxed Kate Williams, the head teacher. She allowed it. As a result, ten additional boys joined in wearing the school approved skirt the following day in an act of solidarity and/or cooled gams.

The Argus, a local newspaper, quotes Williams' subtle displeasure. "Students have access to water in order to keep themselves hydrated," she said. "We have made reasonable steps to ensure that classrooms are as comfortable as possible."

Hydration = Least enthusiastic air conditioning method ever. Remember that, kids. Don't start asking for ice now or whatnot. This isn't France.

Political plagiarism as a teachable moment.

By now we all know Melania Trump channeled her inner 14-year old high school freshman and played a little verbal Freddy Fast Fingers with her speech at the Republican National Convention the other night.

In it, Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's Democratic National Convention speech eight years earlier. Words and phrases like hard work, American dream, values--yada, yada, yada--the sort of political speech making where nothing but white noise is said, but it's an easy sell. Americans love a good fairy tale, regardless of political affiliation.

Which leads us to the teachable moment that has American teachers giddy with excitement. They can teach popularized plagiarism! The BBC reached out to various teachers, including Brad Francis, an English teacher at Davis Middle School in Evanston, Wyoming.

"Melania's speech is probably the most blatant example that I have ever seen," Francis told the BBC. "Eighth grade students need very literal examples, and her speech is basically verbatim to Michelle Obama's. It will help them learn absolutely what not to do in their writing."

Admittedly, Francis might need to learn a little bit of nuance. The speech is absolutely a case of plagiarism, but the entire thing isn't "basically verbatim." Francis would get a C+ grade for such hyperbole and exaggeration in his argument.

"I have students who try to copy and paste material from the internet all the time to pass it off as their own," Francis continued telling the BBC. "That speech was Michelle Obama's intellectual property."

The real disappointing angle that's falling through the cracks with all of this is that two different political parties actually wanted to claim that feeble and uninspired speech as either intellectual or property.

Napoleonic war diary found in secondhand bookstore in Tasmania.

That's how humans used to write.

Royal Engineer John Squire was a noted soldier for the king's military, a learned man of good standing with a penchant for fine handwriting. This led to a diary detailing his stops in battle during the crown's fight with Napoleon's war across the continent. Any sort of diary two centuries old is valuable, never mind one of an officer from the Napoleonic War.

Fast forward 200-years, and Squire's diary was discovered in a cupboard--stacked amongst old, dusty books--in the back room of  bookstore in Tasmania of all places. And no one knows exactly how it ended up there.

According to the BBC, the bookstore owner believes "the journal could have been in the shop for 20 years, but no-one [know's] how it arrived. A working theory is that it arrived with the colonists who established Van Diemen's Land." Van Diemen's Land was the former name of Tasmania shortly after it became known to Europeans in 1642.

Squire was no slouch, with a military resume that saw him at British campaigns in Egypt, including being present when the Rosetta Stone was handed over to the crown. He later spent time in South America, Sweden, and Portugal, where he eventually died of a fever.

Yet, strangely enough, his long lost diary might have been a better traveler than he ever was--however it was that it traveled.



FUN FACT!: After being discovered in 1642, Tasmania was thought to be part of mainland Australia. Somehow, despite a settlement long established on the southeastern tip, it took until 1798 for an explorer to circumnavigate the island and realize, you know, duh.


Photo:  abc.net.au

This Week in Science!!!

A career in writing will lead to premature aging and a healthy dose of personal humiliation. But science and medicine is where you'll make money, fame, and the respect of your parents. As a result, we might as well pay attention to what they're doing in those fields.

So it's time to take another peak at anything going on in the world of science and medicine this week.


Starting off with:  Club beats at the deepest spot on Earth.

story one:
The Mariana Trench needs to tone it down.





Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University dropped a titanium encased hydrophone that could withstand the crushing pressure of 16,000lbs per square inch at the bottom of the deepest spot on Earth--Challenger Deep within the Mariana Trench. Then they listened for twenty-three consecutive days and recorded the first sounds humanity has ever heard so far into the planet.

Nearly seven miles (36,000ft) below the surface, a category-4 typhoon can be heard echoing high above. A passing ship's propellers pulse by. A magnitude-5 earthquake vibrates the ocean's waters, surrounded by a rhythmic whale hum. And, if you listen closely, Nemo and Dory are wondering what all the fuss is about.

Listening to the sound clips can feel mildly haunting, like the one above of the whale hum before and after an earthquake. Then you realize the whale was just moseying by and singing a tune right after the earthquake rolls through, and you understand whales have different priorities in life. Like enjoying good dubstep.



story two:
Polish chemists are trying to kill Superman!!!

Poland's next great superpower.

A group of Polish chemists tried to create kryptonite, the one thing that can incapacitate Superman--as we all know Eastern Europeans are in the pocket of Lex Luthor. Because this is Poland though, the chemists ultimately failed, continuing a centuries-long tradition of Polish jokes.

The attempt at dabbling in comic book chemistry actually resulted in a discovery of sorts. The chemists initially took the known element of krypton, one of the inert elements, and successfully bonded it to oxygen, creating krypton monoxide. Considering that krypton was thought to be unreactive to everything, the fact it can be bonded to anything is a huge step. Toward what, I don't know. Let's assume toward siding with Batman.

As a result, now in a comparison between you and a collection of krypton, you'll be the more inert element.



story three:
Scientists have discovered the gene linked to grey hair!!!

Heavy hair mojo.

In news that shook Clairol and Just for Men to their very core, scientists have discovered the gene that is linked to grey hair. Called IRF4, and sitting on chromosome six, the gene regulates natural pigments in the skin, hair, and eye, and is one gateway to knowing why your hair changes to grey. Surprisingly, it's not because of your annoying in-laws. Not solely, at least.

Not that they can manipulate the gene to reverse your grey just yet. Scientists know the gene linked to balding after all, and Rogaine isn't batting an eye. But the news is the first time a gene has been linked to George Clooney's hair mojo, so it's a start.

During this research into the greying gene, scientists also discovered the gene for beard thickness and unibrows.

That's right. Unibrows no longer need to fear tweezers, a waxer, threader, or public scorn. Unibrows need to fear lab coats.




story four:
Male rats in a bromance tend to have lower stress levels!!!

You got the queso, bro?

You know how it starts. You're a male rat. If you're not working gutters and dumpsters for a meal out on the streets, you're in a laboratory waiting to be injected with some horrible disease.

But maybe you meet a fellow male rat. Dave. He understands the struggle, too. You both talk. You have a beer. You share your worries over mildly stressful events. A bromance blossoms. And the next thing you know, you're in a rat fantasy football league or trading seven-layer dip recipes before major sporting events. You suddenly feel slightly better about your rat life!

In essence, researchers have discovered that male rats, when studied under mild to moderate stress, became more social, huddled and touched more in their cages, and saw an increase in their oxytocin levels, which led to healthier lives overall. The study at the University of California-Berkeley also found that extreme levels of stress had the opposite reaction on the rats, causing them to withdraw and stop answering texts or phone calls from Dave, because Dave just doesn't get you anymore.

Dave was more an acquaintance anyway.

The merging of Langston Hughes, Ice-T, jazz, and art.

In 1987, Ice-T could lay claim to one first in music history: the first explicit warning label on an album.

In 1992, the country was aflutter over his song 'Cop Killer.'

But in 2015, things have changed a bit. Maybe age has slowed him down, but Ice-T doesn't care for controversy so much as he cares for jazz and poetry. That doesn't mean he doesn't want to speak out about inequalities he sees in the world--he just wants to change the way he speaks about them. To do that, he's joining a jazz ensemble to recite Langston Hughes's poetry at the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Indeed, Hughes often wrote poetry with a heavy jazz influence. In 1961 he wrote 'Ask Your Mama,' a series of verse about the experience of living in America as a black person specifically to be accompanied by jazz music. Before his verses ever made the stage, Hughes died.

Now, Ice-T is taking over where Hughes left off. Musician Ron McCurdy wrote a score to Hughes's verses, but sat on the project for nearly twenty years until now--when he approached Ice-T to be the presenter of the verses as the jazz played, accompanied by art work that flashes on screen behind him.

So do the issues of the 1960s still resonate today? Ice-T tells the BBC he thinks so. "What Langston was writing is definitely still relevant--all that stuff about civil rights and poor people [...] You can go back to the '60s and you see stuff that's still going on in society now."

Ernest Hemingway liked fancy hamburgers. Here's the recipe.

In case you're jonesing for a funky hamburger recipe inspired by famous literary types--good news! The John F. Kennedy Library this week released a burger recipe considered Papa's favorite.

Wine, parsley, capers, India relish, Mei Yen powder, Beau Monde seasoning--everything you can imagine that's nowhere near a McDonald's burger--that's what Hemingway wanted in his beef patty.

The recipe is listed here.

You might be wondering--why was this recipe released from the JFK Presidential Library? The BBC explains it involves Hemingway's time living in Cuba and his fourth wife, Mary:

After Hemingway's death in 1961, as relations between the US and Cuba deteriorated, Mary needed help getting back into Cuba to reclaim documents and memorabilia. President Kennedy and Fidel Castro intervened to make it possible--which explains the JFK Library's interest in Hemingway's papers. This recipe was among those left behind.

Don't forget, as Papa says, as part of the recipe you need to set the table. You'll want a salad, too. Hamburgers are no excuse to forget proper etiquette.

British school rewards students who can think up creative lies.

Students at the Perse School in Britain may avoid punishments for minor transgressions if they can think up a creative excuse within 10 seconds.

"It's a great lesson in life to talk your way out of a tight corner in a very short period of time," headmaster Ed Elliot told the BBC. "Many [students]...develop the charm and eloquence needed in the next generation of British entrepreneurs and wealth creators."

Wealth creators. That's a cute one. Elliot is showing you how it's done.

James Bond gets around.

James Bond was a book franchise before he was ever a movie franchise. But the books died with Ian Fleming's demise nearly 50 years ago and the movies took off.

That doesn't stop movies from being churned out, nor does it stop the BBC from letting you know that James Bond is British, damnit, and he loves him some gun violence and ladies.

And with the latest Bond movie being released, the BBC totaled how many women each incarnation of Bond kissed and villains he killed.

The latest tally from today's movie? Three women smooched, sixteen villains mowed down.

Also known as Tuesday for me.

Filipino man quits job, lives off savings, starts a library.

An informal, amateur, non-membership required library has sprung up in the Philippines, all created by Hernanado Guanlo.

No due dates. No stamps. Keep the book for a week. Keep it for a month. Keep it for life. Come by and grab a book and never show your face again--it doesn't matter. Guanlo just wants you to read.

According to the BBC, Guanlo started his casual library in memory of his parents--who inspired him to read--after they died. He started by leaving around 100 books outside his door.

Today, there are possibly 3,000 books available to browse, many left by visitors who bring books by the bagful. As one woman--carrying bags of books to Guanlo's library--told the BBC, "I haven't been to any public libraries except the national library in Manila...Considering the income here, I think parents have other priorities."

Meanwhile, in other library news--while it's difficult to say how many libraries have closed recently in America, studies show 15% of libraries nationwide, and 24% of urban libraries, have reduced the number of hours they're open.

So, to synopsize this whole story:

Filipinos create their own libraries.

Americans close theirs.



photo: nybooks.com, via Robert Dawson and San Francisco Public Libraries.

Any Shakespeare movie < potential Marlowe movie

I like to think Christopher Marlowe was fun. For those non-English majors, Marlowe was a poor man's Shakespeare. Picture Shakespeare after a few cocktails when the self-editing button between the brain and mouth goes haywire.

First, Marlowe annoyed higher-ups and was ordered to report to the Privy Council for heretical concepts. Then he was stabbed to death under mysterious circumstances--which is always a sign of an interesting fella. Unsolved manslaughter = a fun time. Sounds like a good movie.

But he wasn't Shakespeare--which is to say...eh, overdone. Now there's a movie about Shakespeare called Anonymous, which revisits the idea that Shakespeare didn't actually write any of Shakespeare's works. This idea really irks some folks in Britain, who taped over various road signs referencing the Bard as an act of protest against the movie's premise.

Yeah.

That'll show 'em.



Side note:
Is that a bear moseying around upright using a walking stick? It looks like a green, nude Winnie the Pooh. Are there many nude Winnie the Poohs in Warwickshire? Are they all serious hikers? Why isn't this promoted more in the county?



Photo: BBC

BBC: Trollope to rework Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Now, that's no way to talk about a writer!

Ahhhh, wait, Trollope--my mistake. It seems the Trollope in this case is Joanna Trollope, writer of "upmarket family dramas and romances" (per Wikipedia). In essence, she makes the book equivalent of a Mercedes SUV.

Trollope is part of a movement by HarperFiction to create a series of modernizations of Austen's books. If that sounds like a bad idea, well, it is. Remember when Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1998? No?

Neither does anyone else.

The BBC suggests we're all Bible literate.

I'm an old-timey guy.

I'm an old-timey guy in that it takes me awhile to come across stories sometimes. Especially if they're published by the BBC. I don't know about you, but steam ships just don't seem a reliable way to communicate across the Atlantic anymore.

Well, it seems the BBC reported a little while ago that the bible--the King James Bible, specifically--has greatly influenced the way modern individuals speak. So much so that linguist David Crystal suggests in his book (Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language) that there are 257 phrases from the King James Bible used in modern English chit-chat.

Not that the King James Bible necessarily created those phrases. Just that it popularized them. The King James Bible itself coined, according to scholars, 40ish new words, including backsliding and battering ram. Experts say this all had to do with the English language evolving at this time. Shakespeare, writing around the same time, similarly influenced language. He created about 1,000 new words.

Half of which, to this day, still make no sense whatsoever to American high schoolers.

BBC: England prisons aren't a fan of your memoir writing skills.

According to the BBC, Arts Council England has had its budget slashed. This isn't good news for the writers-in-residence program, a program where a writer gets to make a nominal salary (£20,000 a year) while teaching prisoners how to write and speak properly--in essence, to communicate.

Considering that most have a difficult time communicating, this program helps prisoners develop social skills for whenever they're inevitably released back into the public. One former prisoner, now a writer for the Guardian, told the BBC as much.

"They can communicate with a pool ball in a sock or a razor on the end of a toothbrush or by shouting and bawling," said Erwin James.

Did I mention Erwin James, the writer for the Guardian, is a convicted murderer who used the writing skills taught in this program to reform his life?

Canadian woman graduates with Masters degree in The Beatles while simultaneously making it sound entirely unappealing.

BBC News interviewed a Canadian woman who received her Masters degree in The Beatles from Liverpool Hope University. Apparently Mary-Lu Zahalan-Kennedy is a music teacher by trade at Sheridan College in Ontario, so this was a natural progression. Some people study Medieval music. Others study mop-tops.


It sounds sexy at first--getting a Masters degree in The Beatles. It sounds modern and glitzy, like getting a PhD in Harry Potter. That is until you listen to her interview, where she goes full-blast on the professionalism of it all. She makes The Beatles sound as interesting as deciphering Sylvia Plath's poetry. (Daddy!)


The BBC presenter, Dotun Adebayo, tried to downplay this whole situation as not academic study (around the 1:00 mark), until Zahalan-Kennedy dives into the ins and outs of her research--including the fact that she never listened to much of The Beatles' music for her studies.


The rest of the BBC interview with Zahalan-Kennedy is quietly interrupted by what appears to be the sounds of John Lennon's body rolling over in his grave.

SHE EARNED A MASTERS DEGREE IN THE BEATLES, BUT SAID SHE NEVER LISTENED TO THEIR WORK.

And that, folks, is what's wrong with modern scholarship in a nutshell.

What's not wrong? This: