Thursday 4 February 2010

Phileas Fogg and his WikiDiction Sentence

Phileas Fogg is one of my three favourite literary characters. But to get to the point, I added this sentence about him on Wikipedia, it started out with one word, adding a new one every so often:

"Phileas Fogg can be described as being a stolid, arcane, reserved, wanderlustuous, expeditious, untoady, indomitable, burnished, hyperopic, magnanimous, well-mannered, benignant, abstinent, daedal, intrepid, fecund gentleman."

It can be found here:

I think Joe gave me the initial idea of this about two years ago. I don't like to put incorrect things on Wikipedia, so I started writing a sentence about his character, being completly* correct. It has taken a bit of a battle, with some removing it saying it was a stupid sentence.. but I think its far from it.

What tickles me is how the sentence is found on other websites now. For example, this made me laugh... my sentence is featured as an example of the use of benignant in the Blass.com dictionary here.

Maybe even better, the sentence has been used by a fellow blogger. The writer has said:

Lately, I’ve been on a bit of a Jules Verne kick. In particular, I have become fixated on the protagonist from Around the World in Eighty Days: Phileas Fogg.

Phileas Fogg can be described as being an arcane, stolid, reserved, wanderlustuous, expeditious, untoady, indomitable, burnished, hyperopic, magnanimous, well-mannered, benignant, abstinent, daedal gentleman. The story itself is quite fun, but what I found to be truly fascinating was the closely linked Philip Farmer meta-fiction:


It has even been used in an argument by another writer
here:

"the whole programme makes several suggestions that Verne was a member of several secret societies and in what I think is a gross misrepresenation of Victorian Englishness has the gall to suggest that Phileas Fogg " an arcane, stolid, reserved, wanderlustuous, expeditious, untoady, indomitable, burnished, hyperopic, magnanimous, well-mannered, benignant, abstinent, daedal, magniloquent gentleman" was in fact a gay freemason (picks himself up off the floor) and could perhaps be used as the background for a debate on the motion: "This house believes that Jules Verne was a futurist, not a freemason"

Needless to say, I am quite proud of my Phileas Fogg WikiDiction sentence, and will take all steps to ensure it isn't deleted, or edited so it is untrue.

* Wanderlustous isn't quite a word. Wanderlust is a word, and I see wanderlustuous to be the trait of having wanderlust. It may be the word I try and get in the dictionary. When I first wrote it, it was the only useage of the word on the internet.

2 comments:

  1. Haha, I love it! I've always dreamed of changing wikipedia... :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. You should! It's liberating!!

    ReplyDelete