A classic scene we've all read many times is when the hero
gets hit on the head and knocked out. In real life, this can
kill you, or give you a concussion, or at least make you
throw up. In most books, it makes a black void open up in
front of you and you fall in soundlessly, and then you wake
up half an hour later with a headache.
I propose that as we come across such scenes, we note them
and quote a brief snippet of text to show it. Here's one from
Howard Browne's HALO IN BLOOD (1946):
| Something came down on the back of my head. It couldn't
have been
| the Queen Mary's anchor; there wasn't enough water
around.
| I dived into a shoreless sea of black ink, pulled folds of
black
| velvet over my head and burrowed into a coal pile.
| I was out.
I'll keep track of them. I expect that the worse the writer,
the more amusing the description. In a couple of years we
should have a nice collection of words meaning "black" and
"unconsciousness."
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 May 2004 EDT