[BRIEF NOTE] Anne in the Oddest Places

[rfmcdonald]

While perusing Language Log, I found the most interesting blog reference to Anne of Green Gables.

A couple of days ago, Geoff Pullum asked amazon.com for a book by J. A. Green on the theory of sets and groups, and got answers that included one of the Anne of Green Gables novels. That very same evening, I happened to be reading a passage in William Gibson's 2004 novel Pattern Recognition where something similar takes place in a conversation between two human beings. Although both of Anne's intrusions were unexpected and unwelcome, they were the result of conversational strategies that make a lot of sense in general.

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