Forum: Author Hangout

Are you saying that someone submited a story with an expired copyright?

No, I'm saying the owner/operator of the site, Lazeez did it.
And they are orphaned copyrights, not expired. Old porn novels, the authors are pseudonymous and the publishers are out of business.

When Lazeez posts a story like that he could put any author name he wants on it.

Here's more info if you are interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work

And since we're on the subject, on "today" plus one let me tell you about orphaned words.

An orphaned word is a word that has become so rare as to be obsolete, archaic, or entirely gone from the language, but which has derivative words which are still in use.

Common examples are disgruntled, reckless, and unkempt.

The word "gruntled" meant to be grumbly or upset, with "disgruntled" an enhancement of that, the dis- being used not as a negative but meaning "very". Gruntled fell out of regular usage so long ago that we don't even know what the original root was.

"Reckless" is even more interesting. Reckless obviously means without reck. Reck means to pay heed to or to be important, so reckless means to not pay attention to. It comes from the Old English word "reccan" meaning to explain or narrate.

What's interesting is that despite having a similar sound and meaning as "recount" (meaning remember or tell), they come from completely different roots. Reck comes from the proto-West Germanic rekkjan, while Recount comes from the same French-Latin root that we get the word "compute" from: computare > compte > counte.

How about unrequited? One ElSol's stories touched in "requited".

Requited or requit only went into decline about a hundred years ago, around the time of WWI. It's origin and meaning is actually pretty straightforward:

Quite is an archaic variant spelling of quit, meaning "to leave a place";
re- means back or return;
Thus requite means to make an appropriate return, especially in the sense of returning a favour;
un- means "not";
Thus unrequited means not appropriately returned, as in unrequited love.

In fact, you could even argue that unrequited itself is bordering on being an orphaned word since it is almost never used except in the phrase "unrequited love". In another few generations it is likely the word itself will disappear from regular usage and only the phrase will remain.

re- means back or return;

A publican runs a Pub
"A pub (short for public
house) is a drinking establishment licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises. The term first appeared in the late 17th century, to differentiate privater houses from those open to the public as alehouses, taverns and inns."

So a republican has more than one pub.

Given that impugn comes from the Latin word impugnare, it's more likely that "pugn" was a back formation rather than an orphaned words.

Back formations are words with are created by removing prefixes or suffixes to create a theoretical root word that never previously existed. An example would be a few decades ago when "gruntled" had some slang popularity meaning "happy" based on the incorrect assumption that disgruntled was the opposite of gruntled.

More commonly, within the past century it has become very common to use back formation to switch between nouns and verbs, such as the verb televise coming from the noun television, or the noun diplomat coming from the adjective diplomatic.

This doesn't mean that "pugn" was never in use, it's entirely possible it was back-formed to limited use in some place or time, but the word impugn entered English in that form, it didn't come from a root word pugn.

Certainly, but my point was that impugn entered English directly from Latin as a single word, rather than the word pugn entering English then having a prefix added later.

I don't know enough about Roman culture and linguistics to know if pugnare and impugnare were both in common usage at the time that impugn entered English, just that it certainly looks (from my admittedly cursory research) that it was impugn not pugn that entered the English language.

but now I see "Fanny Hill" in the classics. However, "Fanny Hill" is a much better novel than the pocket porn ones even though it's porn.

It might be because Fanny Hill is entirely euphemistic, it doesn't use any explicit words for body parts at all. Also, being as old as it is, there's been lots of scholarly discussion about the novel.

That's pretty much all that is necessary for something to be a classic; porn or not, if you can write a legitimate, published scholarly article on a work then the original is likely to be considered a classic regardless of whatever other genres it may belong to.

You see the same effect with genre books. Even today speculative fiction still has a bit of a bad reputation in mainstream circles, but the books of H G Wells, Jules Verne, and Oscar Wilde are classics first.