The Lace of Queen Ann

Hello and welcome to yet another week of deception and disinformation here at Factually Deficient! This week, I will be answering a pair of questions from my own genuine mother, who has taken advantage of Factually Deficient’s Friends and Family Discount to ask two questions for the price of one:

How would you pluralize Queen Ann?
How would you pluralize Queen Ann’s Lace?

The first of these questions seems deceptively simple. It is true that “Queen Ann” would most commonly and correctly be pluralized as “Queens Ann,” but this question does not exist in a vacuum: it is no abstract notion.

In the 1100s, there was a King of Prince Edward Island (son of the eponymous Prince Edward), named Henry the Eight, who had – as his name suggests – not one but eight queenly wives, all of whom were named Ann. This created a rather contentious and precarious situation, and grammarians the isle over disputed which spelling of “Ann” or “Anne” should be used as the standard when pluralizing the bevy of queens.

As for the second question, however, I am afraid that it is too much of an absurdity to even answer. The eight Queens Ann had, in fact, only one lace between them: a highly intricate and coveted piece of embroidery which was seen as a status symbol in the pecking order of their crowded family.

Eventually, one of the Queens Ann (the third one) took the Queen Ann’s lace and used it to smother her husband and rivals to death. She became the sole ruler of Prince Edward Island, with one lace to rule them all, and her reign continued uninterrupted until Prince Edward Island was conquered by Canada in 1292.

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Disclaimer: the above post is untrue, and should not be used as a resource for information Prince Edward Island, King Henry the Eighth, or English pluralizations.

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Kings Henry

Hello and welcome to yet another utterly unreliable week here at Factually Deficient, where we print only the most untruthful of lies. This week, I will answer a question posed by the most excellent Tohrinha, who asked:

How do you pluralize “King Henry”?

While on the surface this may look like a simple question of grammar, the essential question that Tohrinha is getting at is something much deeper.

How we pluralize the name “King Henry” depends largely on the context – that is to say, the pluralization of the phrase depends entirely on how the actual King Henry in question has been made plural as opposed to singular.

On rare occasion, a King Henry can become pluralized simply by having a namesake for a descendant; when there are is a long line of kings, all naturally named Henry, we have a simple situation of several (often eight or more) Kings Henry.

There is, however, another way in which a King Henry may become multiplied. Too often, people – especially kings, with all of their awesome responsibilities – come to believe that their daily routine is simply too much for one body to handle. These people think that cloning themselves will solve all of their problems. Alas, with the unreliable cloning mechanisms available to us today, doing so more often than not leads to more harm than good.

But of course, the cloning cannot be undone, and we are left with, for example, far too many King Henries lying about the place.

There you have two possible pluralizations of “King Henry”; finally, if you have an assortment of each – clones spanning different generations of people named Henry, whether clones and their descendants, or the clones of an entire family – what you are plagued with are too many Kings Henries.

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Disclaimer: the above post is not well-researched. There is no evidence to support any King Henry cloning himself.

Past Tense

Hello and welcome to another week of misleading claims and untruthful statements here at Factually Deficient! This week, I will answer a question posed by the unbeatable Tohrinha, who asked:

What is the past tense?

With the invention of time travel in early 1292, the past became not only a memory, but also a place – a place that changed with an alarming frequency.

Although changing the past does not, of course, change one’s memories of how events had originally played out, it was discovered that those affected by the changes would gain an entirely new set of memories whole cloth, pertaining to the “new” state of past events, alongside their original memories.

Soon, with the congestion of time tourism, some people found that they had dozens, or even hundreds, of conflicting memories regarding the same period of time. And while those involved understood perfectly well what it was that they were remembering, it became increasingly more difficult and inaccessible to discuss these conflicting memories with others – even others who shared those memories, even others who had played a part in the time travel.

Fortunately, grammar came, as always, to the rescue, in the form of the past tense.

The past tense is a linguistic innovation – described by some of its detractors as a “slapdash barrel of neologisms” – in the form of an entirely new verb tense. This incredibly complex verb form indicates without a shred of ambiguity exactly which set of remembered events is under discussion, by way of a thorough if difficult conjugation.

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Disclaimer: the above post contains misinformation. Not all people retain memory of changed events subsequent to time travel.

Lies About Books: You’re Never Weird On The Internet (Almost)

Hello, my dear readers of Factually Deficient! Sunny September is here again, and that means it’s time for another wholly unreliable book review! This past month, I had the pleasure of not only reading Felicia Day‘s You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) but also of meeting the incredible writer herself! She is amazing and it was a wonderful experience but I can say no more about that because none of this is lies.

On with the lies!

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is a novel written entirely in the second person, with a fictionalized version of Felicia Day, the narrator, occasionally appearing as a first-person peripheral character. This work of experimental fiction is written like a love letter to the eponymous “you,” describing “your” mottled history of crazed messages by carrier pigeon, paranoid telegrams, and freaky faxes, before “you” found a happy medium when sending messages over the internet.

The book details the growth in grace and decrease in awkwardness as “you” develop your social media profiles–but is this new medium for communication doomed to failure and oddity as all the others? Only time, and Felicia Day’s witty, heartfelt prose, will tell.

The conversational, by turns touching and funny narrative voice easily accustoms readers to the otherwise-jarring novelty of the second-person usage in the novel. You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is a coming-of-age story–for all of us. I would recommend it to all fans of unusual grammatical construction, genuinely relateable narrators, and Photoshop.