First let me belatedly thank Jansy Mello, Carolyn Kunin, and Alexey Sklyarenko for their kind words about my pictures or the creatures in my pictures.  However, I don't know why the "striped woodpecker" on Sapsucker paperbacks in Ada has to be the striped woodpecker (or Striped Woodpecker) of South America and can't be the sapsucker, the striped woodpecker that the imprint is named for.  (By the way, in Ada some vernacular species names are capitalized and some aren't.  I only looked at a few chapters, but I wonder whether capitalization suggests Ada's influence or point of view.)


Let me assure Jansy that Kinbote's "Ordinary Razor" is a straight razor.  The phrase seems to have been used about 100 years ago.  I don't know why he capitalizes it.


Barrie Karp brings up interesting examples of Kinbote's American idiom, which I didn't notice because they don't stand out for me.  I think the American spelling throughout the book was simply standard for American books at the time.


Maybe I should mention my suspicion that at that time Kinbote would have learned "coed" on his first day at a coeducational college.  I might add to Barrie's list that "cinemactress" (Index s.v. "Odon") was a Time magazine coinage, as far as I know.  On the other hand, in the note to lines 385-6, Kinbote says "You are telling me!" (meaning "I know that better than you"), but any American would say "You're telling me!"  Typically, he thinks he's mastered American slang better than he has.


"Railway" is known here ("Sittin' downtown in a railway station"), but I'd be very surprised to hear "torch" instead of "flashlight".


Shade uses some British words, despite various reminders of how American he is.  There's a "whilst" (line 43) in his poem and two occurrences of "chap"; one is needed for the rhyme (line 135), but the other could have been "man" or "guy" (line 732).  And "possibilities" rhymes better with "Sybil, it is" in British Received Pronunciation than in "General American".  As Barrie says, even Homer nods, and of course Shade as a poet and English professor and scholar of Pope must have read a good deal of British literature, but I've wondered what else Nabokov could be trying to bring up with these usages.  They do work very well with single-author theories, which I don't find convincing for other reasons.


By the way, I've been writing this note with the help of Matt Roth's Pale Fire Concordance at <http://palefireconcordance.pbworks.com/w/page/13786342/FrontPage>.  It seems to be a work that's no longer in progress--at least I haven't contributed to it for a long time--but if you scroll down to "C" and "Word list: C", for example, you can find every word in the book with references to line number, note number, foreword page, or index page (except words that occur with more than 20 references or some number like that).


Kinbote's description of Botkin as "an American scholar of Russian descent" is one of his more puzzling moments, especially since Nabokov said Botkin was a Russian.


<https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0611&L=NABOKV-L&P=R36332&1=NABOKV-L&9=A&J=on&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches&z=4>


Possibly Kinbote is using the phrase "of Russian descent" unidiomatically, or denying Botkin's Russian-ness as much as he can?


And you can pretty much believe Wikipedia on bird systematics.  Our orioles are in a different family from the original Old World orioles.


Jerry Friedman

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