“Jeeves, who was the fellow who on looking at something felt like somebody looking at something? I learned the passage at school. But it has escaped me.”
“Jeeves, what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?”
I just finished reading P. G. Wodehouse’s Thank you Jeeves. These are two of the questions Bertie Wooster asks his valet, Jeeves, in the first chapter of the book. It reminded me of one of the old internet search engines, Ask Jeeves. I decided to try these two questions on the internet version, but I soon discovered that Ask Jeeves has been renamed simply ask.com.
This is a personal favorite use of the internet for me, to find quotes that I vaguely remember, but can’t put my finger on the exact wording, or even who said it. So I decided to try these two questions on ask.com. I found that the first question was too much for both ask.com and Google. None of the results returned the correct answer or even matched the quote to P.G. Wodehouse’s Thank You Jeeves.
The second question did turn up a reference to Wodehouse and thus to the answer to the question, which for number 2 is “treasons, stratagems and spoils”.
Wodehouse’s Jeeves' answer to question number 1 is:
“I fancy the individual you have in mind, sir, is the poet Keats, who compared his emotions on first reading Chapman’s Homer to those of stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific.”
Maybe I should ditch the internet and hire a smart British valet. Nah!
2 comments:
I remember a few years ago thinking about stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble as encyclopedias gone ballistic.
Then there was the internet and now Google. I'm at a loss to adequately describe the difference...
I'm glad you're not going to give up on the internet! :)
I am a Wodehouse fan from long ago, and what I couldn't do with a Jeeves at my shoulder. Jeeves had what the Internet has -- an encyclopedic base of knowledge -- but also has the two elements the Internet lacks -- wisdom and discretion.
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