Best Questions & Answers from 3rd Quarter of 2017

Question

This post is a continuation of the grand old tradition of gathering collections of particularly good Literature Q&A, so that we have some easily available links to show off to people.

Now that Literature has a community-run Twitter account, one obvious use for this post will be to gather links for tweeting. But it's also useful for any kind of site promotion - if we want to show off the site to literary friends, it'll be much easier if we have a list of particularly great posts to point to.

Please nominate some exemplary Q&A from the third quarter (Jul/Aug/Sep) of 2017.

• When choosing nominations, please remember the primary purpose: to showcase our site to people elsewhere in the hope of maybe tempting them to come here. Let's try to focus mainly on great questions with great answers, and perhaps also great unanswered questions (which we can advertise as "hey, why not come and answer this"), but not anything with subpar answers, which will tend to give a bad impression and defeat the purpose.
• Remember that votes don't necessarily reflect quality, and the purpose of this is to promote quality over score. Highly-voted posts are easy to find, underappreciated gems less so.
• Getting a wide range of different stories represented in our list here would also be nice, but not strictly necessary - feel free to nominate a bunch of Q&A about the same book, if you think they're all outstanding. But don't nominate questions just because they're about your favourite book.
• Multiple nominated posts per answer here is fine.
• Feel free to nominate either some of your own posts which you're particularly proud of, or posts from other people which really impressed you.
• Ideally, some explanation of why the nominated questions and answers are so good would be useful - constructive feedback might give people ideas about what to aim for in the future.

Answer 1

I was sad that this question had no answers, so I poked around among the questions and answers posted during the third quarter of 2017 to see which ones I liked. Voilà:

Question

• Matt Thrower's question about the intended audience for the Just Wm stories was first an eyebrow raiser, then an eye-opener. I had not realized that they were ever meant to be anything other than children's stories. My sister, who's rather older than I, used to enjoy them as a girl, but by the time I was old enough to read them on my own they were passé.

Both the question and associated answer

• Alex Doe's interesting question is about a particular rhetorical device that doesn't seem common in English: using a single word to combine two distinct grammatical constructions. Tsundoku's excellent answer gives the German term for this kind of construction where it apparently is at least common enough to be identifiable by name.

Answers

• Matt Thrower's explanation of the phrase "the myth of fingerprints" was very useful and, as with all his posts, excellently argued.
• Another noteworthy answer from Matt was this one about the historical battle to which Wilfred Owen's "Spring Offensive" refers.
• A rather poor question asking whether Shakespeare's plays were exclusively in iambic pentameter received three answers: one adequate, one good, and one first-rate. Peter Shor's answer takes the actual yes/no aspect of the question for granted, relying on the other two answers for that. But his explanation of Shakespeare's metrical skill in varying iambic pentameter pushes the question in a fresh direction. I disagree with his scansion of two of the lines (for example, I don't believe "and" is stressed in "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow") but I like what he's done with the question.