For that matter, I couldn’t stop my mind throwing up objections like “Frodo buys off-the-rack clothes? From where exactly? Surely he’d have tailor made? Wouldn’t he be translated into British English as saying ‘trousers’? Hobbit feet are big and hairy for Hobbits, but how big are they compared to human feet—are their feet and inches 2⁄3 the size?”
It didn’t occur to me until I’d read past the first two paragraphs that we were even theoretically supposed to ACTUALLY guess what size Frodo would wear. And I’m still unsure if the badness of the Frodo example was supposed to be part of the joke or not—I mean, it’s fairly funny if it is, but it’s the sort of mistake (a bad example for a good point) I’d expect to see even made by intelligent, competent writers.
And I mean, I’m fairly sure that the fictional bias effect is real :)
For that matter, I couldn’t stop my mind throwing up objections like “Frodo buys off-the-rack clothes? From where exactly? Surely he’d have tailor made? Wouldn’t he be translated into British English as saying ‘trousers’? Hobbit feet are big and hairy for Hobbits, but how big are they compared to human feet—are their feet and inches 2⁄3 the size?”
It didn’t occur to me until I’d read past the first two paragraphs that we were even theoretically supposed to ACTUALLY guess what size Frodo would wear. And I’m still unsure if the badness of the Frodo example was supposed to be part of the joke or not—I mean, it’s fairly funny if it is, but it’s the sort of mistake (a bad example for a good point) I’d expect to see even made by intelligent, competent writers.
And I mean, I’m fairly sure that the fictional bias effect is real :)