Imagine my amazement when I found a whole big box of DVDs and textbooks of "The Great Courses" in one of my favourite op-shops, with the vast majority still in their shrink-wrapped plastic covers.
Not being greedy, I left plenty for the next knowledge nerd, and only bought, for a mere $2.50 each, "World History"; "Understanding the Dark Side of Human Nature"; "Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature"; "A Brief History of the World"; "Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature"; "The Addictive Brain"; "Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques"; "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft"; "Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works"' and "English Grammar Boot Camp".
If you bothered to click on the above link, you would have seen that it retails for $339.95 instead of the $2.50 I paid for it. Arriving at Lecture 22 on page 149 I became convinced that $2.50 was a more fitting price because it opened its discussion on punctuation with the sentence "The 20th century witnessed some reigning in of punctuation." Really?
During the whole reign of Queen Elizabeth II and her English to whom I swore my allegiance, the word "rein" was never spelt "reign"! Surely, this was just an isolated oversight by a tired editor, but, no, the horse had bolted and could no longer be reined in when on page 156 the apostrophe was described as "... a French borrowing, coming into English in the 16th century ... It was then reigned in as part of standardization."
This wouldn't have been tolerated during Queen Elizabeth II's reign!
P.S. I have just watched "Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature" and gained more literary insights in just thirty minutes than I had in all the previous thirty years. "The Great Courses" still reign supreme!
