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James Davis Nicoll
James Davis Nicoll (born 1961 March 18) [1] of Kitchener, Ontario, is a former role-playing game store owner, a freelance game and SF reviewer, and a noted Usenet personality. [unverified] Nicoll also works as a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club, selecting books for the editors to consider.[2] Among others, Charles Stross mentions Nicoll's influence in his book, The Family Trade.
He is best known for the following epigram first written in 1990 and has been attributed to everyone from Booker T. Washington to a nineteenth-century painter also named James Nicoll:
- The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle [sic] their pockets for new vocabulary.[3]
His contributions to the English language have been noted in Jeremy Smith's Bum Bags and Fanny Packs: A British-American, American-British Dictionary[4] and Richard Lederer's A Man of My Words: Reflections on the English Language [5]. Both authors were much taken with Mr Nicoll's assessment of the way English acquires new vocabulary.
Online he is perhaps best known for two things. First, his nearly single-handed rescue of the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written from descending into noise through his "Nicoll Pledge", in which he promised to refrain from off-topic posts and to start multiple new on-topic threads regularly. This pledge was spectacularly successful, inspired some imitators, and increased the signal-to-noise ratio by a dramatic amount. Second, James Nicoll is known for having had possibly more life-and-or-limb threatening events happen to him (and to those in his family) than anyone else, and for casually recounting the most bizarre sequences of near-fatal events with a dry, understated wit which has made the term "Nicoll Event" a by-word on all SF-related newsgroups. He is also the creator of the phrase "Brain Eater", which refers to a decline in quality of science fiction writers' works late in their careers, and a simultaneous increase in focus on the writers' obsessions and eccentric opinions. Writers suggested to have been Brain Eaten include James P. Hogan and Larry Niven.
References[edit]
- ↑ SF Birthday Calendar: March, retrieved May 15, 2007.
- ↑ SFBC News Archive, retrieved May 15, 2007.
- ↑ Usenet article <1990May15.155309.8892@watdragon.waterloo.edu> (1990)
- ↑ Smith, Jeremy (2005), Bum Bags and Fanny Packs: A British-American, American-British Dictionary, New York: Carrol & Graf, p. 164, Template:citation/identifier, http://books.google.com/books?id=qQONKyKvY1gC&pg=PA164&ots=BeFbqtG1YX&dq=James-d-Nicoll+date:1970-2009&num=100&sig=FmuEb_WgOfBWT7OpMQ5mgDUt-CY
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- ↑ Lederer, Richard (2003), A Man of My Words: Reflections on the English Language, New York: St. Martin's Press, Template:citation/identifier </li> </ol>
See also[edit]
- More Words, Deeper Hole James Nicoll's LiveJournal weblog.
- Millennial Reviews A series of reviews by James Nicoll of science fiction books set in the year 2000.
- List of Nicoll events
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