Pepys, and more on Jinxes

I don’t pay nearly enough attention to the serialized Diary of Samuel Pepys, though I glance at it pretty much every day in RSS summary. Thus, I’ve been missing the community created by the annotators and commenters who brighten each entry with erudition, miscellaneous carpings, and occasional doggerel. Monday’s piece (Friday 15 May 1663) is a case in point, with [among many others] Australian Susan’s addition, jeannine’s limerick, and Robert Gertz’ imagined dialog as wonderful enlargements on the text.

…and while we’re enlarging upon texts, three weeks or so ago I pointed to a r0ml posting about jinxes, and just this morning I happened on two Language Log entries (Pickle Jinx [16 Dec 2003] and High Jinx [17 Dec 2003]) in Far from the Madding Gerund that offer links to several antecedents in jinx research, and suggest an Opiesque/Sutton-Smithian research frontier…