Via James Nicoll, there’s a new press release from the Cassini mission talking about new radar maps of a region on the surface of Titan that’s been dubbed “Xanadu.” The topography looks very Earth-like, with rivers and lakes and oceans of methane, providing Dr. Jonathan Lunine an opportunity to show off the benefits of a classical education:
“Although Titan gets far less sunlight and is much smaller and colder than Earth, Xanadu is no longer just a mere bright spot, but a land where rivers flow down to a sunless sea,” Lunine said.
(Based on the other comments quoted, this is another case where “said” really means “typed into an email sent to the PR office,” because nobody talks like that…)
I’ve talked like that, from time to time — when I’ve had the chance to work out my classical allusions in advance!
Later in the press-release Lunine also talks about “caverns” – hinting to those of us who know ‘Kubla Khan’, that they are (currently) measureless … What a great press-release – poetic and fact-based! Coleridge would be very pleased.
I was once “quoted” in a press release — meaning that my organization’s press guy wrote something, decided that the face appropriate to the issue was mine, and got my permission to pretend I’d said it. Mom saw it and knew that the language was not mine.
i said that just because the one time I was quoted in a press release, the “quote” was taken from a carefully-worded email, and had a similarly stiff and pompous sort of sound to it.
Of course, I came off better than Bill Phillips, who once had the New York Times mangle a statement he made into “There are no two-level atoms, and sodium is not one of them.”