It really is the sheep who are seated on the ground!

[jwg]

Today a CD arrived in the mail addressed to Robert from a soc.motss acquaintance who hasn't been heard from in a while. Loading it in a CD-drive (it wasn't labeled so it could have been data or audio) we listened to it. It was synthesized music seeming to be perhaps variations of something I'd heard of, maybe. We didn't listen to every minute of the nine tracks but did listen to a fair amount of each track. To add to the experience we were using Real One player and happened upon Annabelle the Sheep as the graphic of "choice". I'd never had the patience to see this in its full action??!! for good reasons since there isn't much: a disco ball, a butterfly, some gulls, a robin, a moon, a space ship and a few other objects pop in for a while to the mostly sleeping Annabelle. It did help when I speeded it up.

The other day while musing about the meaning of while shepherds watched their sheep all seated on the ground because I claimed it could be the sheep that were seated on the ground, Robert said that sheep don't sit. With this action before us I argued, not too successfully, that the sleeping Annabelle was seated. None of the objects in Real One were shepherds BTW. Track 9, the last one, segued into some Christmas carol fragment/variations - most disappointingly that tune (Sherborne) didn't appear.

Comments

[fj.livejournal.com]

I find it impossible to parse that sentence otherwise than that those sheep are sitting.

I feel like asking a wooly mammoth how out of step I am with modern english speakers for that.

i'm only wooly, but i'll answer..

[ranger1.livejournal.com]

I agree. I understood it to mean that the sheep were sitting. And although I don't claim to be a fantastic grammarian, I think of myself as reasonably knowledgeable. (Were it otherwise, that degree in English Lit would have been impossible to obtain.)