To make a long story short, Max Boot is kind of ridiculous but the longer version of the story to be found by following the link is pretty funny.
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The Annals of Pedantry
02 Nov 2007 11:38 am
Comments (7)
Maybe the name World War IV is apt. But the correct comparison would not be the Star Wars movies, but the Rocky movies with the with the two good movies that justified the series, the somewhat embarassing third movie, and finally the Rocky movies that came out just so they could say there were more Rocky movies.
Tangent from the other day:
I was just surprised to find out the name was pronounced pa-DOR-its. For some unknown reason, since I'd never heard the name pronounced before, I'd been pronouncing it in my head POD-or-its. pa-DOR-its make it sound like it's an obscure element of Gregoria Chant. A dotted pa-DOR-its.
This isn't really on point, but one of my pet peeves is when I see a movie or TV show that takes place in the 1920s or 1930s and I hear a reference to World War I. Well, during that period, they wouldn't have called it World War I because they had no way of know that there would be a World War II (or III or IV). They always called that conflict the Great War.
You misspelled "anals".
He's not being ridiculous so much as needlessly pedantic.
I would agree with him that we could probably renumber the World Wars (although I'd consider the American Revolution, which featured fighting in North America, Europe, India (the British East India company attacked French possessions in India after the French came into the war), significant battles at sea (including the largest naval battle fought to date in the Indian Ocean) to be a World War, too).
But that's an argument for scholars and history junkies that is kind of out of place in Boot's actual piece.
To me, what sets the world wars apart from other global-scale conflicts, was the catastrophic death toll. So maybe the Mongol wars and the Napoleonic wars would count as world wars, but not so much the Seven Years war.
Comments closed November 16, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Max Boot: Not a credible authority on Star Wars, much less on Real Wars.
"If we follow this logic, we would relabel the 1914-18 conflict World War III and the 1939-45 conflict World War IV, in the same way that George Lucas relabeled his first Star Wars film 'Episode IV' after producing three 'prequels.'"
Posted by bob | November 2, 2007 11:58 AM