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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Arthur Conan Doyle born (22-5-1859)
Date: Thu, 23 May 2024 14:29:08 +0100
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 Ar an tríú lá is fiche de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Ross Clark: 

 > "I haven't found linguistic topics discussed in his writing, apart from passing
 > references...."
 > 
 > Still, a solid Victorian, interested in all kinds of things: medicine, cricket,
 > body-building, fairies....
 > 
 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle

Bit of relevance in the article:

  “From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in
  Feldkirch, Austria.[9] His family decided that he would spend a year there in
  order to perfect his German and broaden his academic horizons.[15]”

  “In early 1891, Doyle embarked on the study of ophthalmology in Vienna. [...] 
  Doyle found it too difficult to understand the German medical terms being
  used in his classes in Vienna, and soon quit his studies there. For the rest
  of his two-month stay in Vienna, he pursued other activities, such as ice
  skating with his wife Louisa and drinking with Brinsley Richards of the
  London Times. He also wrote The Doings of Raffles Haw.”

I find those grounds surprising (“too difficult to understand the German
medical terms”); I’m sure it would have been difficult to get through a year of
boarding school in Austria without picking up German, and medical jargon in
German is Greek and Latin as it is in English. (Was ophthalmology different
then?). But he was a dilettante, qual piuma al vento.

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)