I was reading through it, thanks :)
I'm trying to write an essay on the poem "The Unknown Citizen" and it has this prologue thingy:
To JS/07/M/378
I'm pretty sure JS is the name, 07 the year he was born, M meaning that he is male but I can't figure out what 378 could be.
how big of a fatty he was lol, dunno besides weight what that could be
That's what my sister said.
prolly foreshadowed how fat mikes gonna be!
I'm 90% sure that the first three numbers are relative to the state you were born in - but I'm not sure how to get a historical record of which numbers were used for which states in which years.
Yeah, the first three numbers area accorded by region (east coast being lower numbers west being higher like zipcodes). I guess it's not really important to know what the actual numbers mean but I was trying to figure out their relative significance.
Can you find any annotated copies of the poem? I have this great Byron anthology that has all kinds of footnotes about how the lines could've related to his own life. Unless you'd consider that plagiarism - I dunno.
I have the anthology I use for class but is has really bad footnotes. We're supposed to do this on our own (haha...asking ezabel doesn't count!) unless we want the paper to be longer and then we can use critical sources. I think I can manage to write the paper without going into detail about the dedication, just that it is how the government views people just as letters and numbers.
Ahh, so cheating is looked down upon at your school, huh? :P I also think it's interesting that so many people around the turn of the century used to sign letters and other private documents with just their initials. As if your initials would be different from everyone in your immediate radius because the world was so much smaller than today, what with this new-fangled "internet".
Only sometimes :)
Huh..that is interesting. Do you think it was possible that you wouldn't know anyone else with the same initials? That's kind of cool.
Well think about it, 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago, how many people could you really know intimately? Your family, maybe 10-15 friends from your town and church. That's a much smaller social circle than we have today. Plus, prior to WWII, isolationism was popular not only as foreign policy, but as a way of life; people were content to stay to themselves. That changed during the war when women started working and also in the 50's with the civil rights movement.