By NOAM COHEN
THE Author, Author quiz in the Times Literary Supplement has pleasurably tortured British readers for many years, inducing them to put their intellectual self-respect at risk in return for minor celebrity among literary scholars and pedants. But now, Google and other Internet search engines can help even the virtually illiterate find many of the answers.
Each week, Author, Author offers three thematically linked, stunningly obscure quotations and asks who wrote them. Bernard Knox, the eminent scholar of ancient Greek, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1995, happily called the quiz an "infuriating competition," concocted by "fiends" who "ransacked their authors' lesser-known works for texts innocent of such clues as proper names, dates, or allusions to historical events."
The first contest, on Nov. 23, 1979, had no winner - a prophetic result. The £10 prize was shared by the two competitors who came closest: J. W. Thirsk of Headington, Oxford, and G. K. Pechey of St. Albans. (The prize is now £25, or about $50.)
Twenty-five years later, textual scholarship, like almost everything else, has been colonized by Google and the collective wisdom of the World Wide Web. Plug part of the quotation into the search engine, and it's likely a variety of Web sites can place it in its proper context. Not every T.L.S. contest yields completely to the power of the search engine (to see where Google failed, look at the right-hand column of test questions), but rarely does the Web fail to identify at least one, and more often two, of the three quotations.
Look, for example, at the Author, Author published on April 8: A patch of Latin, a soupçon of French and some English iambic verse. "Res gerere et captos ostendere civibus hostis ... ," comes from the letters of Horace; "Je me fais veix, j'ai soixante ans ..." is a line in the song "Carcasonne," by George Brassens; and "the finger-post says Mamble ..." is a line from a poem by John Drinkwater. Five minutes of Internet searching was all it took.
A typical quiz rarely gets more than 50 or 60 correct entries, said Mick Imlah, the editor responsible for Author, Author since the early 1990's. Usually there are significantly fewer. Mr. Imlah did say in an e-mail message that "there are two regular entrants I've got down, fairly or not, as Google players - one in New York, one in Oxford - because they enter so often, and because they don't seem to know the answers they give, if you see what I mean."
Meanwhile, Mr. Imlah said that the people involved with Author, Author "have shut their eyes to the whole Google phenomenon and carried on as if it made no difference."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/weeki ... 1noam.html