Who is A. Parody?

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Ingrid Tieken

You don’t have to be very imaginative to see that Eats, Shites & Leaves (2004) parodies the title of Lynne Truss’s phenomenally popular Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003). And so does the name of the author: A. Parody. The back flap gives Mr Parody a first name, Antal, adding that he is “of Hungarian extraction” and that he “fled to Britain from either Buda or Pest – sources differ – in the late 1940s, following the collapse of the so-called ‘Mashed-Potato Revolution'”. Haha. But who was the author, or compiler, really? And more interestingly, would a parody of usage literature herald the end of the genre?

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2 Responses to Who is A. Parody?

Richard Bond says:

March 12, 2014 at 2:15 pm

Peter Duncanson at alt.usage.english.narkive.com says that Antal Parody is ‘apparently’ his real name (here’s the link http://alt.usage.english.narkive.com/T4kzis7t/remember-remember). Antal is the Hungarian for Anthony according to the website Behind the Name (http://www.behindthename.com/name/antal) and Parody is a real surname – listed on Geneanet (http://en.geneanet.org/search/index.php?name=parody&ressource=arbre&p=6). Too good to be true for a satirist to be called Mr Parody? I recall a Dr Butcher, MD and a real favorite for me, a pastor called Randy Pope.

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Ingrid Tieken says:

March 12, 2014 at 4:06 pm

Interesting! I’ve come across a dentist called Snoep and a midwife called Naaktgeboren (sorry, you have to know Dutch for this …). What, though, about “the collapse of the so-called ‘Mashed-Potato Revolution’”, was there such a revolution?

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