Monday, 14 April 2008

Pet Sematary. I mean cemetery. Or do I?

A small admission. For many years, until quite recently, I thought that 'sematary' was just the American English spelling of 'cemetery'.


My elder brother's copy of the Stephen King novel Pet Sematary (pictured) was to blame.

As I understand, in the novel the sign for the pet cemetery is incorrectly spelt, having been written by children (the sign, that is, not the novel). The title of the novel refers to that incorrectly spelt sign. But how was I supposed to know that?

Especially as I would be more inclined to say 'graveyard' anyway...

1 comments:

Gareth said...

You're probably not supposed to read most of Stephen King's books before the age of twelve.

Strange though, I also read this when I was fairly young and I don't remember ever getting confused over the use of the word Sematary. Without rereading it, it's hard to say how clearly this was explained in the book, but sometimes it's easy to miss a single sentence that clears things up.