An Or Any

"'The measure of our damnation is that every one of us with an intelligence - and there are some - every one sees the Long Night coming."

-Poul Anderson, We Claim These Stars (New York, 1959), CHAPTER VIII, p. 52.

Regular rereading highlights oddities of phraseology. Perhaps for the first time, we wonder whether "an intelligence" should have been "any intelligence" so we check with two other versions of this text:

"'...with any intelligence...'"

-Poul Anderson, "Hunters of the Sky Cave" IN Anderson, Agent of the Terran Empire (London, 1965), pp. 83-187 AT VIII, p. 125.

"'...with any intelligence...'"

-Poul Anderson, "Hunters of the Sky Cave" IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 149-301 AT VIII, p. 210.

Two against one. We have had some of these before, haven't we?

Here is another example. In CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, an English woman (mis)pronounces "Merlin" as "Merling," as well she might. Lewis had a good ear for the spoken language. In the omnibus edition, The Cosmic Trilogy, "Merling" has been corrected (?) or at least changed back to "Merlin." Regular readers spot what publishers and proof readers might miss. But we become familiar only with texts that merit such close study.