First off, I would like to mention that autocorrect keeps changing “Tonypandy” to “to panda”. Not that it would be totally awesome for there to be pandas in this story, but the story would have gone from history disguised as a mystery novel to a totally fictional story about two pandas trying to solve a mystery. Now that I think about it, it is not a bad idea somebody should write that fan-fiction. Anyway, enough with my obsession with pandas, it is time to figure out what in the world of the Oxford Dictionary is the word tonypandy?
“It’s the damnedest silliest name, isn’t it?”
My handy-dandy dictionary on my ebook version of this book says… no word found… Ok…thanks iBooks for your help. Sure I could have just googled “Tonypandy definition” but that would only be only half of the fun of figuring out what the word means. Since I am not going to take the easy way out, I am going to have to figure out this word the hard way, reading for context clues. Suddenly this is feeling like I am taking the SAT again at least this time I know what I am doing, hopefully.
Each time the word “tonypandy” in The Daughter of Time appears it is when Grant looks at a historical reference. Even so Grant does end up adopting this term and using it quite often in the story. Grant observes multiple sides of who Richard III really was. Some people believe he was an innocent and noble king; while other believed he was an evil, vicious, vile murder who killed the princes in the tower. So, would tonypandy mean a widely believed fact about a historical event and or person? Even then, it begs the question what is truly history and what is truly fiction?
As both words have similar meanings in a way, history is what truly happened in the past by historical documents as proof and fiction is tale that does not have or has little any backup proof. But here is the thing, how do truly know that the history we believe is truly what happened? Let me paint this picture, in kindergarten we learned that the first thanksgiving was all joyful and happy. But, we later learned that it was not the case and in fact it was the opposite. Henry the IV had a historian to write down all the events so how do we know that what he wrote down was the truth because mostly likely he would have been persuaded to write nasty things about the previous king to make the previous king look bad and make the current king look great.
Well, whatever tonypandy actually means I can guess it has to do with something with history. Ok I could just google it at this point after going through all this analysis but, there is snow outside that is begging to be played with ( Don’t judge me, I’m from Southern California, there is no such thing as snow 😏☃)
