tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23156293331098687892024-03-17T22:59:25.512+00:00Peter Household - things that have interested mehistory - science - words - placesPeter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.comBlogger446125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-14168893133792373782017-04-27T00:56:00.000+01:002017-04-30T00:17:15.088+01:00Science placards around the world<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0NTx9LVKneuw1ugo6ZByp6WIi20gykMXlqT0ICkERd1K4NDUsnorc4ITuDooWKrPNIdgmLabJK-DszDxGjHha40tovz1B-rtE1jJePsOBTrxguWx8bjvnR-J_sTavunoSWoP4R4d1LjeL/s1600/Got+plague.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0NTx9LVKneuw1ugo6ZByp6WIi20gykMXlqT0ICkERd1K4NDUsnorc4ITuDooWKrPNIdgmLabJK-DszDxGjHha40tovz1B-rtE1jJePsOBTrxguWx8bjvnR-J_sTavunoSWoP4R4d1LjeL/s640/Got+plague.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">This placard </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">from Boston is m</span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">y absolute favourite from the biggest science event in history, the global <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/24/why-we-joined-the-march-for-science" target="_blank">March for Science on 22nd April</a>. And here are the runners-up:-</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizRvmtrvIte2sF7lsM6tRhEyVu-ZF4Tsg_d8xsdDd8vv_OEzNUvK-tpu4VrxaCxF2y0eB5QM2e754HpVvu06MdW0uzeZbKIHq4HsFQUEkfUma2AJ0-D93NDnX2e7hopMoPwqG75GnPouj8/s1600/still+legal.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizRvmtrvIte2sF7lsM6tRhEyVu-ZF4Tsg_d8xsdDd8vv_OEzNUvK-tpu4VrxaCxF2y0eB5QM2e754HpVvu06MdW0uzeZbKIHq4HsFQUEkfUma2AJ0-D93NDnX2e7hopMoPwqG75GnPouj8/s640/still+legal.JPG" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">In no. 2 place, <b>Think while it's still legal</b>. A similar thought prompted a Swedish placard in Stockholm: <b>Våga Fråga!</b> (the å's are pronounced like English "or"). It means "Dare to ask", nicely encapsulating the scientific enterprise - enquire, then follow the data wherever it leads.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOs6mnRDBiceHPUnv8y7H4GRP3RhoQCNcmsRF9EvxFgkZDg7Yd2mOdvPGwCKPCjjLVfNaS214UJSlzqlRONT1KcyojNIkS8haq4QXgURJhpmXYWUR79qM4N0wiCzW4AsB9EfK13-9lSNkx/s1600/stockholm-sweden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOs6mnRDBiceHPUnv8y7H4GRP3RhoQCNcmsRF9EvxFgkZDg7Yd2mOdvPGwCKPCjjLVfNaS214UJSlzqlRONT1KcyojNIkS8haq4QXgURJhpmXYWUR79qM4N0wiCzW4AsB9EfK13-9lSNkx/s640/stockholm-sweden.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I must include <b>I'm not a zoologist ...</b> perhaps I should have placed it higher up my list, but here it comes at no. 4:-</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcY82ICyr_Cve_J1asFXf44kQ3seQSz3TwCBaWrN6gwzE06e1VcrFjLG0uGaIVbtzzVp04RGQG8_w5ecW3VLJFzUATU_TjCUA4M1CHBQ6vcbrBdTLI8lJ7P3jGRlNJVJouUj2BamctL3sA/s1600/not+a+zoologist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcY82ICyr_Cve_J1asFXf44kQ3seQSz3TwCBaWrN6gwzE06e1VcrFjLG0uGaIVbtzzVp04RGQG8_w5ecW3VLJFzUATU_TjCUA4M1CHBQ6vcbrBdTLI8lJ7P3jGRlNJVJouUj2BamctL3sA/s640/not+a+zoologist.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">And this photo contains a few more worth a glance. You've got to smile at <b>When do we want it, after peer review</b>, and <b>Paid scientist, I protest for free</b>. <b>Science not silence</b> was a slogan used in many protests across the globe. We can call these 4(a), (b) and (c). Next, <b>Less Invasions More Equations </b>deserves a place, here it is at no. 5:-</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3njAo8WeQQENlZwtv3ILpGAOwniRsigtFrhV1m1CIjNLMIVGsg_01BOXfBeIEjNcy3Qw_Z2yYJc6wyRai8dABhcDL-6zRxeyQv3c0t5ZUYb15aSOS3o2QJPT-1iss4v4SvdABgAUyhUk-/s1600/more+equations.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3njAo8WeQQENlZwtv3ILpGAOwniRsigtFrhV1m1CIjNLMIVGsg_01BOXfBeIEjNcy3Qw_Z2yYJc6wyRai8dABhcDL-6zRxeyQv3c0t5ZUYb15aSOS3o2QJPT-1iss4v4SvdABgAUyhUk-/s640/more+equations.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b>I'm with Her</b> is a nice repurposing of a Hilary Clinton slogan. This one was from Paris:-</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwOmDv8tKpF0201mBkONJNfKfok2Q9EPiaf81qX2DiiE9Rx_4Y6frODV-Tuuk2NYVKjMfiWwhM3yuAUMKYvPhS4dy9UOQZOHIWM-0aGjBH96Wd6e2tCzqY5peHKj4z5o5VSsUBywXqHIdQ/s1600/Im+with+her.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwOmDv8tKpF0201mBkONJNfKfok2Q9EPiaf81qX2DiiE9Rx_4Y6frODV-Tuuk2NYVKjMfiWwhM3yuAUMKYvPhS4dy9UOQZOHIWM-0aGjBH96Wd6e2tCzqY5peHKj4z5o5VSsUBywXqHIdQ/s640/Im+with+her.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b>Not an alternative fact</b> was mass produced, I've seen it in numerous photos, so while certainly rating a mention, I have to put it bottom of my list:-</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPt84ymruOdKvrBJILfgWfcQGjR-l844raxvtXTzczW9I6JFKE73la9k6A-VH_0o1CKYvUuNGiFKlfpQPxXXPDPcRjO7wKqBS9MxRwayKGOGJVxmAptVTRfKPoALM-vD0g_mniS6Hw909H/s1600/not+alt+fact.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPt84ymruOdKvrBJILfgWfcQGjR-l844raxvtXTzczW9I6JFKE73la9k6A-VH_0o1CKYvUuNGiFKlfpQPxXXPDPcRjO7wKqBS9MxRwayKGOGJVxmAptVTRfKPoALM-vD0g_mniS6Hw909H/s640/not+alt+fact.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">All good humoured stuff. A pity then that we have to end on a sour note. Did Donald Trump really need to turn up in New York and spoil the day by playing golf with the Earth? So very sad.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnxvOGsBqns9-Xcs-WtUIQAGVAyE1qZiJF0NSzUD0_wDGBj5zx_ZPUFfksiv6EAS8SUY8uq_Btc2ESI3FSkrMjPr4QUJr_sPvAKqNHsSWYRus8QgzLfrwEVsnFMYWFtvtuiHku3QNkXW19/s1600/Golf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnxvOGsBqns9-Xcs-WtUIQAGVAyE1qZiJF0NSzUD0_wDGBj5zx_ZPUFfksiv6EAS8SUY8uq_Btc2ESI3FSkrMjPr4QUJr_sPvAKqNHsSWYRus8QgzLfrwEVsnFMYWFtvtuiHku3QNkXW19/s640/Golf.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
<br />Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-70759216476787745712017-03-01T21:57:00.001+00:002017-10-14T12:35:37.433+01:00Tell me it's not true! <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ha! … bet you thought it was going to be something about the first six weeks of Trump. No, what concerns me right now is news in the <i>Daily Mirror</i>, about the governor of the Bank of England and what he's putting on a £10 note.</span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLmi5QOHOLEAFJvC4OnD7-DxpEw1GejB95Z6F_3s54URHkIC_DjSkgcKqU2aalWqc5khD2V_cujicKBQQ43lCXyEUwrjCQdlad0PsF1BTnhJU_UYjnw8sZh9Ax1m3O67Jn0FTlxTvno1ur/s1600/JA+%25C2%25A310.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLmi5QOHOLEAFJvC4OnD7-DxpEw1GejB95Z6F_3s54URHkIC_DjSkgcKqU2aalWqc5khD2V_cujicKBQQ43lCXyEUwrjCQdlad0PsF1BTnhJU_UYjnw8sZh9Ax1m3O67Jn0FTlxTvno1ur/s400/JA+%25C2%25A310.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">A few weeks after taking up his appointment as Bank of England governor in 2013, Mark Carney shows off the proposed Jane Austen £10 note
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There are four things worth remarking about this new banknote, due to be issued later this year. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/bank-of-england-5-note-10-animal-fat-keep-confirm-g-currency-pound-sterling-a7581131.html" target="_blank">The animal fat it contains</a>; the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/07/jane-austen-banknote-abusive-tweets-criado-perez" target="_blank">campaign of abuse and threats</a> against the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez whose persistence persuaded the Bank to put Jane Austen on the back; the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/21/jane-austen-airbrushed-new-10-note-campaigners-complain/" target="_blank">airbrushed portrait</a> ... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And lastly, an ill-chosen quotation (too small in the photo) placed under Jane Austen's image: "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!“</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Last November I was in Dublin to hear John Mullan, author of <i><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9317284/What-Matters-in-Jane-Austen-Twenty-Crucial-Puzzles-Solved-by-John-Mullan-review.html" target="_blank">What matters in Jane Austen?</a></i> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was a lecture put on by the Jane Austen Society of Ireland, and half a dozen of us travelled from Cork. Well worth sitting 6 hours on a bus for. Prof Mullan brought up the no enjoyment like reading quotation, and asked the audience if we could guess the controversy it has provoked. We could, of course. As three years had elapsed since the Mark Carney photo opp, and the new note was still not issued, the professor had reason to hope this delay betokened unease about the said quotation, and that the bank was hunting out a replacement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Sadly, it appears not ... According to a story posted on the <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/new-10-note-everything-you-9034532" target="_blank">Mirror website</a> on 15th February, no enjoyment like reading is still there. Dearie me ...
<br /><br />Prof Mullan even surmised how it came about; convinced that governor Carney had a gofer called Barney, he imagined the following conversation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Barney, there's been a bit of a fuss about needing a woman on the back of the new tenner, Jane Austen would do, be a good fellow and find me an image.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Next day Barney produces the Jane Austen image for the new banknote. “That’s terrific Barney, now we could do with a quotation to go with it.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“What sort of quotation boss?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Oh I dunno, something to do with reading would be good.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Barney goes googling and comes back with “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Good Barney, very good, and where does that one come from?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Pride and Prejudice boss.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Wonderful, my fave, now then, we need a meeting about interest rates, set one up for Friday will you, like a good chap.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Cue an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/shortcuts/2013/jul/25/jane-austen-quotation-10-note" target="_blank">outcry</a> from all Jane Austen enthusiasts. If you are one, you'll know the rest. If not, you need to understand that these words from <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> are put in the mouth of the ghastly Caroline Bingley, the novel’s least appealing character, not even excepting the villainous Wickham and the atrocious Lady Catherine. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Caroline Bingley is deceitful, she's pretentious, she's a snob, and the worst is, she's the sworn foe of English literature's favourite heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. To cap it all, she has no interest in books, as proved in the scene where in furtherance of her campaign to hook Darcy as a husband, she sidles up to him, purporting to share his interests. Since he is reading a book, she sits next to him and pretends to read one too, which she has only chosen because it's the second volume of his. (At that time, novels were commonly issued in three volumes.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Here's this scene in full:-</span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>Miss Bingley's attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr. Darcy's progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question, and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, "How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her book, and cast her eyes round the room in quest of some amusement …</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now of course all Jane Austen’s heroines are at odds with Caroline Bingley in this respect, that they are great readers. (Save one. Emma knows she should read, and even makes reading lists, but never quite gets round to it.) Catherine Morland in <i>Northanger Abbey</i> actually reads too much, makes a fool of herself by imagining she’s living out the plot of a gothic novel. Anne Elliott in <i>Persuasion</i> in a crucial scene is overheard by the hero Captain Wentworth discussing books, leading to the happy denouement. In <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>, Elinor and Marianne are fond of reading, and a shallow character called Lady Middleton fancies them satirical as a consequence. Fanny Price reads about the McCartney expedition to China, and Lizzy Bennett is disparaged by her antagonist Caroline Bingley as "a great reader".<br />
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Please Governor Carney, choose one of these! Not Caroline Bingley! Tell me it's fake news!</span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Note: the <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> extract is from ch 11. More Jane Austen extracts about reading, including those mentioned above, <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/qiohtp0ge96gt6s/Jane%20Austen%20extracts%20about%20reading.pdf?dl=0">on a separate page</a> if you want them. In the last extract on that page I've suggested a possible alternative quote for the new £10 note - see if you agree. And a final point, we must beware of being too up ourselves over this one, as Jane Austen wouldn't have said … "for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous." (P&P ch 3)</span><br />
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Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-66882700189505557552017-01-15T00:35:00.001+00:002017-03-06T19:18:46.924+00:00Some curiosities from 'Self Control', an 1811 novel<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Jane Austen was very rude about <i>Self Control</i>, a novel by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Brunton" target="_blank">Mary Brunton</a> that came out in 1811, the same year as Austen's first, <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>. Austen said she would go one better and in her next book, have her heroine cross the Atlantic in a boat by herself <span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[1]</span>. This was an unfair swipe at Brunton whose kidnapped heroine Laura escapes her American captors by floating downriver to safety in an Indian canoe, narrowly avoiding drowning in a waterfall. Saved by a farmer, our heroine is conducted to Quebec where she boards a ship for her home in Scotland. <br /><br />
And here's the point: lacking money to pay for her passage, she persuades the captain to accept a banker's draft, which can be cashed at the voyage’s end. On arrival at Glasgow we read: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“The next morning she gave the captain a draft for the price of her passage; and producing her purse and Mrs De Courcy's ring, offered them as further security; ... The sailor, however, positively refused to accept of any thing more than the draft, swearing that if he were deceived in Laura, he would never trust woman again.” <span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[2]</span> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Paying for travel by draft as early as 1811? (or the 1790's which is when I suppose the action is set.) I was intrigued … </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But having looked it up </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I find that </span><a href="http://heritagearchives.rbs.com/rbs-history-in-100-objects/going-the-extra-mile/cheque-1659-60.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">ordinary citizens had been able to write cheques</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> since around 1650. Here's one of the earliest surviving handwritten cheques in England, dated 16th February 1659. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUkSAjb9jQok4Xs9GJjAn0B9p4VVdSPq3M8sNIlr1sMrpNb5LBSGCfSSDEd77gNw207ZBlizWZ5H261UT83T64CkBGNd6j7AR1cvcS8L5xEhSVGEAbA75KiRb0hSc9n6nrkfskjLE6_IRN/s1600/1659+cheque+-+Capture.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUkSAjb9jQok4Xs9GJjAn0B9p4VVdSPq3M8sNIlr1sMrpNb5LBSGCfSSDEd77gNw207ZBlizWZ5H261UT83T64CkBGNd6j7AR1cvcS8L5xEhSVGEAbA75KiRb0hSc9n6nrkfskjLE6_IRN/s400/1659+cheque+-+Capture.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple; font-size: small;">A 1659 handwritten cheque. The amount is £400 - over £40,000 today.</span> </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Printed cheques, it appears, were introduced by the Bank of England in 1717 and the earliest surviving cheque on a printed form is dated 1759. However, as we have seen, in <i>Self Control </i>Laura gave the captain the draft “the next morning” so I imagine we are to suppose Laura tendered a handwritten cheque similar to the image above. The context makes it improbable she would have had time to visit a bank to get a proper form. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For international merchants using bills of exchange the banking system and cheques seem to go back to the 9th century at least, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque" target="_blank">see Wikipedia</a>. But it's ordinary people, if you will permit me use that word loosely, that I am interested in. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Another historical curiosity from <i>Self Control</i>. Early in the story, Laura and her father have to travel from Edinburgh to London: the surprise here is that they go by sea. By land would have been more convenient in every way, but much more expensive, so a sea passage was chosen as the mode of conveyance best suited to her father’s finances. "Five days they glided smoothly along the coast. On the morning of the sixth, they entered the river, and the same evening reached London." <span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[3]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: purple;">Application to the officers of police</span></b><br /><br />
I was startled to come across the word “police”. I had thought this word came into use in the 1840’s, at the very earliest. But to my surprise, in 1811 you could contact the police to report missing persons. After Laura is kidnapped, her friend Mrs De Courcy searches for her, by advertising in every newspaper, and by making “application to the officers of police for assistance in her inquiries” in London. <span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[4]</span> I see from the <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i> that “police” is first found thirteen years earlier, in 1798. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicq0ONRJD9t2ZplAgMT8tgYiFRLOZHnUg_fvHORh1CimDAW_jdu5o74YT08xvhCfyvBwAVozQQ38UhJDUnCh5FPlflW6td5UJnY4YwY0LUzsbEB7xhKqI_IdGQvTWIZYGtD2qSDAIrZXGM/s1600/Pem+visit+-+Capture.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicq0ONRJD9t2ZplAgMT8tgYiFRLOZHnUg_fvHORh1CimDAW_jdu5o74YT08xvhCfyvBwAVozQQ38UhJDUnCh5FPlflW6td5UJnY4YwY0LUzsbEB7xhKqI_IdGQvTWIZYGtD2qSDAIrZXGM/s400/Pem+visit+-+Capture.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">In <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> the housekeeper guides Elizabeth and the Gardiners through Pemberley's interior. From Jane Austen's World blog.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A party is got up to view pictures in a country estate, in the owner’s absence </span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[5]</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">– putting me in mind of the Pemberley visit in <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>; an episode which has long puzzled me, that you could just turn up at a grand house and ask to be shown round by the housekeeper. In <i>Self Control</i>, the visit is with the owner’s prior permission, so the parallel is not exact. But I've subsequently found an <a href="http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number22/clarke.pdf" target="_blank">essay explaining the protocol</a> of these country houses visits.<span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[6]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It seems that in the 18th century it was accepted that respectable people could view the lavish country homes of the aristocracy and landed gentry. A tip to the gardener or housekeeper for their trouble was often all that was expected. Though in some cases you bought tickets. The scale of country house tourism at the end of the century was prodigious. In August 1776 the visitor book for Wilton, a great house with a celebrated collection of artwork, showed 2,324 visitors in the previous year; and the second half of the 18th century saw 26 editions of four different guidebooks to this house. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The blog </span><a href="https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/tag/gardens-at-stowe/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Jane Austen's World</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> is also very good on this topic.<br /><br />I see I haven't actually told you anything about the novel itself, but maybe that's another day's work. I'm slowly making my way through some of the books that Jane Austen would have had on her shelf, and finding it much more enjoyable than I expected. Next I might say something about Elizabeth Inchbald’s <i>A Simple Story</i>, 1791.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[1] When writing her Plan of a Novel, Austen wrote to her niece: "I will redeem my credit with him by writing a close imitation of 'Self Control' as soon as I can. I will improve upon it. My heroine shall not only be wafted down an American river in a boat by herself. She shall cross the Atlantic in the same way, and never stop till she reaches Gravesend." (Jane Austen's letters,4th ed. Oxford University Press. p. 295)</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[2] <i>Self Control </i>chap XXXIV</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[3] <i>Self Control </i>chap VII</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[4] <i>Self Control</i> chap XXXII</span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[5] <i>Self Control </i>chap XXIV<br />[6] “A Fine House Richly Furnished: Pemberley and the Visiting of Country Houses”, Stephen Clarke (2000), in <i>Persuasions</i>, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America. Thanks to Eileen Collins for drawing this to my attention.</span><br />
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Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-23163675561948692622016-12-29T00:43:00.001+00:002017-03-02T23:09:42.273+00:00My worst day at school<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I'm going to tell you about my worst memory from school. This would be when I was six. For some reason I associate it with Christmas, and I imagine this is because it was the last day of the Christmas term. There was a test, or a sort of quiz, and the lady teacher called out the questions, we wrote down the answers, then at the end we had to swap answer sheets and score each other’s work. And here's my worst moment. The question was, what sort of dog is Sarah? Sarah being the school dog. Actually I tell a lie as Sarah was not the dog’s name, that was another dog at another school, an Airedale Terrier. The dog I'm going to tell you about wasn’t an Airedale Terrier and wasn’t called Sarah, but as I've forgotten the name, Sarah will do for now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I agonised over the answer to this question, of what sort of dog Sarah was. And I really do mean agonised. I can feel the agony now. And what made it worse, another child was going to mark my work. Here's what I wrote down on my answer sheet:-</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioe01iz7UYvORXzJvUl8lG_JdiTImFonP5HsyxZg_WrV0Ni8q7XsbGN3b4s_NkOz73zJ81X7RmlP_fijR684Qq8r9XFFO0ZYnOPEiTHACNflXfqx24Bj3MMPCCbGLDIV3yutDxE4EtMfIe/s1600/blacnew.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioe01iz7UYvORXzJvUl8lG_JdiTImFonP5HsyxZg_WrV0Ni8q7XsbGN3b4s_NkOz73zJ81X7RmlP_fijR684Qq8r9XFFO0ZYnOPEiTHACNflXfqx24Bj3MMPCCbGLDIV3yutDxE4EtMfIe/s320/blacnew.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I stared at what I had written, and the more I stared, the wronger I knew it was. I knew it was wrong in three ways, at least: I knew I hadn’t spelt black right. Moreover I knew one of the letters was formed wrong, though I couldn’t fathom which, or how. But most all I knew I had made a category error, as I think it's called. I knew that black, however spelt, wasn’t the answer looked for. I sensed that I wasn’t being asked what colour Sarah was. I sensed I was being asked some other sort of question. Though without any inkling what that question might be. The question was, of course, what breed Sarah was - though I didn't know the word breed, didn't have the concept of breed, couldn’t name any breeds, knew nothing about dogs. I was sure all the other children did, they all had dogs and ponies and stuff at home. This was a private kindergarten in Sussex you see. I can tell you now, that Sarah was in fact a black Labrador, and LABRADOR was the answer sought. Probably none of the other children could spell Labrador but though I can derive comfort from that thought now, I couldn't then. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Eventually I ran out of time, the papers were to be swapped, and I handed my paper over, with that shaming word BLAC on it. This is my worst memory from school and it's associated with Christmas. </span><br />
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Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-25988110034550658922016-12-24T00:25:00.001+00:002017-01-15T10:25:49.739+00:00Utopia, some thoughts<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;">“For what justice is there in this: that a nobleman, a goldsmith, a banker, or any other man, that either does nothing at all, or, at best, is employed in things that are of no use to the public, should live in great luxury and splendour upon what is so ill acquired, and a mean man, a carter, a smith, or a ploughman, that works harder even than the beasts themselves, and is employed in labours so necessary, that no commonwealth could hold out a year without them, can only earn so poor a livelihood and must lead so miserable a life, that the condition of the beasts is much better than theirs? ” </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From Thomas More’s <i>Utopia</i>, 1516. This month is the quincentenary and Verso Books have brought out a <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/2250-utopia" target="_blank">commemorative edition</a>. Must get this book. Sadly, came across it too late to drop any hints for Christmas. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">A woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein, illustrating a 1518 edition of <i>Utopia</i></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Utopia – or as we might say, “nowheresville” – was the name of an imaginary republic, usually described as a place in which all social conflict and distress has been overcome. But I need to read it to check this; </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">here's another extract, which is fine till you get to the discordant note of the two slaves:-</span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">They have built over all the country, farmhouses for husbandmen, which are well contrived, and are furnished with all things necessary for country labour. Inhabitants are sent by turns from the cities to dwell in them; no country family has fewer than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. There is a master and a mistress set over every family; and over thirty families there is a magistrate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>Is utopianism any good?</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There have been many utopias over the years, including visions of a socialist society. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/" target="_blank">Utopian Socialism</a> had many advocates in the early nineteenth century, like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Marx and Engels defined their own socialism as scientific socialism in opposition to utopian socialism. The difference being that Marx and Engels thought they had mapped out a route to get from here to there, whereas the utopian socialists merely hoped to persuade the capitalists to hand the stuff over. That’s my second-hand understanding of the distinction in any event. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now two positive quotes about utopianism:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/visions-of-eden-the-capitalocene-china-mieville-and-the-limits-of-utopia/" target="_blank">China Miéville</a> in the Verso edition : <b>Utopianism isn't hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire</b></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5822041.Eduardo_Galeano" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Eduardo Galeano</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist.1940-2015: <b>Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.</b></span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>477 years</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The early voyages of European discovery, were, I imagine, amongst the influences that prompted More to write <i>Utopia</i>, and this has set my mind wandering off in another direction. Between Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the West Indies in 1492, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in 1969, is only 477 years. I find this a sobering thought. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">La Niña, 1492. Apollo 11, 1969
</span><br />2009 replica of Columbus's ship La Niña. Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the Moon (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin )
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Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-88091761081872687282016-12-14T00:37:00.000+00:002018-04-02T21:59:33.112+01:00Dr Johnson and a head carved on a carrot<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Two months since I wrote anything here, what’s all this delay? Surely I can come up with some insightful and entertaining <i>bon mots</i> pertaining to Jane Austen? Or how about some nugget culled from the dusty byways of English grammar? Well, perhaps … but my mind’s been elsewhere, agonising about Brexit, Trump, the drift towards fascism and what is to be done ... and just how, why and when did anti globalisation which used to the province of the left, become a plaything for the extreme right. Tonight I've given up trying to pen something on these themes that you haven't read much better elsewhere, so I've decided to talk about Samuel Johnson instead. Till a few days ago I only knew his definition of oats, “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” To which his Scotch friend Boswell retorted, “But Sir, what horses, and what people!” The dictionary definition is actual, though so far as I can tell Boswell’s retort isn't. I picked up a copy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_Samuel_Johnson" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Boswell’s <i>Life of Johnson</i></a> in a cancer charity shop in Cork last week, and may I take this opportunity to recommend you get or borrow a copy yourself. Almost every page contains pure entertainment. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple; font-size: small;">Left to right. Samuel Johnson c. 1772, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. “Am I not a man and a brother” – medallion made in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood </span><span style="color: #444444; font-size: x-small;">[1]</span><span style="color: purple; font-size: small;">. James Boswell at 25, by George Willison
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The first thing to say is Johnson was a strong slavery abolitionist, and no friend to the American colonists. Boswell records that in 1777, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, Johnson’s toast was, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” Johnson’s “violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers appeared whenever there was an opportunity”, Boswell tells us, revealing his own prejudice. Of the American colonists, Johnson said: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” <span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[2]</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b>His colour sufficient testimony </b></span><br />
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It seems that in the year 1777 a negro was claiming his liberty in a Scottish court, and Johnson dictated an argument in his favour. No law but that of violence, subjects a negro to his master, he argues; and the slaveholder’s pretended claim to the negro’s obedience is based on having “bought him from a merchant of slaves, whose right to sell him never was examined …. The laws of Jamaica afford a Negro no redress. His colour is considered as a sufficient testimony against him.” The argument is worth reading in full, and I have it for you, along with a handful of other extracts from </span><i style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;">The Life of Johnson</i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">, </span><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/ejuv159bgu1zj2i/Johnson.pdf?dl=0" style="font-family: "trebuchet ms", sans-serif;">on a separate page</a><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">. Johnson could get vexed when opposed in argument, and after debating slavery and the taxing of the American colonies, two subjects which Johnson and Boswell disagreed on, they went to bed bad friends. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">As you would expect from the writer of the first dictionary, Johnson was jealous of infractions on the English language. He found fault with Boswell for using the phrase to <i>make</i> money. “Don’t you see (said he) the impropriety of it? To <i>make</i> money is to coin it: you should say <i>get</i> money.” Boswell doesn't agree though, and thinks the phrase to make money is pretty current. In an object lesson to those of us who would stem the tide of language change, Johnson “was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word <i>idea</i> in the sense of <i>notion</i> or <i>opinion</i>, when it is clear that <i>idea</i> can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind”. We may have an idea or image of a mountain, a tree, or a building; but Johnson objected to an idea or image of an argument or proposition. Lawyers “delivering their ideas upon the question under consideration” was modern cant, he thought.<span style="color: #444444; font-size: x-small;">[3]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: purple; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><b>The finest head cut on a carrot </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Going into a convent for fear of being immoral was like a man cutting off his hands for fear he should steal. “There is, indeed, great resolution in the immediate act of dismembering himself; but when that is once done, he has no longer any merit: for though it is out of his power to steal, yet he may all his life be a thief in his heart.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">He argued against the value of sculpture. Painting is okay, as it consumes labour proportionate to its effect; “but a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Two final offerings, Johnson declared “It is commonly a weak man who marries for love”, and thought it was better to shoot a highwayman in the heat of the moment than to testify against him later in cold blood. You can find all these things <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/ejuv159bgu1zj2i/Johnson.pdf?dl=0" target="_blank">in my extracts</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I'm collecting books that Jane Austen had on her own shelves. According to her brother Henry, Johnson was her favourite moral writer in prose <span style="color: #444444; font-size: x-small;">[4]</span>. And in a 1798 letter, Austen wrote of getting Boswell’s <i>Life of Johnson</i>. I'm now reading Johnson’s <i>Rasselas</i>, and have recently finished a handful of other 18th century novels. Which are not, I'm happy to say, as bad as I expected. My mistake was starting with Richardson’s <i>Pamela</i>. It's dire, but I'm reassured to find Johnson also thought Richardson dire. More of this anon perhaps.<br /><br />As a postscript, I see that challenged by Boswell about his prejudice against the Scots, Johnson admitted: “Why, I own, that by my definition of <i>oats</i> I meant to vex them.” (1783)</span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">[1] For slave medallion by Staffordshire pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, see <a href="http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_596365" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Smithsonian National Museum of American History</a> </span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">[2] Another Englishman, the abolitionist Thomas Day, wrote in 1776 that “if there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.” Can't find the source for this.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">[3] In <i>Rasselas</i> I find: “Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas.” (ch XI) Here Johnson appears to have flouted his own rule. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">[4] Henry Austen “Biographical Notice” in the 1st edition of <i>Northanger Abbey</i> (Dec 13th 1817)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-41669023014410449202016-10-14T22:52:00.004+01:002017-03-22T23:23:33.523+00:00The awkwardness of "Awkward"<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I've come across another word that describes itself. </span><br />
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Stare at <b>awkward</b> long enough and I think you'll agree with me. What an awkward word, with that <b>wkw</b> in the middle. It turns out to be a combination of the Middle English adjective “awk” and the directional suffix “-ward.”<br />
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It seems “awkward” was coined in the 1300's in Scotland and northern England, where it meant “turned in the wrong direction”. The word "awk" meant the wrong way round, backhanded. Other possible meanings are sinister, ominous, perverse.<br />
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Here’s an example of the sinister/ominous meaning of "auke" from Philemon Holland’s 1600 translation of Livy’s history of Rome and the Roman people. In this passage Livy refers to those who disparage the Roman practice of augury:<br />
<br /><i>Now let them mocke on and scoffe at our religions. Let them deride our ceremonies. What makes matter (say they) if those pullets pecke or eat not? What if they come somewhat late out of their coupe or cage? What if a bird sing <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">auke</span> or crowe crosse and contrarie? How then?</i></span><br />
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And here's a late example from 1674, where perhaps perverse is meant. It's in a scientific treatise from the 17th century clergyman Nathaniel Fairfax: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>What we have hitherto spoken, will seem to have less of auk in it</i>, </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That is, what we have hitherto spoken, will seem less perverse. Fairfax was keen to use native English words only, and I suspect that by 1674, having “less of auk in it” already sounded old-fashioned, or dare I say, awkward. (I have more on Nathaniel Fairfax and the context of this quotation in an <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/08409hrbzs5emyz/Awkward.pdf?dl=0">appendix</a>. It interests me because of a connection to the history of science. He seems to have been exploring some of the thoughts that gave rise to calculus at about the same time.)</span><br />
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For an early instance of "awkward", there's the Middle English poem Pricke of Conscience (1340): <i>the world thai all awkeward sette</i> (they turned the world all awry).</span><br />
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A bit of etymology</span></b></span><br />
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“Awk” is Scandinavian in origin. Its equivalent in modern Swedish is “avig”. Suppose you were to put a shirt on back-to-front, this in Swedish would be “att ha skjortan avig”, literally to have the shirt the wrong way. There's a German word "Abweg" meaning the wrong way, which looks as if it ought to be related, but so far as I can tell it isn't. </span><br />
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I can't account for why, but it tickles me that the “ward” in awkward has something to do with direction, as in northward, onward, backward, inward, and so on. We can perhaps think of awkward as equivalent to the non-existent word wrongward. <br />
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My <i>Shorter Oxford Dictionary</i> tell me that the suffix ”-ward” gives the meaning of having a specified direction, and is connected with the Latin verb <i>vertere</i> (to turn). I find that an especially fruitful piece of etymology as it helps us to think of “–ward” as having the meaning turned in the direction of. So: turned in the direction of in, turned in the direction of out, turned in the direction of north, etc. Then there's "toward", and the interesting case of "untoward". In Middle English there was a word “fromward”; which in Old English apparently meant "about to depart; doomed to die; with back turned." <br />
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“-ward” can in principle be added to any location, to suggest progressing or pointing towards that place. As in <i>she raised her eyes heavenward</i>. Or this sentence from H. G. Wells, <i>The War of the Worlds</i> (1898): <i>In the road that runs from the top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night after the fighting began</i>. And in a recently published legal history of New York we find: <i>It was not until the colony became a state that the pendulum of emigration and settlement swung New Yorkward.</i><span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[1]</span>
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I thank the excellent <a href="http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/09/awkward.html" target="_blank">Grammarphobia blog</a> <span style="color: #666666; font-size: x-small;">[2]</span> for calling my attention to the awkwardness of “awkward”. It puts me in mind of the opposite case, the mellifluousness of “mellifluous”. A curiosity <a href="http://peterhousehold.blogspot.ie/2016/05/yellow-is-not-yellow.html">I had something to say on</a> back in May. <br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“Awkward” and “mellifluous” are autological words, words that describe themselves – or so it seems to me. </span>
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[1] <i>Courts and Lawyers of New York: A History, 1609-1925, Volume 1</i> (2010) by Alden Chester<br /><br />[2] The blog is the source of many of the foregoing quotations and I've even plagiarized the title of this post from it. You'll find more information in an email from the blog editors reproduced in the <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22760419/Blog/Awkward.pdf">appendix</a>.
</span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-87805377393721688452016-07-10T23:39:00.002+01:002016-07-10T23:58:50.019+01:00But why did it feel that way? <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Soon after the news of the Brexit vote came out, I wrote a piece describing <a href="http://peterhousehold.blogspot.ie/2016/07/the-brexit-referendum-what-it-felt-like.html">what it felt like</a>. Shock, disbelief, a country I don't recognise, these were some of my thoughts, which seemed to be shared by many of those with whom I am in contact in England, by <i>Guardian</i> columnists, and the like. Since then, I've been puzzling firstly, why these thoughts ... and secondly if they are the right thoughts. <br /><br />What were we voting for, we who voted Remain? It's perhaps presumptuous to say “we” because there will be many different we’s but I'm going to make a stab at saying what the we that I belong to voted for. And the first thing to say is that it was neither the dull economic arguments often put forward by the Remain side; nor was it a vote for the EU that actually exists – the EU that wants to crush the Greek people and hand power to the corporations through TTIP. Read George Monbiot on this theme: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/10/eu-in-health-wildife-european-union" target="_blank">“I’m starting to hate the EU. But I will vote to stay in.”</a>
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No, not for what the EU is but what it should be. Equally, for what sort of country Britain should be. A connected and inclusive nation, not an angry island on the edge, in the words of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/20/the-guardian-view-on-the-eu-referendum-keep-connected-and-inclusive-not-angry-and-isolated" target="_blank"><i>Guardian </i>editorial</a> two days before the vote. <br /><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW1xBpIhHUYlp_kQArSjxjWQtue6kAiayBo6j5rXtI_nMw0LhhY1-dlHY8nEmpsqXo-p0JLeg5KN6xOLKgJEK8I3S0grMYj_gqt65IjC4-hoDeKZLP62MoG-JRTxehRHmcLw06Z8f-OxTX/s1600/Brexit+Montage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="337" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW1xBpIhHUYlp_kQArSjxjWQtue6kAiayBo6j5rXtI_nMw0LhhY1-dlHY8nEmpsqXo-p0JLeg5KN6xOLKgJEK8I3S0grMYj_gqt65IjC4-hoDeKZLP62MoG-JRTxehRHmcLw06Z8f-OxTX/s400/Brexit+Montage.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This montage encapsulates what I was turning my back on when I voted Remain.</span></span></span></td></tr>
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And why was the Leave result so devastating? It appeared to be a vote for the Farage poster that encouraged voters to turn their backs on refugees, for a murky blend of xenophobia, nationalism, humble patriotism, and nostalgia for an imaginary lost age, a rainbow where the malignant merges into the stupid and the stupid merges into the naïve. The racist abuse “go home we voted Leave” that has followed the result, strongly reinforces the point.<br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>Now for the hard bit</b></span>
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Those then were the thoughts that motivated a Remain vote and greeted the result. And up to here was easy enough to write. But what follows has been through several drafts and I'm not sure I've got it right yet. Since the vote there's been another analysis. That the large proportion of working class Leave votes in post-industrial Britain, if you’ll allow me to use that phrase, was a howl of anguish against the status quo. Why vote for what is, when what is is crap. I had a message from England after the vote along the lines of, “Is something good going to come out of all this. I don't see what it is yet” ... and maybe this is it, that the dispossessed have found a voice. But if so they’ve used it to say the wrong thing. Life is bad! Let’s do what the right wing of the Conservative Party wants and see if that helps! In the words of Fintan O’Toole writing in the <i>Irish Times</i>, it's a <a href="http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-brexit-fantasy-is-about-to-come-crashing-down-1.2698974" target="_blank">Downton Abbey fantasy rebellion</a> of toffs and servants all mucking in together.
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But I'm being dismissive again and I didn't intend that. Lisa McKenzie’s <i>Guardian</i> article <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/15/brexit-working-class-sick-racist-eu-referendum" target="_blank">“Brexit is the only way the working class can change anything”</a> is worth a read. Writing a week before the vote, she says working-class people are sick of being called ignorant or racist because of their valid concerns. Hmm. What do I say about this ... let’s try: undeniably the Leave campaign was directed to the ignorant and racist. £350m a week for the NHS forsooth! So like it not, the burden of proof is on those who voted Leave.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUg8XDcv9JnNt-IvsBWSSOa4SK04O0oHEKR0rVNx1y9cf7TuBRr3yzB0dv1qslIIeqfowoq3x-OBqgcGOACF5pkIfHVmgIvpAj_gGTfSORUOJznMOPEXTziC6H9TPnowkGaHarAZGQws3f/s1600/Brexit+NHS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUg8XDcv9JnNt-IvsBWSSOa4SK04O0oHEKR0rVNx1y9cf7TuBRr3yzB0dv1qslIIeqfowoq3x-OBqgcGOACF5pkIfHVmgIvpAj_gGTfSORUOJznMOPEXTziC6H9TPnowkGaHarAZGQws3f/s400/Brexit+NHS.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Stupid to be taken in by this? </span></span></span></td></tr>
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But the referendum is a chance for the marginalised working class to have their say, goes the argument. No explanation though of how voting Leave will help, or lessen precarity <span style="color: #999999;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[1]</span></span> and fear. Indeed the architects of Brexit hope to undermine workers rights many of which are based on European law. See a TUC report from February, <a href="https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/UK%20employment%20rights%20and%20the%20EU.pdf" target="_blank">UK employment rights and the EU</a>. <br /><br />
Granted, in precarious employment, it's hard to enforce rights. And in no employment, impossible. But handing over to libertarian free marketers? What kind of answer is that? The drift of McKenzie’s article, and similar ones I've seen, appears to be things are so bad they couldn’t be worse so let’s take a punt on leaving the EU, it might be better, who knows. That may not be stupid or racist, but it is reckless. A recklessness born of desperation, it will be argued. Here I stop. I ought to have said something about the various studies contradicting the the view that immigration is the cause of falling wages. If my essay appears incomplete, I can only apologise.
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<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] Apparently I haven't been keeping up, because “precarity” is the new word for the effects on workers of neoliberalism.
</span></span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-88877535807396562462016-07-09T01:48:00.001+01:002016-07-10T22:27:18.934+01:00Jupiter over Death Valley<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
To Ballingeary near Cahir, Co Tipperary, on Wednesday to give a talk on a few curious facts about the universe to an ICA meeting (Irish Countrywomen’s Association). An appreciative audience. I showed them some arresting graphics of the relative sizes of the Earth and the other planets - but nothing I produced could match an image which I have just come across showing what Jupiter would look like in our sky if at the same distance as the Moon. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZJf_yc_0oBkSaJfQGmCypgWK6WS9jNW_0kt0tqXLfNsYtDKZmwLNJDxx_LDcKaULNF9_ei9Vt0i31IzFT4m1x3RY2v1knZBbOrxY76G-4qg9oBcyvhWa2P_Bwlit3Pf6pv3peqrl-Y-Jr/s1600/Jupiter-earth-death-valley-Ron-Miller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZJf_yc_0oBkSaJfQGmCypgWK6WS9jNW_0kt0tqXLfNsYtDKZmwLNJDxx_LDcKaULNF9_ei9Vt0i31IzFT4m1x3RY2v1knZBbOrxY76G-4qg9oBcyvhWa2P_Bwlit3Pf6pv3peqrl-Y-Jr/s640/Jupiter-earth-death-valley-Ron-Miller.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's as if seen from Death Valley, California, by space artist Ron Miller. At the Moon’s distance (<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">c.</span> 240,000 miles, or 386,000 km) Jupiter appears about 1,600 times larger than the Moon, shown for comparison in the next image:
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-h3TWjbolsBAhpLyHHktxoMDSiaiInzm3SSW7hwk8LJISHxslFBLE56idyoCbs4L3sD2dBG5solJcsRjVx_BfGolNiFMMpDIbyLfPyxtpUu-uBpz-d4eAQOiZdFunfcXer1v6Qqol660x/s1600/moon-earth-death-valley-Ron-Miller.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-h3TWjbolsBAhpLyHHktxoMDSiaiInzm3SSW7hwk8LJISHxslFBLE56idyoCbs4L3sD2dBG5solJcsRjVx_BfGolNiFMMpDIbyLfPyxtpUu-uBpz-d4eAQOiZdFunfcXer1v6Qqol660x/s640/moon-earth-death-valley-Ron-Miller.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Jupiter is our solar system’s largest planet, two and half times as massive as all the other planets together. <br /><br />Miller's images were published in <i>The Atlantic</i>, along with <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/what-the-night-sky-would-look-like-if-the-other-planets-were-as-close-as-the-moon/277247/" target="_blank"> Saturn and the other planets, each hovering over Death Valley</a>.
<br /><br />And here’s a link to <a href="http://spaceart.photoshelter.com/gallery-collection/Stock-Space-Art/C0000tNDaWl3DLNQ#" target="_blank">Ron Miller’s other work</a>.</span>
Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-80388577079260574842016-07-01T20:42:00.002+01:002016-07-03T14:48:47.821+01:00The Brexit referendum - what it felt like<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo0nY871Xya1mCYMBLutr756p-35twLQS48Z_e8-kqe6Scy2oW0UZJC6m01Hla-e1QNw4K-4PTj9XY9fB-92Y0wTCm82oqw6IGDoz-t7JMz0-sB6Ff4KkzFV3-92QsTtq0rSm9bektuaBh/s1600/safety+pin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo0nY871Xya1mCYMBLutr756p-35twLQS48Z_e8-kqe6Scy2oW0UZJC6m01Hla-e1QNw4K-4PTj9XY9fB-92Y0wTCm82oqw6IGDoz-t7JMz0-sB6Ff4KkzFV3-92QsTtq0rSm9bektuaBh/s320/safety+pin.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The safety pin - a hastily improvised symbol to oppose post-referendum racism </span></span></span></td></tr>
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<br />If you live in Britain and especially in England you won't need to read this because you will know it, and have felt it yourself. But for those elsewhere I just want to chronicle some of the shock and disbelief that greeted the Brexit referendum. It was on Thursday 23 June, the result coming early on Friday morning. Hard to remember this was only 7 days ago, so much has happened since. Yesterday I heard an elderly Englishwoman on the radio describing her reaction on Friday morning. She said it was the most shocking news since the declaration of the Second World War. A <i>New Statesman</i> columnist wrote <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/06/i-want-my-country-back" target="_blank">“I woke up in a country I do not recognise.”</a> And myself here in Ireland? Well, I was so angry and upset that day I couldn’t bring myself to contact anybody even though there were various people I ought to have been in touch with on unrelated matters. <br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Here are some comments I had from friends over the following couple of days, directly or through Facebook … “Heartbroken, where has my country gone?” … “Terrible. I'm ashamed and embarrassed to be English, and I'm angry and upset” …. “Feeling gutted, upset and as if living in another country” …. “Cannot believe that Britain has been so *** stupid. Very depressed” … “We had a party here yesterday for our local old friends and they are all very depressed”. <br /> <br />Two days later in the European soccer championship Iceland faced England and beat them 2:1. I was delighted. Seeing the England flags and hearing the England supporters singing God Save the Queen turned my stomach. I'm not normally a follower of football; but I know some English people who are, and they had much the same response to the Iceland match as me. All those I've quoted are English, so far as I know anyway. (I'm stressing English because Scotland voted clearly to remain in the EU, so did Northern Ireland. Wales followed England, why I ask myself.) <br /><br />I'm recording all this partly for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand, and partly for my own benefit to come back to in years to come.<br /><br />Something I should like to do and maybe shall in the next few days, is to analyse just why I and so many others feel this way. I've been sucking my pen wondering what to write next. Won't comment on the current political situation in Britain as it's moving too fast. But one thing does need mentioning, and that’s the reports of racism unleashed by the Brexit vote. <br />
<br />There's a 6-minute interview worth listening to, from a Canadian radio programme called <b><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/go-home-we-voted-leave-uk-sees-spike-in-hate-crimes-after-brexit-vote-1.3656893" target="_blank"><i>As it happens</i></a></b>.</span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's a young British woman named Singh. She describes racist incidents witnessed in the past few days. The referendum she says, has emboldened people to be racist. They don't feel ashamed to come and hurl this abuse at you like they maybe would have felt before, they feel they now have a democratic mandate for it. “Go home we voted Leave”. In a similar vein, here are some reports of racism collected from Twitter over the past few days; all directed against those perceived as being of Muslim heritage - so, absurdly, the racists either don't know or don't care that the referendum was about Europe not Asia or North Africa:-</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGXlb6seMLonj8hK4QSfn5ZvVynIlr7kWVF26hJAn46eOkEOth1PcTwCepBm5Bm6X2nkF60I127NRkyoviQK46pzwWXpj64HBPOZn4NzXiN9mUCn10viap9eEtOhWJUEjEfEToV7wVcnix/s1600/Racist+tweets.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="572" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGXlb6seMLonj8hK4QSfn5ZvVynIlr7kWVF26hJAn46eOkEOth1PcTwCepBm5Bm6X2nkF60I127NRkyoviQK46pzwWXpj64HBPOZn4NzXiN9mUCn10viap9eEtOhWJUEjEfEToV7wVcnix/s640/Racist+tweets.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>This evening my daughter left work in Birmingham and saw a group of lads corner a Muslim girl shouting “Get out, we voted leave”. Awful times.<br /><br />We were accused of bringing sharia law in whilst distributing Remain leaflets yesterday in Southampton<br /><br />Just arrived at 78% Muslim school. White man stood making victory signs at families walking past. This is the racism we have legitimised.<br /><br />My 13-year old brother had chants of “bye bye you're going home” at school today. He insisted it was “a joke” but it worries me. </b></span><br /><br />Maybe it's to soon for analysis. Maybe when history comes to be written it will emerge that this spike is post-referendum racism was very localised and short-lived. I hope so but the signs are not good. There's a Facebook group worth a look called <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Post-Ref-Racism-205471743181923/" target="_blank">Post Ref Racism</a>. <br /><br /><i>Linguistic postscript re the word “Brexit”. Everyone is using it so I've fallen into line, though I resisted it as long as I could. </i></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-31881314443973291792016-06-22T22:55:00.000+01:002016-06-23T09:07:24.142+01:00Fervently hoping for Remain<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZriKFTSKFwfINpf2E0fb1j8kOKCLy6pB1504HjDVQWvsK7Hfbh9jXjokG3taur06AnrLKVeAVKa69HHhn_z0TAnp_SL4M8aTuyIa-qYZQrXRuK0_ENMVujR21icLcj8RIdYS5kECOCwm/s1600/Vote-remain-poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZriKFTSKFwfINpf2E0fb1j8kOKCLy6pB1504HjDVQWvsK7Hfbh9jXjokG3taur06AnrLKVeAVKa69HHhn_z0TAnp_SL4M8aTuyIa-qYZQrXRuK0_ENMVujR21icLcj8RIdYS5kECOCwm/s320/Vote-remain-poster.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Well, 24 hours from now the count will be on. I've sent in my postal vote to Remain in the EU, having voted against in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Communities_membership_referendum,_1975" target="_blank">1975 referendum</a>. <br /><br />At that time I viewed the Common Market as it then was as a club for capitalists, and though the argument can still be made, now is neither the time nor the place to rehearse it. I hope that when I come to look over these words in a year’s time, I shall find my predictions null and void: but if it's a vote for Leave, I fear not just God Save the Queen being sung in the streets - which I shall be mercifully spared - but a resurgence of fascism both in Britain and across Europe. <br /><br />Staying in the EU was always going to be a hard sell to those of us on the left according to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/billybraggofficial/posts/10153484789162471" target="_blank">Billy Bragg</a> writing a few days ago on Facebook.<br /><br />The <a href="http://peterhousehold.blogspot.ie/2015/01/cassandra.html">treatment of Greece</a> and the threat of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-is-ttip-and-six-reasons-why-the-answer-should-scare-you-9779688.html" target="_blank">TTIP</a> suggest that the European Union is little more than a neo-liberal cartel. He quotes Jeremy Corbyn being merely “7.5 out of 10” in favour of remaining within the EU. <span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[1]</span></span> <br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>A turning point?</b></span><br /><br />
And he refers to the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/22/jo-cox-mp-women-views" target="_blank">Jo Cox murder last Thursday</a> as a turning point. <br /><br />Is he right to do so? Not widely known before she died, and certainly not to me, this young Labour MP seems to have been murdered in the name of 'Independence for Britain'. She had a passionate belief in the European Union as standing for international cooperation, and had engaged in international humanitarian work in Darfur, Syria and Afghanistan, advocating for the UN-initiated, but dormant, concept of a Responsibility to Protect.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Since her death, says Billy Bragg, none of us on the left can be in any doubt who will be emboldened by a victory for Leave. Viewed from over here in Ireland, my comment is this was never in doubt, with or without that murder, but no matter. The referendum is a battle for the soul of our country, says Bragg. If we win, we will have to work hard to address the genuine problems that mass immigration causes. We will need to build schools, hospitals and union membership. We will need to give a voice to the forgotten and the marginalised so that they can have some control over their lives and communities. And we will need to reform the EU to make it more about people and less about profits.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Addressing fellow socialists who are tempted to vote Leave, he says that if we do, none of this will be possible. If the libertarians triumph, what's left of our welfare state will be sold to the highest bidder and our workplaces – already the most deregulated in Europe - will be stripped of their meagre protections. The Tory Party will be reborn as shiny suited free market zealots. At the same time the forces of division will be emboldened and anyone doesn't fit in with their warped idea of who does and who doesn't belong will have a life of misery. But if Remain wins, then we will have momentum and the chance to utilise it while the Tories tear themselves apart over Europe. <br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Everything Bragg says is true, I've no doubt about it. At the end of his article, someone comments that if it was a choice between Weimar and the Third Reich, we would be campaigning for Weimar without hesitation, and I have the feeling there's some parallel to what's happening now.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] George Monbiot made a similar argument in the Guardian on 10 February 2016: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/10/eu-in-health-wildife-european-union" target="_blank">"I’m starting to hate the EU. But I will vote to stay in."</a></span></span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-85038666362670428492016-06-15T23:50:00.000+01:002016-06-22T23:47:57.701+01:00In time of war<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEKwuJnTyIYj_0Xf-uO0w7z2_tvcH_tb4wapzfssM7nMY6Li7g2ILiXB4M1KgSdehxfXD_WpRpG4VNaRFv47DvXAfWOcq5tJgVAZi3UbitT8rruijysnEqaIW7dbs2R7a1gb2XwbKD2SG2/s1600/Postcodes+1944_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEKwuJnTyIYj_0Xf-uO0w7z2_tvcH_tb4wapzfssM7nMY6Li7g2ILiXB4M1KgSdehxfXD_WpRpG4VNaRFv47DvXAfWOcq5tJgVAZi3UbitT8rruijysnEqaIW7dbs2R7a1gb2XwbKD2SG2/s320/Postcodes+1944_01.jpg" width="235" /></a></div>
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The image is a directory of post offices printed by the Reichspostministerium in Berlin in July 1944. It contains information on how to properly address mail with the correct postal code. I'm intrigued that at the height of the Second World War they would do such thing. Only ten months to go before Hitler’s suicide. The book contains a map of all the postal districts in the Grossdeutch Reich, at a time when some of these districts, in the Baltic states, were already in Soviet hands. <span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[1]</span></span> <br /><br />And here's another puzzle. Postcodes were <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Germany" target="_blank">introduced in Germany on July 25, 1941</a>. This was a world first. Unless you count the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_postal_district" target="_blank">London postal districts </a>(NW1 etc) introduced by Rowland Hill in 1856. <br /><br />Though on reflection I suppose you could say that the German postcodes contributed indirectly to the war effort by making postal workers more productive, thereby releasing some of them for war work. <br /><br />Let’s accept that. But how would you justify choosing 1944 to bring out a new edition of the <i>Shorter Oxford Dictionary</i>? You could, I suppose, argue that it made civil servants more productive when they were writing memos, though the case is far fetched. The Shorter Oxford consists of two big tomes, hardly a work to be consulted when you're in a hurry. So it can only be a matter of pure scholarship, and hats off for that. Were German universities doing the same sort of thing in 1944 I wonder? I've browsed through the German dictionaries at University College Cork and on the web, and the best I could come up with is the Duden spelling and style dictionary published in 1941. It's the official spelling rules in the German Reich and Switzerland, published by the Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD_KKx73pFfYqMBz4ncSHXnKLEWKFOqoTIJ7cgQIatyqYoszM_tg_cnsAIyqOPkyDZk5YTUsCOgJp_nEtF8y9vmnppDiYGenREyg2-Tohx0dP_lJyvh_xCq9zdEtr0IFkcoLO-FgOO7VwC/s1600/Wartime+dicts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD_KKx73pFfYqMBz4ncSHXnKLEWKFOqoTIJ7cgQIatyqYoszM_tg_cnsAIyqOPkyDZk5YTUsCOgJp_nEtF8y9vmnppDiYGenREyg2-Tohx0dP_lJyvh_xCq9zdEtr0IFkcoLO-FgOO7VwC/s400/Wartime+dicts.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Second World War dictionaries. My Shorter Oxford was not actually printed during the war but the Duden was.</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I mention the 1944 edition of the <i>Shorter Oxford Dictionary</i> because it's the one I have on my shelf. It's a 1962 reprint bought second hand in Bristol in 1967. I took it down recently to see if the word <i>access</i> is listed as a verb, or only as a noun. As I expected it's listed as a noun only. An example from about 1530 is given “At our access to the pope’s presence” (access here meaning entrance). <br /><br />From this I infer that in 1944 you couldn’t access something, though today you can. <br /><br />Nor in 1944 could you highlight the fact that <i>access</i> used only to be a noun, as the word <i>highlight</i> doesn't occur in the main listing, only in the addenda added in 1956. I have more to say in this subject but first I need to get my ducks in a row. An expression I've only ever used once before and I vowed never again, but I've broken my vow. <br /><br />I started with the postal directory issued by the German post office in 1944, and I'll finish with a couple of postage stamps in my collection issued in April 1945, showing that the post office continued doing what it does to the bitter end. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBs0WkQO2NExQcPcuXfHKfM2TBazltfBmxLWJEWOC9KReov-xK4KW3U15_5lEozZCj48X7VSYnA0d4WmLRZ8eRNFx5AsUKMLXe_u5LdhCFr7MD1K8jBaKev_BCz7MBKLXnilQxnwZ_Q3tT/s1600/Nazi+stamps.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBs0WkQO2NExQcPcuXfHKfM2TBazltfBmxLWJEWOC9KReov-xK4KW3U15_5lEozZCj48X7VSYnA0d4WmLRZ8eRNFx5AsUKMLXe_u5LdhCFr7MD1K8jBaKev_BCz7MBKLXnilQxnwZ_Q3tT/s1600/Nazi+stamps.JPG" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The stamps shown above were the final issue by the Reichspost, issued on April 21, 1945. They were commemorative stamps, celebrating the assumption of power by the Nazis, the date being the 12th anniversary of that event. The stamps were placed on sale in Berlin only, for a few days before the fall of the city to the Soviet Army. <br /><br />The stamp on the left features a Storm Trooper / Military Police Officer (SA). The stamp on the right features an Elite Storm Trooper (SS). Here are some other rather fine stamps issued by the Reichspost earlier that year.<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">:</span>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFCU9Os6KSZAmRWV7wibqmKQYqUrcAuHHap84ELwxkSNLx-CJj3UIBVguXnsVslyjmmIH0J1rY4ATU3Z2qc_SV4_5g7uHz97CEvQVxe1EHhV5QnrnkNuDvOVMnEFXWXK02EH7UekRzuAZl/s1600/Nazi+stamps+2+Capture.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFCU9Os6KSZAmRWV7wibqmKQYqUrcAuHHap84ELwxkSNLx-CJj3UIBVguXnsVslyjmmIH0J1rY4ATU3Z2qc_SV4_5g7uHz97CEvQVxe1EHhV5QnrnkNuDvOVMnEFXWXK02EH7UekRzuAZl/s320/Nazi+stamps+2+Capture.JPG" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<br />The grey stamp at the left was issued on January 6, 1945 to commemorate the 600th <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">a</span>nniversary of <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">m</span>unicipal<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> l</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">aw in Oldenburg. Wow! The<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> pink one</span> was issued in February 1945 to commemorate the <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">p</span>roclamation of the <i>Volkssturm</i> (People's Militia) in East Prussia to fight the Russians. <br /><br />But back to those fina<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">l </span>stamps. Th<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ey</span> were delivered on April 21 to six Berlin post offices only. Four of the six post offices seem to have been abandoned on or before the day the stamps were issued, the fifth post office closed on April 25, and the last Berlin post office closed on April 28. The city was overrun on May 2. It seems that none of these post offices were accepting or delivering mail during this period. Moreover stamp collectors have been unable to find any authenticated franked copies of these final stamps. Some apparently franked copies do exist, but philatelists believe they were not used for postage, but are manufactured souvenirs, for sale to occupying troops and personnel after the capitulation. <span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[2]</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">[1] For more on the post office directory with maps, see</span> <a href="http://www.usmbooks.com/nazi_postal_codes.html" target="_blank">USM Books</a> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #666666;">[2] Source for postage stamp information:</span> <a href="http://www.stamp-collecting-world.com/thirdreich_1945.html" target="_blank">Stamp Collecting World</a> <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-33896595529164518452016-05-16T23:59:00.002+01:002016-05-19T00:46:35.975+01:00Yellow is not yellow<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Image from wordables.com</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The word “long” isn't long, but the word “short” is short. And riddle me this: “multisyllabic” is multisyllabic, and "pentasyllabic" is pentasyllabic, but “unisyllabic” isn't unisyllabic. On the other hand, “word” really is a word, “noun” really is a noun, and “unhyphenated” really is unhyphenated. This all began with the verb “to verb”. Some people critique verbing and would like to elbow it out of the language. I'll blog about that another day; for now let me just highlight that “to verb” is an instance of itself, like “word” and “noun” - and noticing this, I began to wonder what other examples exist, and is there a name for a word describing itself. <br /><br />It turns out there is. Words that describe themselves are called “autological,” sometimes “homological”. <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #666666;">[1]</span></span><br /><br />Autological words I've already used are “multisyllabic”, "pentasyllabic", “unhyphenated”, “word”, “noun”, and “to verb”. All those words are instances of themselves. As I suppose is “mellifluous”.<br /><br /><span style="color: #bf9000;"><b>“Yellow” is not yellow</b></span><br /><br />Most words are heterological, that is to say their meanings don’t apply to them. “Long” is heterological because, as I noted at the top, it's not a long word. Likewise, the word “yellow” is not actually yellow, nor is the word “square” a square. <span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[2]</span></span><br /><br />Autological words seem to have a devoted fan base, and you’ll find lots of websites devoted to them. Indulge me while I mention a few more: “erudite” is erudite, “obfuscatory” (designedly unintelligible) is obfuscatory, and “recherché” (rare, exotic, or obscure) is recherché. “Terse” is terse, “twee” (impossibly cute) is twee, “prefixed” is prefixed, “adjectival” is adjectival, "pronounceable" is pronounceable. All of these I've found elsewhere, but one I've come up with myself is “noun phrase” which (if I remember my school grammar correctly) is a noun phrase.<br /><br />I won't weary you with any more. <a href="http://www.segerman.org/autological.html" target="_blank">Henry Segerman collects them</a>. He has a list of clearly autological words, and a separate list of more doubtful cases. “Meaningful” is a doubtful case. Yes it has meaning, but is that enough? Surely to be meaningful you need an above average amount of it (which I don't think “meaningful” has). Judging from the internet evidence, coming up with autological words is meaningful to many people. <br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>Curiosities</b></span><br /><br />
I'll end on a couple of curiosities. “Hellenic” is Hellenic, “English” is English, and “Afrikaans” is Afrikaans. But we must beware of being too quick to suggest others in this category. Is “Hebraic” Hebraic? “Swedish” certainly isn’t Swedish; nor is “German” German or “Dutch” Dutch, see the following table. Very few languages call themselves what English calls them. Afrikaans and Portuguese are rare exceptions. As are Indian languages - so far as I know, “Hindi”, “Urdu” and “Gujarati” are respectively Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />My last curiosity is this: does "heterological" describe itself? If so, it’s autological, because that’s what autological words do, they describe themselves. But wait! If "heterological" is autological, then it doesn't describe itself. Which makes it heterological; so it actually does describe itself, meaning it's autological. Welcome to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_paradox" target="_blank">Grelling-Nelson Paradox</a>. The link is to a Wikipedia article which I don't entirely follow. For example it casts doubt on whether “autological” is autological, which to my mind is indisputable.<br /><br />Finally a thank you to Pat O’Conner & Stewart Kellerman of the <a href="http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog" target="_blank">grammarphobia blog</a>. It's to them I turned when I first noticed that “to verb” and “word” are instances of themselves, and I wanted to know if there were other examples of this phenomenon, and is there a name for it. They sent a full reply from which most of the foregoing, and the notes below, are culled.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #666666;">Notes <br /><br />[1] The adjective “autological” originally had to do with self-knowledge when it first entered English in the 18th century. It came from the rare 17th-century noun “autology” (self-knowledge or the study of oneself), according to the <i>Oxford English Dictionary</i>.<br /><br />But a new meaning emerged in the early 20th century, the <i>OED</i> says, when “autological” was used to describe a word, especially an adjective, “having or representing the property it denotes.” <br /><br />The dictionary’s earliest recorded use of the word is from a paper by F. P. Ramsey published in 1926 in <i>Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society</i>: “Let us call adjectives whose meanings are predicates of them, like ‘short,’ autological; others heterological.”<br /><br />[2] See article by the linguist Arika Okrent : <a href="http://theweek.com/articles/459441/17-words-that-describe-themselves">http://theweek.com/articles/459441/17-words-that-describe-themselves</a>. I've used several of her examples.</span></span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-66766074818527786062016-03-25T01:29:00.000+00:002016-04-07T12:33:55.972+01:00Born to lie<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.cbc.ca/1.3400631.1452630494!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/born-to-lie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://i.cbc.ca/1.3400631.1452630494!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/born-to-lie.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Can I get away with this?<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></span></span></td></tr>
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No one wants to be called a liar. Or worse, to be caught lying. Yet lying is something we all do, often without even realizing it. This paradox of the human condition is explored in an episode of <i>Ideas</i>, a weekly radio programme by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. <br /><br />Called <i><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/born-to-lie-1.3400603" target="_blank">Born to lie</a></i>, and broadcast on January 13th, it looks at our instinct to lie, why we do it, how we teach children to do the same (yes we do though we kid ourselves the opposite is true) and why it can sometimes be a good thing. <br /><br />The highlight for me <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">wa</span>s a recording of an experiment with a three year old child. I laughed out loud and had to put down a bag of logs I was carrying. It's a guessing game. On the table is a toy animal which Cormac (the child) can't see, as he has to face the wall. A researcher (Sarah) tells him to guess what it is from the sound it makes, and as it quacks, Cormac correctly guesses it’s a duck. Same procedure with a toy dog. Next up is bear. But at this juncture Sarah unexpectedly finds she has to interrupt the game. “Oh! You know what? I forgot something in the other room that I need. I'll put the toy on the table with the sound playing but don’t turn around and peek. I'll be back in a minute.” The sound plays: it's a tune having no association whatever with teddy bears. Door closes. Cormac, satisfied he's alone in the room, peeks at the bear. Sarah the researcher returns with a blanket. She drapes it over the bear and Cormac is now allowed to turn round and guess what the toy is. “A bear” he says. “Wow, how clever, you didn't peek did you?” “No”. “How did you know it was a bear” “I just knew”.<br /><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQYuSRePFBXfBeIZpR-k_STWgRfa3vM6qvKTEBAfqvs8jl9vWwjpBOsYjsz18RdJIh5uZQ_BSp_qy7tvoraGd9YdzSNEcDVbhC1Vmz8xJRPVN3v4AhYq0vmJqmmTdWgvspeIl05f4ycDCt/s1600/PaulKennedy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQYuSRePFBXfBeIZpR-k_STWgRfa3vM6qvKTEBAfqvs8jl9vWwjpBOsYjsz18RdJIh5uZQ_BSp_qy7tvoraGd9YdzSNEcDVbhC1Vmz8xJRPVN3v4AhYq0vmJqmmTdWgvspeIl05f4ycDCt/s320/PaulKennedy.jpg" width="268" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;">Paul Kennedy host of <i>Ideas</i> <br />on CBC radio</span></span></td></tr>
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Apparently it's a standard experiment in psychology<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, </span>used to assess whether a child has reached the developmental milestone of pulling off a lie. The test is to see if the child will volunteer the fact that he cheated or not. There's also a white lie experiment. As a reward for taking part on the game, Cormac is given boring bar of plain white soap, and the test is does he pretend to like it. (The presenter claims he does, though it didn't sound that way to me.) <br /><br />Kang Lee of University of Toronto says: "If you discover your two-year old is telling a lie, instead of being alarmed, you should celebrate! Your child has arrived at an important stage of his or her life." At two years of age about a third of children will lie to cover up a transgression. At three, about half. At four, about 80%. After five its almost 100%.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />David Livingstone Smith, philosophy professor at the University of New England, says we have a collective investment in dishonesty. “A measure of dishonesty isn't optional. It's necessary. " A contrary point of view is held by the Radical Honesty movement, founded by Brad Blanton, a psychotherapist. You should always say just what you think even when this is uncomfortable. "I recommend you hurt peoples' feelings and offend people. And then stick with them." Unconvincing. But a <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">bri<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ll</span>iant</span> piece of radio. <br /><br />I can't recommend <i>Ideas</i> too highly. Here's the page for <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/pastepisodes" target="_blank">past episodes</a>. And here are a few of my favourites:- <br /><br /><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/talking-philosophy-war-and-peace-part-2-1.3324750" target="_blank"><i>Talking Philosophy: War and Peace.</i></a> War is bad - but does this mean that peace at any price will do? Philosophers grapple with the nature, rules, and challenges of war and peace. November 2015, in two parts.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-myth-of-the-secular-part-1-1.3135538" target="_blank"><i>The Myth of the Secular</i></a> is a 7-part series originally broadcast in 2012. The theme is that the old map of the religious and the secular no longer fits the territory, and we hear from theologians, anthropologists, sociologists and political philosophers. Does the mid 20th century orthodoxy of the withering away of religion need to be replaced? What about the Marxist idea that religion is a compensatory activity that the powerless resort to when politics doesn't work? Is the very concept of “religion” a western category that never <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">fu</span>lly applied to non-Christian religions?<br /><br /><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/global-justice-part-1-justice-across-borders-1.3368968" target="_blank"><i>Global Justice - protecting human rights in a world of conflict</i></a>. Global Justice is rooted in the aspiration to make the world a better place; but who decides what justice really is? And what happens when “universal” human values collide with interests? December 2015, in two parts.<br /><br />By the way, there's a problem with the search function on the <i>Ideas</i> webpage. It's problematic using Firefox but it works well with Chrome or Internet Explorer. I imagine this applies to the whole CBC website.</span></div>
Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-37678805522742097232016-03-10T22:03:00.000+00:002017-03-22T23:24:37.125+00:00Changing day length in Luleå<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Spring soon. Evenings stretching out apace, wasn’t really dark tonight till seven. Though here in County Cork we're in the wrong time zone. This means that sun-wise, it would be truer to say it got dark about a quarter past six. <br /><br />I now want to say something about the stretching of the days in Luleå during my recent stay there. In Cork the shortest day is 7 hours 46 minutes, and the longest 16 hours 43 minutes: hence between midwinter and midsummer the sun has almost 9 hours to chase. In Luleå, the difference is nearly 20 hours; consequently the stretching of the days is more rapid, and I was hoping to be able to observe this effect over the course of the seven days I was there. But I was disappointed, and if you bear with me I shall explore the reasons for this.<br /><br />My visit was from 18th to 25th February, during which time the days lengthened by 49 minutes. I know this from tables available at <a href="http://www.timeanddate.com/sun/sweden/lulea?month=3&year=2016" target="_blank">timeanddate.com</a>.<br /><br />Over those seven days, sunrise moved 26 minutes earlier, and sunset 24 minutes later. That adds up to a 49 minute increase (due to rounding). This is almost double the difference in Cork, where during the same week sunrise got 14 minutes earlier and sunset 12 minutes later. You can see all this in the table next to the map.</span> </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCcsjmQzd6n87a2WVaJcO58wcEnXkPyNCxkRTyGdtWer5dT11DWaIB2Qt4w0eHDPEB4UEhNp-F2KpzUZTzibgzlckoBrlcCEMMs8g0kKfc0mOqNXIH9PPhH-ZcuzJrqrmuA8w8oJ6OzLlM/s1600/Sunrise+map2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCcsjmQzd6n87a2WVaJcO58wcEnXkPyNCxkRTyGdtWer5dT11DWaIB2Qt4w0eHDPEB4UEhNp-F2KpzUZTzibgzlckoBrlcCEMMs8g0kKfc0mOqNXIH9PPhH-ZcuzJrqrmuA8w8oJ6OzLlM/s640/Sunrise+map2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Location map for Luleå, and sunrise/sunset table for Luleå and Cork.
Minutes are rounded. </span></span></span></td></tr>
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<br />To put it another way, when I arrived in Luleå, the day was 1 hour 20 minutes shorter than in Cork, and when I left, it was 1 hour 6 minutes shorter. Today it was a mere 24 minutes shorter. Come the 21st March (just to remind you) the days in Cork and Luleå will be the same length, namely 12 hours, indeed the same all over the globe. <span style="color: #666666;">[1]</span><br /><br />I said I was disappointed. I actually noticed no change while in Luleå, no stretching of the mornings or evenings. This was partly because for several days skies were overcast. But only partly. On reflection I realise that two factors work against each other. The further from the equator, the shallower the sun’s trajectory in the sky. This makes sunrise and sunset more gradual, extending the period of twilight; and it means that during the northern spring, even though the daily increment in sunlight becomes greater as you travel north, the stretching of the days becomes harder to mark. <br /><br />I cast my mind back to Trinidad where I spent a year in 1968. In the tropics the sun never rises and sets far from 6 o’clock. A typical sunset conversation would go: “You noticed the sun’s setting much later now?” ... “Yes, tonight it was 7 minutes past. A few weeks ago it was 4 minutes past.”<br /><br />Here is a table comparing Luleå, Cork and Trinidad for the week in question. It shows that where the daily increment in daylight is greater, twilight is also longer. <span style="color: #666666;">[2]</span><br /><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4T1qi2Vy_xQEZT6WlQSd0MY989eza8wXEJCI35dRFWn1UyDa_fPON-7K0nD-Q0Ra-e9EkWhAfNHGhwu1peBNvSmvP5FVsLhBDxrNWd63CWsXkk7UzPfX3BEQleAV4IndXpRTlMJpZBY3Q/s1600/Daylight+twilight+table.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4T1qi2Vy_xQEZT6WlQSd0MY989eza8wXEJCI35dRFWn1UyDa_fPON-7K0nD-Q0Ra-e9EkWhAfNHGhwu1peBNvSmvP5FVsLhBDxrNWd63CWsXkk7UzPfX3BEQleAV4IndXpRTlMJpZBY3Q/s1600/Daylight+twilight+table.JPG" /></a></span></span></div>
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<br />The paradoxical consequence is that in Trinidad, even a tiny difference in day length can be more noticeable over a short period of time than a very significant increase over the same period in Luleå. <br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/3krqnz0v0eod9q2/3%20sunrise%20diagrammes.pdf?dl=0">a set of three diagrammes</a> which may help to illustrate this. They apply to the winter solstice, 21st December, and show sunrise, sunset and the sun’s altitude at midday, comparing the cases of Luleå (midday sun altitude 1°), Cork (15°) and Trinidad (56°)<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>Daylength table </b></span></span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">anomaly</span></span></b></span> <br /><br />I'll now mention an anomaly I can't get to grips with. This arises from studying the daylength tables in preparation for writing this blog post. <br /><br />In the spring, as the sun sets further and further north each day, the daily increment in day length ought to peak around the equinox (21st March), and after that gradually lessen. From equinox to midsummer, though the days continue to get longer, the increment from one day to the next becomes less and less marked. When midsummer arrives, the day to day increase is zero; the sun no longer sets further north but stands still and then starts to set further south; so that after 21st June (the solstice) the day length begins to decrease again.<br /><br /><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><i><span style="color: purple;"><b>Why is it called the solstice?</b> A digression</span></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><i><span style="color: purple;"><br />Solstice is a bad word. It means sun stands still in Latin - but who knows or cares for Latin? In Swedish it's </span></i><span style="color: purple;">solstånd</span><i><span style="color: purple;"> (sun-stand) and in German </span></i><span style="color: purple;">Sonnenwende</span><i><span style="color: purple;"> (sun-turn). Much better. </span></i></span><br /><br />Thus in Cork, the daily increment in day length peaks in mid March at 4 minutes 1 second, and begins to decline after the 27th. During April the daily increment slows, so that at the end of that month the daily increment is down at 3 minutes 35 seconds. The decline in the daily increment continues during May, down to under 2 minutes. By 12th June it's down to 54 seconds. All that is good and just as it ought to be.<br /><br />But the day length table for Luleå tells a strange tale. <br /><br />Throughout February the daily difference is just over 7 minutes - oddly 4 seconds longer at the beginning of February that at the end. For most of March - when you would expect the daily day length increment to be at its maximum – it dips just under 7 minutes. Then, throughout April, when the daily increment ought to be slowing, it again tops 7 minutes. The daily difference is 7 minutes 22 seconds on 30th April and continues to rise, peaking, extraordinarily, in the second half of May, at 7 minutes 40 seconds. And it doesn't dip under 7 minutes till 9th June. Weird! I must find out why this is, something to do with the Earth wobbling on its axis or being a funny shape I suppose. <br /><br /><span style="color: #666666;"><b>Notes:</b><br /><br />[1] In most of the tables I've looked at, it's actually 18th March when the day length hits 12 hours. The leap day on 29th February distorts the picture of course, but even adjusting for that, you get the 19th March. I don't know why this is. And what about the two Poles I ask myself? I haven't found any table for them. My understanding is that they have only one day and one night, sunrise at the North Pole on 21st March and sunset on 21st September. South Pole vice versa. So is “12 hours all over the globe” correct or not?<br /><br />[2] About twilight. I've used civil twilight: the limit of which is defined by the sun's centre being 6° below the horizon. Solar illumination is insufficient, even under clear weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished, and artificial light is needed to carry on most outdoor activities. There are actually three definitions of twilight, the other two being nautical twilight and astronomical twilight, but civil twilight is most relevant for my purposes today. </span></span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-79904341258621812512016-03-04T01:10:00.000+00:002016-07-24T00:30:26.059+01:00A winter diary from Luleå <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbzHuUHitauzP8j6gYW9yHZ5T2NE3NmeSYTFsfnzJQdVemkIQbxKZMrb5ifVoZkKCrgHkNhA6XOmWXBfjFuMLd1TY0dNTVf_elz1za-ePe7rPR6g6CZ0zNfbN0z-tfWOwMxX0FjN0JImxN/s1600/Luldea3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbzHuUHitauzP8j6gYW9yHZ5T2NE3NmeSYTFsfnzJQdVemkIQbxKZMrb5ifVoZkKCrgHkNhA6XOmWXBfjFuMLd1TY0dNTVf_elz1za-ePe7rPR6g6CZ0zNfbN0z-tfWOwMxX0FjN0JImxN/s640/Luldea3.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I pose in the town centre beside two ice sculptures. And cars heedless of an icy road.</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A few notes I made whilst in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lule%C3%A5" target="_blank">Luleå</a> for a week with two of my mother’s sisters, Kerstin and Barbro. Normally I come in summer, this was my first winter visit for many years.<br /><br /><b>Thursday 18 Feb </b><br /><br />Clear sky but not very cold, only -3°. A couple of weeks ago was -20°. Snow heaped by the roadside. As there's been a recent fall, it's all white. In late winter the roadside snowheaps tend to get very grubby, I remember this from being here in 1967, age 18. The roadway, I was surprised to see, consisted largely of compacted snow. On the way from the airport my cousin made some tight turns at a fair old speed, which on our tyres in Ireland would have been catastrophic, but here their winter tyres can cope with ease. Inspected them later, small studs which looked insignificant to me but they certainly do the job.<br /><br />Walked into town with Barbro. Today's temperature -4.9°. My boots are good and comfy, and the ice grips work well. To the Culture House to use the wifi. Couldn’t get it to work, thought it was stupidity on my part, but it turns out the system had been changed the previous night. The three staff went into a huddle to figure it out for me. <br /><br />
Anxious about walking home in the dark in a dark coat, but Barbro says it doesn't matter, you show up against the snow. She remarked that the other day when it had been somewhat colder, she feared a packet of spinach leaves in her rucksack would freeze and be spoilt before she got home.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Luleå's Culture House. And a Semla bun.
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<span style="color: purple;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A digression about Semla buns</span></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;">A <i>semla</i> is a wheat flour bun, flavoured with cardamom and filled with almond paste and whipped cream, a bit rich for my taste. They start eating them the first Sunday in Lent. A heathen tradition if ever I saw one, as Lent (<i>fastan</i> in Swedish) is meant to be a time of fasting and self denial. <br /><br />These buns are blamed for a royal demise. King Adolf Frederick of Sweden died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after consuming a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, topped off by fourteen helpings of <i>semla</i>.<br /><br />The tradition is rooted in <i>fettisdag</i> (Shrove Tuesday, or Fat Tuesday) when, like pancakes in England, the buns were eaten at a last celebratory feast before the Christian fasting period of Lent. At first, a semla was simply a bun eaten soaked in hot milk (known as <i>hetvägg</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, </span>ughh!).<br /><br />At some point Swedes grew tired of the strict observance of Lent, added cream and almond paste and started eating <i>semla</i> every Tuesday between Shrove Tuesday and Easter. The foregoing is part<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ly</span> w<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ha</span>t <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I</span> was told and par<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">tly</span> what I <a href="https://sweden.se/culture-traditions/the-semla-more-than-just-a-bun/" target="_blank">looked up</a>, with some unresolved inconsistencies between the two.</span><br /><br /><b>Friday 19 Feb</b><br /><br />Kerstin told me a sad tale that occurred in the 1930’s. It concerned a family who lived in a distant part of Sweden, he being a train conductor and she a school teacher. For several summers they looked after Kerstin and her brother Gösta, an arrangement which started so far as I can tell when Kerstin was 4 and Gösta 8.<br /><br />The<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">y had</span> several children who had died as babies, but did have one surviving daughter, much older than Gösta & Kerstin, who became pregnant out of wedlock, and on account of social ostracism, she and her boyfriend killed themselves in a wilderness area. Kerstin, age 4 at the time, witnessed <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the mother</span>’s grief when she was told of this. At the time Kerstin was bemused, it was only later in life that she realised what all this was about. There are several details of this story I didn't follow. One such detail is how they died: poisoning themselves with sulphur from matches and starvation were both mentioned. Barbro knows the story in outline only, can't add anything.<br /><br />Kerstin indignant about the cruelty of neighbours whose job it is to help not to condemn. An immoral morality she says. But the neighbours are afraid too of course, that's how they get you. I can't help remarking that it's a pity the same spirit of rebellion that leads to cream buns in Lent wasn't exercised in this case as well. There is of course a larger question of whether the church leads or follows popular morality. <br /><br />Drinking <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">E</span>arl <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">G</span>rey tea. It's actually rather good as long as you leave the tea bag in a nice long time.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A Systembolag (<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">p</span>ic from the internet). And the Luleå-Kiruna railway.</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<b>Sat 20 Feb</b><br /><br />This afternoon walked to town on my own. My errand was to the <i>Systembolag</i> for wine and <i>brännvin</i> (snaps). -4.9° again and the wind in my face, which Barbro was concerned about when I came back, but was in fact no problem to me. Whilst my boots grip perfectly on the ice, I'm not so at ease in town where the main pavements are completely clear, or in shops, and I actually prefer walking in the roadway where there's snow and ice for the studs to grip on. The tie-on ice grips which I brought with me are called <i>brådar</i>, and Barbro approves them, says they are just the thing. <br /><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Cycling past a snow heap in the town centre, note the heated pavement in foreground. And a postman on a moped.</span></span></span></td></tr>
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Found out how the pavements in the main shopping street are so clear of snow. They are heated. Is this ecological I wonder? Still surprised that in general the Swedes are content for both roadways and footpaths to remain covered in snow and ice. People cycle and we saw a postman on a moped. <br /><br />The <i>Systembolag</i> displays a sign saying they will not serve anyone under 20, nor anyone who appears under the influence, nor anyone who is suspected of making purchases for another person who is in either of the foregoing categories. "This is important to us, our prime motive is not profit but restricting alcohol problems." I should explain that the <i>Systembolag</i> is a state-run chain of off-licenses and is the only place you can buy alcohol stronger than medium-strength beer. I had to buy a white wine suitable for salmon with a lemon sauce. Barbro told me to ask the staff for advice, which I did, she says they go on courses for this sort of thing, and like to be asked to demonstrate their skill. <br /><br />This puts me in mind of a story that I think my cousin Tolle told me. In the 1930’s the <i>Systemet</i> had an even more severe protocol. Alcohol was rationed and everyone had a ration book called a <i>motbok</i>. Tolle's father Calle and Albert (my granddad) were brothers-in-law and both engine drivers on the Kiruna-Luleå route. Calle asked Albert to get him some bottles during his break in Luleå, and lent Albert his ration book. There was nothing inherently wrong with this proceeding, the only problem being that Albert noticed Calle’s <i>motbok</i> was invalid as he had forgotten to sign it. Albert was in Luleå and Calle 200 miles away in Kiruna, so there was nothing for it but to forge Calle's signature. Here the problem began, for when he presented the <i>motbok</i>, the cashier went to fetch the manager, and Albert had to go into the office to answer the question "whose signature is this?". It turns out that Calle had remembered his oversight and had rung ahead to the Luleå <i>Systembolag</i> in order to explain! Quick thinking was called for. "That damned idiot!" expostulated Albert, "He can't remember from one minute to the next what he's been doing, of course this is his signature!"<br /><br />Tonight Barbro and I stayed up late writing our dairies. Interruptions from time to time, the latest about religion. I told her how when I was in Trinidad in 1968 I made it my mission to investigate which of the three religions there, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, was true, and at the year's end I concluded none was. <br /><br />Barbro has given me tomorrow's weather forecast. There will be a blizzard and the wind will be 15 m/sec. Not enough to be called a storm but still strong. Surprisingly, they have no dedicated word for blizzard, they just use <i>snöstorm</i>. But it's interesting that wind speed is sufficiently important to be measured in meters per second, and also that they concern themselves with tenths of a degree. Kerstin's thermometer has measured -4.9° for a couple of days now. I thought it was broken, but apparently it's not unusual for the temperature to remain constant over a 24-hour period, day and night. <br /><br />Here English is extremely clumpy. Where I have to say "over a 24-hour period, day and night " in Swedish I would simply say <i>"för ett dygn"</i>, or if emphasis was needed <i>"för ett helt dygn"</i>.<br /><br /><b>Sunday 21 Feb</b><br /><br />Last night there was neither blizzard nor snowstorm but there is about an inch of fresh snow, <i>kramsnö</i> Barbro called it, and demonstrated that you can squeeze it into a snowball. This means you must go carefully, as it sticks to the ice grips under your boots making them ineffective. We saw some boys having a snowball fight. Here it's called a snowball war, <i>snöbollskrig</i>. <br /><br />A Spanish Ido-comrade called Pilar sent Kerstin a nice grey blouse for her birthday. Kerstin thanked Pilar, writing in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido_%28language%29" target="_blank">Ido</a> of course. Ido is a harmless eccentricity that Albert was keen on, and has infected several members of the Åkerlund family. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Cycles outside Kerstin's flat. And walking on the frozen harbour.</span></span></span></td></tr>
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Three cycles left out all winter in a rack outside Kerstin's window have given rise to comments on how some people are so careless of their possessions. Covered in snow almost to the tops of the wheels. Took photos of them on my first and last day to be used as a snowfall meter. <br /><br /><b>Monday 22 Feb</b><br /><br />Tonight Barbro and I discussed the refugee problem. In Barbro's view this consists in the fact that Swedish people ought to be more welcoming. There have been instances of refugee centres being attacked and attempts to burn them down. There is one in Sundsvall near her, a disused school. They are given Swedish ready meals. What sort of idea do these refugees get of Swedish food, she asked, when they have to make do with ready meals here, whilst having such fantastic food in their homelands. She told how the refugees delivered leaflets in the locality inviting the Swedes to the centre for a meal, and a marvellous meal it was too, the only downside was all the Swedes were sitting together, there wasn't enough mixing.<br /><br />There's a magazine here with a piece on an initiative called the Invitation Department. It's about inviting a refugee into your home for dinner. Members of Barbro's family participate in the scheme. Subsequently found a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/world/europe/in-sweden-dinners-melt-cultural-barriers.html" target="_blank"><i>New York Times</i> article on this</a>. <br /><br /><b>Tuesday 23 Feb </b><br /><br />At breakfast Kerstin looked up bible quotations. The question of a serving woman's son came up and this led us to the Epistle to the Galatians amongst other places. English bible, Swedish bible and bible dictionary all on the breakfast table. <br /><br />Brilliant sun on the snow this morning and I walked into town, leaving Kerstin & Barbro to follow in the special taxi. We are to meet Tolle and have lunch at the Culture House. The restaurant gives a marvellous view over the frozen harbour, a distant prospect of people walking and skiing on it, and a tractor ploughing the path and ejecting snow through a chute. Like a combine harvester ejecting grain. Apparently there's an 8-km walk to an island with a restaurant on it. I don't mean the island is 8 km out to sea, it's just that you have to walk around a headland to get to it. A superb lunch praised by all, with huge thanks expressed to Eileen, and regrets that she wasn't there. <br /><br />The Culture House is an excellent institution: library, art gallery, theatre, restaurant, café, tourist information, and spacious open areas, in two of which lunchtime piano <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">recital</span>s were in progress.<br /><br />Later asked Tolle about <i>längre än mig</i> as opposed to <i>längre än jag</i>, exactly equivalent to "taller than me" or "taller than I". At first he gave a convoluted grammatical justification for the "taller than I" option (just like Kerstin & Barbro). But when I told him I wanted to speak Swedish like a person and not like a schoolmistress, he admitted that many people said <i>längre än mig</i>, and so does he from time to time, and there is nothing wrong with it. Later when I brought the subject up, Kerstin & Barbro admitted that it is in common use, including amongst educated people, which they deplore. <br /><br />Tolle talked of his UN tour in Cyprus where he had the temporary rank of Second Lieutenant in charge of a platoon. Repeated the story of how in 1940 <a href="http://peterhousehold.blogspot.ie/2011/01/my-swedish-cousin-and-german-cigarettes.html">his father had thrown all the German cigarettes</a>, about four or five packets, in the stove, when Tolle, age about 1<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">1</span>, had done errands for German soldiers travelling on Swedish trains. "Never again bring any more German stuff into this house." On the Norwegian-Swedish border in the vicinity of the railway line linking Kiruna to Narvik, there was a forbidden zone 400 metres wide with Swedish and German soldiers stationed opposite each other, and Tolle went skiing there with some friends. The Swedish soldiers waved and Tolle and his companions waved back. When the soldiers shot in the air, the skiers grasped the situation, and later had a big telling off from the police. Gave me the recipe for <i>gravad lax</i>, though this may not be popular at home. Discussed the two Swedish words for large rivers: <i>flod</i> and <i>älv</i>. The word <i>flod</i> is only used for a large river outside Scandinavia, and the word <i>älv</i> is only used for a large river within Scandinavia. Looked in several dictionaries. One suggested that <i>flod</i> is for tidal rivers. This sounds implausible to me, and in any event Norwegian rivers are tidal, which seems to kibosh it.<br /><br />Learnt a brilliant saying but it doesn't work in English. The translation would be "Everyone else is busy thinking about themselves, I'm the only one thinking about me." The Swedish has a zing to it that I can't reproduce: <i>Alla tänkar på sig, det är bara jag som tänkar på mig</i>.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTeUX_5LRSA4EIL_7clSyuQcSuLt-7-GLVBIyr3k6Ud1BVnlFZKrf3APE8yOe4w9ooGQz1Y61tAsuVQOxiGRk8ImrjSpb3c-WGzLtRoGMDoE1F5BGGcpwN1rzfGRlFmGjDcLOQ1LWshxvk/s1600/Lulea2b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTeUX_5LRSA4EIL_7clSyuQcSuLt-7-GLVBIyr3k6Ud1BVnlFZKrf3APE8yOe4w9ooGQz1Y61tAsuVQOxiGRk8ImrjSpb3c-WGzLtRoGMDoE1F5BGGcpwN1rzfGRlFmGjDcLOQ1LWshxvk/s640/Lulea2b.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">By the harbour: a remarkably silly dog, and a snow castle.</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<b>Wednesday 24 Feb</b><br /><br />
My last day in Luleå. Down to the quay in brilliant sunshine. A snow castle with kids playing. A dog owner throwing snowballs for the dog to chase after<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> - </span> <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">s</span>earching for snowballs in the snow, what a silly dog. Many people coming and going on the ice, some skiing, some skating, most walking, so decided to join them. Surprised how many people bare-headed even though between -7° and -5.5°. </span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-71134174691943087352016-02-06T23:41:00.001+00:002016-02-07T09:13:40.960+00:00Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This aphorism is attributed to King James I of England<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> / </span>VI of Scotland. The attribution may be false but it's contained in a collection described as a “Royal Chain of Golden Sentences” published in 1650 (25 years after James’s death). This was during the English civil war, which may be significant.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)</span></span></span></td></tr>
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The true originator may be the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon who in 1625 wrote a piece discussing statecraft titled “Of Seditions and Troubles”. <br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>Above all things, good Policie is to be used, that the Treasure and Moneyes, in a State, be not gathered into few Hands. For otherwise, a State may have a great Stock, and yet starve. And Money is like Muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly, by suppressing, or at the least, keeping a strait Hand, upon the Devouring Trades of Usurie, Ingrossing, great Pasturages, and the like.</b></span><br /><br />
In the same year Bacon attributed a similar saying to a Mr. Bettenham, including the pleasing image of money stinking when kept in a heap instead of being spread. <span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[1]</span></span> <br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: purple;"><b>Mr. Bettenham vsed to say; That Riches were like Mucke: When it lay, vpon an heape, it gaue but a stench, and ill odour; but when it was spread vpon the ground, then it was cause of much fruit.</b></span><br /><br />All this you can find in the <a href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/05/muck/#more-12981" target="_blank">Quote Investigator</a>. <br /><br />It started with someone writing in to ask for the origin of a saying of the British entrepreneur Richard Branson who used the image of money s<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">tinking when it's in a pile </span>on his website<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">:</span> “If you let money pile up, it starts to stink. But if you spread it around then it can do a lot of good.” </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Francis Bacon by the bye <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">was the first to make</span> the cogent observation that the modern world was distinguished from the ancient one by the three key inventions of gunpowder, printing, and the magnetic compass. All of which, unbeknownst to him, came from China, a fact unearthed by Joseph Needham in the 20th century, see my essay <a href="http://peterhousehold.blogspot.ie/2011/09/day-i-met-famous-man.html" target="_blank">The day I met a famous man</a>. <br /><br />
My closing thought is to wonder if <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers" target="_blank">the Levellers</a> used Bacon's saying <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">that money stinks in a pile</span> in their pamphlets, and if the attribution to James I (by a royalist, clearly) was intended to draw the sting out of it. Pure speculation on my part, I've googled in vain to find any connection. </span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj63V2_guBGYkaFJTiDU4Jv2FL0iwh2qnXQZ9NEfjBHgKFvchyAmj90GWh7f7Qn9IzuYodqp4rDEJjr_Cn2J2bStAQnzmMsrkps9kfHhIN4AMjtlrez7Z0EAJUNe3KV_QwWQZxylso-Qo9a/s1600/Digger+Declaration+1649.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj63V2_guBGYkaFJTiDU4Jv2FL0iwh2qnXQZ9NEfjBHgKFvchyAmj90GWh7f7Qn9IzuYodqp4rDEJjr_Cn2J2bStAQnzmMsrkps9kfHhIN4AMjtlrez7Z0EAJUNe3KV_QwWQZxylso-Qo9a/s320/Digger+Declaration+1649.jpg" width="247" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A pamphlet by Gerard Winstanley printed in 1649</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] “Apophthegmes New and Old” (1625) (apophthegme being French for aphorism).</span></span></span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-69052532590454346892016-01-14T00:17:00.001+00:002016-01-14T11:34:01.509+00:00Hey! You with the stained sink! <span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">This one’s about TV adverts and grammar.<br /><br />There's plenty to irritate in TV adverts and I'll mention one irritation in particular, presumptuous injunctions such as “Organize that messy closet” or “Get rid of those unsightly stains in your sink.” Where the copy writer pretends to be on such familiar terms with you that they have peered into your home. Why they do it, and why it irritates, is easy enough to see; but exactly how do they do it?<br /><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A tidy closet, or should I say wardrobe</span></span></span></td></tr>
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It's the word “that” and its plural, “those”, the grammatical name for which is demonstrative adjectives. In the foregoing slogans “that” and “those” modify a noun, in effect pointing at it; thereby indicating, from amongst all the possible closets and sinks, which one (or ones) the speaker is referring to - yours.<br /><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A stained sink - or it was when the photo was taken, but please be assured, not now!</span></span></span></td></tr>
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Putting advertising aside for a minute, let me take this sentence spoken by a normal person: “Sam misses that dog.” <br /><br />Or this: “These sneakers belong to Janet.” <br /><br />The demonstrative adjectives demonstrate which dog Sam misses, which sneakers belong to Janet. “That” and “these” refer to nouns that actually exist—dog, sneakers. The speaker and the audience both take for granted that the dog and sneakers indicated are known and exist.<br /><br />Now back to the advertising slogans, with an anonymous voice telling you to “organize that messy closet” or “get rid of those unsightly stains”. The voice isn’t pointing to an actual condition in your house - but instead is presupposing its existence and treating it as a fact. It seems linguists have a name for this, and the slogans are examples of “presupposition.”<br /><br /><i>The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language</i> says, “The information contained in a presupposition is backgrounded, taken for granted, presented as something that is not currently at issue.” In the cases in point, the presupposed information is that you have a messy closet and a sink with unsightly stains.<br /><br />In a study entitled “Presupposition, Persuasion and Mag Food Advertising” (2012), Tamara Bouso uses the example “Do you expect to fit into that beach bikini in the New Year?” This sales pitch presupposes not only that the consumer has such a bikini but that she’s probably too fat to wear it.<br /><br />In this way, demonstrative adjectives are employed to create a false sense of familiarity, of intimacy with the consumer. It's a forced intimacy that can strike listeners as intrusive or annoying, but whether it's more intrusive and annoying to those with tidy closets and spotless sinks, or messy closets and stained sinks, is hard to say.<br /><br />Two names have been proposed by linguists for demonstrative adjectives used in this presumptuous way: “affective demonstratives” and “emotive demonstratives.” “Emotive” because such terms convey a sense that both speaker and listener share some relevant knowledge or emotion about the referent of the demonstrative—that is, the closet or sink it points to. And “affective” to imply an emotional element—in this case familiarity and a shared experience of a closet or a sink.<br /><br />How do I know all this? Well yesterday I didn't, but today I've read my daily email from the <a href="http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/01/that-those.html" target="_blank"><i>Grammarphobia Blog</i></a> and it's all there, with links and references. I've used the word closet because they do, it's an American blog.</span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-38352896657645114922016-01-05T19:06:00.001+00:002017-03-22T23:26:58.429+00:00Younger or youngest? Can Jane Austen err?<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">By indirections we find directions out. I'll start with an alleged mistake in the second sentence of Jane Austen’s <i>Emma</i>. Here we read that Emma “was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father”, and it's the word “youngest” that gave rise to a difference of opinion. To set the scene, it was last November, and we were at lunch before a lecture in Dublin hosted by the Jane Austen society to mark the novel’s bi-centenary. Professor Darryl Jones of Trinity College thought that <i>Emma</i> is a landmark in the history of the English novel, being the first designed to be read more than once. It only makes sense on the second or third time of reading, he said, as all the questions Emma gets spectacularly wrong, we do too, the first time. The most complex of Jane Austen’s novels and one of most complex novels in English. <br /><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Chapter 10 of <i>Persuasion</i> in the <a href="http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html" target="_blank">Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition</a>
curated by Prof Kathryn Sutherland</span></span></span></td></tr>
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But back to lunch, and Emma being the youngest of two daughters. Someone asserted that Austen was in error here, as you can be the younger of two but not the youngest of two. And indeed I've subsequently seen numerous posts on websites supporting this ruling.<br /><br />The first thing to say about this point of view is that it assumes the existence of a Big Book Of English Grammar where such rules are written down. As I've lived 66 years without encountering such a book, I think I can plausibly suggest there isn't one.<br /><br />
I did however in the heat of debate make an ill-considered statement, which was that Jane Austen can't be wrong, and if she wrote the youngest of two then youngest of two is okay. Reflecting on this later I decided I ought to investigate whether Jane Austen actually took care of such matters; whether "youngest" is what she actually wrote; would she leave a decision about younger/youngest to the printer, and how carefully did she proof-read? I was travelling down a blind alley of course, because these questions matter not one jot. What's important is that the text of <i>Emma</i> is what it is, however many hands are responsible; not whether Jane Austen herself was interested in grammar.
<br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>William Gifford</b></span><br /><br />
Actually my blind alley was not entirely blind, for it led to me some new nuggets of knowledge. One of these is that Jane Austen did have an editor, William Gifford, who took great pains with grammar and punctuation. Indeed in 2010 a brouhaha erupted over a claim that his influence on the final text was such that Jane Austen’s style can't really be said to be her own. All this was attributed to Oxford Professor Kathryn Sutherland, though in fact <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2811" target="_blank">the professor’s remarks seem to have been distorted</a>. Be that as it may, we can be sure that the said Gifford wouldn't allow anything untoward to slip past him, and in the novel’s second sentence of all places. <br /><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Prof Kathryn Sutherland and Jane Austen. The Kathryn Sutherland image is (so far as I know) a good likeness, whereas the Jane Austen one is not </span></span></span></td></tr>
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The Kathryn Sutherland controversy makes some fascinating reading, or fascinating to me at any rate, and I have a fellow Jane Austen society member to thank for drawing it to my attention. You could start with this <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2731" target="_blank">blog by linguist professor Geoffrey K. Pullum</a>. Writing in October 2010 when the spat over Austen's alleged failings in style and grammar was still fresh, he says he has seen no examples to back these claims up.
<br /><br /><span style="color: purple;"><b>Dubious basis</b></span><br /><br />
Another nugget that came my way following my “Jane Austen can't be wrong” outburst: it seems that from about 1750 to about 1850 creating new rules of English grammar became a favourite passtime, and a prohibition on the “youngest of two” was being suggested around the time that Jane Austen was writing. There's plenty on this in the excellent <a href="http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/eldest.html" target="_blank">grammarphobia blog</a> which I've newly discovered. Here they reproduce the conclusion of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merriam%E2%80%93Webster's_Dictionary_of_English_Usage" target="_blank">Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage</a></i> on the matter:-
<br /><br /> “The rule requiring the comparative has a dubious basis in theory and no basis in practice, and it serves no useful communicative purpose. Because it does have a fair number of devoted adherents, however, you may well want to follow it in your most dignified or elevated writing.”<br /><br />The blog authors Pat O’Conner & Stewart Kellerman were kind enough to email me with some additional comments on Jane Austen’s use of “youngest”, and they say that whilst there are differences of opinion here, it’s probable that Jane Austen was unaware of any “rule” banning a superlative with only two members; indeed many popular grammar prohibitions emerged only in the latter half of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th, so it’s not fair to call an author “incorrect” for ignoring a convention that was not yet firmly established in common usage at the time she was writing.<br /><br />As I've already indicated, I'm reluctant to use the word “incorrect” at all, moreover <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/yuns01m1s73p1ax/Younger%20youngest.pdf?dl=0" target="">I can adduce plenty of evidence</a> against there being, even today, any firmly established convention that you can't be the youngest of two. <br /><br />Finally, I nearly wrote "the authoritative" <i>Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage</i>, but then I would stand accused of inconsistency, as I've already suggested that no-one is entitled to lay down rules. And that’s true, but Merriam-Webster is authoritative in this sense, that they have exhaustively investigated English usage, and if you want to know what’s been written and by whom, Merriam-Webster is a good place to look. Maybe all of this leaves you thinking that some of the things that interest me are very dull indeed, in which case I salute you for getting this far. </span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-12738974238337987932015-12-16T23:29:00.000+00:002016-01-06T00:24:39.536+00:00Jane Austen and a shop in Devon<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This happened when I was about 10, which would make the year 1959. We were driving home through Devon after visiting my English grandmother in a nursing home in Teignmouth (my father’s mother that is, an explanation I wouldn't need to give were I writing in Swedish). Passing through a town my mother caught sight of a shop sign and called out to my father to stop and go back because the name on the shopfront was Household. I glimpsed it fleetingly, it looked a substantial affair. No, it was just a household stores said my father. My mother insisted she was sure Household was the proprietor’s actual name, and with so rare a surname it must be some sort of relation, we ought to call and say hello. But my father drove stolidly on refusing to turn back and investigate. Later my mother explained to me the reason for this strange behaviour: my father would be ashamed to be related to anyone engaged in trade. But it looked like a big shop I protested. No matter, this was the way he had been brought up; my granny, my mother told me, was a snob. We had a small car and a small rented flat in Brighton, and what made me ashamed was that the stuffing was coming out of the arms of the sofa.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Title page of Emma, published <br />200 years ago this month <br />(though it says 1816, hmm)</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The memory came to me because I'm working on the question of Jane Austen and snobbery. I've promised to lead off a discussion on this topic in a small book group we have in Cork - the Cork Friends of Jane Austen that’s what we call ourselves. Several prominent snobs feature in Jane Austen’s works. Emma, Darcy, Sir Walter Elliott are names that spring to mind, and the snobbery theme is a staple of Jane Austen criticism. For example in a famous 1957 essay the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of Emma: “Her self-love leads her to be a self-deceiver. She can be unkind. She is a dreadful snob.” One occasion of her snobbery - and this takes us back to the shop in Devon - is when a family <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">by the name of</span> Cole give a large evening party, an enterprise Emma treats with disdain. "Nothing should tempt her to go”; the Coles were "of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel … they ought to be taught that it was not for them to arrange the terms on which the superior families would visit them". <br /><br />I must make it clear my mother didn't blame my father for his attitudes, she accepted it was part of his upbringing and couldn’t be changed. And I suppose I must extend the same charity to my grandmother, who grew up part of the landed gentry; my mother grew up in the north of Sweden, the daughter of an engine driver. I also need to add something about the state of the sofa. This was due to my parents spending far more than they could afford on my expensive schooling. For better or worse that’s made me what I am, so it's not my place to complain about the stuffing. <br /><br />I'll finish on a puzzle. It occurs to me to ask whether and how Jane Austen and her contemporaries talked about snobbery, since according to my understanding, the word was not yet in use. Did they have another word for it? I don't think they did. I can't help wondering if there's something anachronistic going on <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">when we</span> talk of Jane Austen and snobbery. It's something I should like to explore, if only I knew where to begin. I hope to have an answer by the first Tuesday of February. <br /><br /><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Note : The Trilling essay is <a href="http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1957jun-00049" target="_blank">“Emma and the legend of Jane Austen”</a> in <i>Beyond Culture</i>, 1965. The <i>Emma</i> quotation is from ch 25.</span></span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-81529433225627450932015-11-25T17:22:00.000+00:002020-04-24T20:52:47.353+01:00The glory is departed<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Boarzell School in Sussex where Mr Dumbreck taught me English in 1961</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<br />I had a terrific English teacher when I was 12 called Mr Dumbreck and were he here today he would <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">strike</span> a big red pencil through that word “terrific”, on the grounds of being a cliché, and furthermore terrific means inducing terror. Another rule for our English compositions was that no sentence was to begin either with the word “it” or the word “suddenly”.
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I want to tell you about my swotty boy moment. One day the word “hectic” cropped up and Mr Dumbreck asked us for examples of how it might be used. Up I piped with “yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red”, a line from Shelley’s <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174401" target="_blank">“Ode to the West Wind”</a>, which we had recently been reading in class. Mr Dumbreck heaped praise on me for quoting both correctly and appositely, and even after all these years the memory c<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">all</span>s up a glow of satisfaction. Lindsay by the bye tells me that at her school quoting Shelley wasn't considered <i>comme il faut</i>, and would quite likely have earnt me a whack on the back of the head with a pencil box.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Mr Dumbreck and the Fifth Form room. The events related here took place in the Sixth Form room next door, but no photo is available. <br />All photos courtesy of Michael Salmony </span></span></span></td></tr>
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Whenever I think of Mr Dumbreck the phrase “Ichabod, the glory is departed” comes to mind. It's an essay he read to us about a hat box festooned with luggage labels. You have to be as old as I am to remember what this meant. The hat box is sent away for a lock repair and when it comes back it's been steam cleaned, and the lovingly preserved collection of labels has vanished. I've gone looking for this essay, which turns out to be by Max Beerbohm, and after fifty-four years <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/lm3ydqxg7kzzrpg/Ichabod.pdf?dl=0" target="_blank">I've just read it again</a>. I see the title is simply “Ichabod”, the phrase “the glory is departed” occuring only at the very end. I imagine Mr Dumbreck read us this verse from the Old Testament: “And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel: because the ark of God was taken, and because of her father in law and her husband.” He was a brilliant teacher. He taught us art too. We weren't allowed erasers, and had to ask to borrow his bungy. This was occasionally permitted but normally he would claim to have lost it.
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It's hard to say why I've started reminiscing about Mr Dumbreck. My age you will say. But I think I can trace it back four years when I read PD James's <i>Death Comes to Pemberley</i> and was startled to come across this sentence: “Suddenly Mrs Reynolds was with them.” Proof that PD James had not attended Mr Dumbreck’s lessons, and considering that she was writing a Jane Austen sequel, very bad; for Austen, though she used the word “suddenly” about 50 times in her novels, never once began a sentence with it. I know this because I have the internet. Mr Dumbreck knew it in his bones.
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Finally, in a couple of hours we in Cork Astronomy Club will celebrate the centennial of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which prompts me to ponder the relativity of time. From leaving Boarzell in 1961, to 1972 the year my mother died and I moved to York, was 11 years, and appears to me like half a lifetime. From leaving York to now is nearly 11 years, and it seems like yesterday.
<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #666666;">Note 1 : For a read-out of every sentence in which Jane Austen used the word “suddenly”, all you need is this website</span> <a href="http://www.pemberley.com/etext/">http://www.pemberley.com/etext/</a> <span style="color: #666666;">and about eight seconds of your time. Charles Dickens had no such compunction by the way. I found the following instances in David Copperfield, and I suspect, had I continued searching, would have found many more:-
<br />“Suddenly I came upon a pasteboard placard, beautifully written, which was lying on the desk …” Chap 5
<br />“Suddenly Miss Murdstone gave such a scream that I all but dropped it.” Chap 8
<br />“Suddenly there passed us ─ evidently following them ─ a young woman …” Chap 22
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Note 2: The Biblical quotation is 1 Samuel 4:21 in King James version.
</span></span><br /> </span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-66515684102854003842015-11-23T23:00:00.000+00:002015-12-16T23:39:52.874+00:00Flags, Paris, ISIS - a few thoughts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This post is far from a considered essay I'm afraid, more a stream of consciousness. I'll start with French and Irish tricoleurs on a rain soaked street in Cork this afternoon. And an image going the rounds on Facebook of the Malian flag, where French flags have sprung up adorning many users’ pages. These flags have been called forth by an ISIS atrocity in Paris ten days ago, on 13th November, which has dominated the international news<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span> Unlike a similar one in Mali on the 21st, <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">whi<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ch</span> gave rise to</span> no flags on Facebook. Bombings in Beirut on 12 November, likewise attracted little coverage. <br /><br /><i>The Guardian</i>’s readers editor, reflecting today on his own paper’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/23/what-we-got-right-and-wrong-in-coverage-of-the-paris-attacks" target="_blank">recent opinion pages</a>, made an arresting point about when is the right time to express certain views: “The idea that these horrific attacks have causes and that one of those causes may be the west’s policies is something that in the immediate aftermath might inspire anger. Three days later, it’s a point of view that should be heard.” <br /><br />He also responded to a complaint that when the Paris story first broke on Friday 13th, the Guardian website didn't immediately open it for comments. This was because there were very few moderators available and, regrettably, a considerable number of people wanted to leave Islamophobic comments, alongside the many others who wanted to engage in legitimate debate.<br /><br />
If it's Islamophobia you want, look no further than today’s <i>Sun</i>, a tabloid with the highest circulation in the UK.
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<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/23/the-sun-jihadi-headline-dangerous-poll-dubious-survey-hate-crimes-muslims?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=The+Best+of+CiF+base&utm_term=139134&subid=5451585&CMP=ema_1364" target="_blank">
<br />Demolished in <i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">T</span>he Guardian</i></a> by Miqdaad Versi for being irresponsible, dangerous and grossly misleading. As many commentators have pointed out, <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">t</span>he <i>Sun</i> story is precisely what ISIS in their black and white world want. <br /><br />An interview on RTÉ radio made a big impression on me, if I have time later I'll find the link. A French senator, from the socialist party I infer, defended the French response to the Paris attack, namely to step up bombing of ISIS positions. She also welcomed a <a href="http://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc12132.doc.htm" target="_blank">UN security council resolution</a> backing “all necessary measures” to prevent and suppress ISIS terrorist acts on territory under its control.<br /><br />So far, all according to script. Until at the very end, when the radio presenter asked her about the upcoming French elections, and would the <i>Front National </i>be making gains? Then we got her authentic voice: “I'm scared, I'm really scared” she said, of the right wing backlash that might arise from these attacks. <br /><br />I see that I confidently asserted just now that I know what ISIS wants, and it occurs to me that I actually know no such thing. I've read <a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/isis-wants-us-to-invade-7-facts-revealed-by-their-magazine/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=SR&utm_campaign=SR&sr_source=lift_facebook" target="_blank">“7 things I learned reading every issue of ISIS's magazine”</a> by one Robert Evans on a website called Cracked. Now I know nothing of Evans nor his website, but find I'm reduced to trawling around the internet for any scraps of insight I can gather, and this just may be worth a read. ISIS it seems has a glossy magazine that Evans has studied at length. Amongst other things, the primary target of their hatred is not the United States, France or Russia; the one "enemy" they devote more time to ranting against than anyone else is the "apostate Muslims", who form the vast majority of their victims. I suppose we knew that already, but in the last week it's all been hidden by events in Paris.<br /><br />Most propaganda makes enemies appear ugly and brutal, whilst portraying one's own side as shining and blameless, says Evans. But the Islamic State does not do this. And “their fawning ads about various jihadis don't show only happy pictures ... they almost always include a picture of the man's corpse.”<br /><br />President Holland reacted immediately to the Paris outrages by announcing a new bombing campaign. Isn't this just revenge, and demeaning to France? Treading in the footsteps of George W Bush and Tony Blair and their war on terror. You can't make war on an idea, only on a state. ISIS likes to call itself a state and now they’ve all declared war on it, so it is one. <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/nov/16/paris-attacks-isis-strategy-chaos" target="_blank">The war ISIS wants</a>, according to Scott Atran on the <i>New York Review of Books</i> website.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Atran'</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">s</span> article also touches on a question that bothers me and probably you, the horrific, seemingly senseless, violence that ISIS followers engage in. But to them it's a deeply purposeful part of an exalted campaign of purification through sacrificial killing and self-immolation. This finding is based, he says, on interviews with youth in Western cities as well as with captured ISIS fighters in the Middle East.<br /><br />Or is this all wrong, and are they deranged and pathetic?<br /><br />When it became known ten days ago that the Islamic State militant known as "Jihadi John" had been killed by a US drone, the mother of American journalist James Foley, who was beheaded last year in Syria, said she felt no solace in the killing. "It saddens me that here in America we're celebrating the killing of this deranged, pathetic young man," <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/mother-james-foley-strike-targeted-jihadi-john-35175287" target="_blank">Diane Foley says in an ABC video</a>. "Jim would have been devastated with the whole thing. <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">He</span> was a peacemaker. He wanted to know how we could figure out why all this was happening." <br /><br />Ju<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">st</span> disjointed thoughts really, and not up to my usual standard, but I hope you find some of the links useful. I'll finish with one more, from the <i>Guardian</i> website again, yesterday. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/22/islam-terror-morality-paris" target="_blank">Why do Islamist groups in particular seem so much more sadistic, even evil,</a> asks Kenan Malik. Amongst his answers he suggest that over the past few decades anti-imperialist traditions based on Marxism and other leftwing perspectives have unravelled, leaving political rage against the West nothing but nihilistic, barbaric forms. <br /><br />
As a postscript here are two more links that have been </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">r</span>ecommended </span>to me by Dave and Stevey<br /><br />
(1) This article, and its part 2, <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">covers</span> the history of ISIS. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html" target="_blank">Huffington Post</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">:</span> “You can't understand ISIS if you don't know the history of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia”
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(2) <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/" target="_blank">Atlantic<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span>com</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">:</span> </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">but a</span></span></span> religious group with carefully considered beliefs, amongst them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. </span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-15336861193319230422015-11-06T22:53:00.001+00:002015-11-24T13:29:05.195+00:00A Dyson sphere, my eye!<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The central dot in this image represents a star surrounded by a Dyson ring of solar power collectors, </span></span></span><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">100 million miles out</span></span></span> from a star. Many rings would make a Dyson sphere. Loopy!! <br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image via Wikipedia.</span></span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">When it comes to extraterrestrial life and space colonisation by humans my intuitive response is, this is fantasy stuff, and not worth a second glance. <br /><br />I'm thinking in particular of the notion that <a href="http://earthsky.org/space/possible-alien-megastructure-kic-8462852" target="_blank">star KIC 8462852 may sport a Dyson sphere</a>. And what, pray, is one of those? Oh yes, it's a <a href="http://earthsky.org/space/what-is-a-dyson-sphere" target="_blank">hypothesized artificial structure surrounding a star</a>. A structure the size, say, of Earth’s orbit around the sun, consisting of a shell of solar collectors. The idea being that with this model, all (or at least a significant amount) of a star’s energy would hit a receiving surface where it can be used. The physicist Freeman Dyson speculated that such structures would be necessary for the long-term survival of a technological civilization due to its escalating energy needs.<br /><br />Madness.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> But madness or not serious scientists looking at the data from th<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">e</span> recently discovered KIC 8462852 think it's behaving so strangely, that this Dyson sphere conjecture is worth exploring. Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2015/oct/16/alien-megastructure-could-explain-mysterious-new-kepler-results" target="_blank">quoted in <i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">T</span>he Guardian</i></a> “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”<br /><br />Even as “the very last hypothesis” this is surely loopy! … and yet ... as a mere bystander, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">who am I </span> to say, no this cannot be? <br /><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdWx3e3MZ2mTSp7o5-PSxI1nGighgZLtjTrlCmCNOGtw8JqEKNo0qFz7bxcVtknzF73XM2hhPtbR0LHS8SHcSd7ourYrSfYq_V2nIPI9jOWVWac4KRLM2deAi3WrgKNl7Lcxw_NezzkKvH/s640/mars-one.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdWx3e3MZ2mTSp7o5-PSxI1nGighgZLtjTrlCmCNOGtw8JqEKNo0qFz7bxcVtknzF73XM2hhPtbR0LHS8SHcSd7ourYrSfYq_V2nIPI9jOWVWac4KRLM2deAi3WrgKNl7Lcxw_NezzkKvH/s640/mars-one.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">When I need an image for a space colony I invariably seem to revert to this representation from the Mars One website</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />Space colonies <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">are</span>n't quite so far out and yet I struggle to take th<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">em</span> seriously too. <a href="https://www.pdx.edu/anthropology/cameron-smith" target="_blank">Dr Cameron Smith</a> is someone who’s caught my eye. An archaeologist at Portland State University, <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">he</span> has arresting views on how space-born descendants of explorers would evolve culturally and genetically. His theme is the biological and cultural dimensions of human space colonisation. <br /><br /><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This</span> will be a process of adaptive evolution, and he thinks evolutionary studies can help plan for its success. He proposes to <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">foun</span>d a new science that he calls exo-anthropology. He envisages different models of space colonization:-</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />• Terrestrially-tethered colonies <br />• Independent colonies on other solar system bodies <br />• Independent colonies aboard 'closed-system' spacecraft <br /><br />I recommend listening to an <a href="http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Smith_7-16-14/Smith.mp3" target="_blank">hour-long audio file of a teleconference</a> held <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">last year </span>with scientists from NASA and the University of Texas. There are slides to accomp<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">an</span>y his talk, and you <a href="http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Smith_7-16-14/" target="_blank">can find them on this page.</a> (<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">L</span>ook for a pptx file.) <br /><br />Space colonisation will be a natural continuation of 4 million years of adaptation, he believes. Against our nature? No … ever since the human dispersal out of Africa, we’ve always found new places to live. Why would that stop with the atmosphere, he asks? Plenty of technical reasons maybe, but no reason against space colonisation either philosophically, or evolutionarily. Humans have always perceived new environments and then gone on to colonise them. <br /><br />All except Antarctica that is. There are <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">some</span> scientific stations, but where are the colonies, where are the children, huh? <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">T</span>here's the flaw is his scheme surely. Mars is many times less hospitable than Antarctica.<br /><br />He says we require a science of extraterrestrial adaptation. It will be an evolutionary transition on a par <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">with</span> our ancestors coming down from the trees. Humanity has long considered colonising space, and at present we're at the exploration stage, thinking of individuals and how they could survive on Mars. But as an anthropologist he think<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">s</span> of groups. Biocultural evolution, co-evolution of genes and culture, that’s what anthropologists study. Up to now the anthropologists have <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">look</span>ed at the present and the past. Cameron Smith <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">want</span>s the<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">m to</span> turn their attention to the future.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Dr Cameron Smith, exo-anthropolog<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ist</span></span></span></span></td></tr>
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He cites the example of high-altitude societies in the Andes and Tibet. Here genetic mutations allow more efficient blood oxygenation. There's cultural adaptation too, for example in the Andes mothers move down to lower altitude before giving birth. <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Maybe</span> on Mars there will be a need to give birth in 1g gravity, so, by analogy with practice in the Andes, mothers perhaps will ascend to an orbital station with artificial gravity. <br /><br />We can expect both beneficial and deleterious mutations to arise off-Earth he says. Evolution will be driven by selection pressures arising from the different gas composition, lower atmospheric pressure, and lesser gravity. All these factors will differ from the Earth conditions that have shaped human embryo development for millions of years. On Mars we'll see the return of natural selection, big time. There will be an increase in infant mortality, he sees no way round this.<br /><br />The Q&A session following his talk <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">i</span>s worth listening to as well. A Mars colony would be physically fragile at first, and highly susceptible to sabotage by any of its members who went awry. A whole new approach to mental illness will be called for.<br /><br />If a one-hour audio file i<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">s</span> too much to digest, <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Dr</span> Smith also gave a 10-minute talk for SETI Big Picture Science, called <a href="http://blog.bigpicturescience.org/2015/06/big-picture-science-and-to-space-we-return-cameron-smith-space-humans/" target="_blank">“And to space we return”</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-60473029035170693502015-10-24T01:32:00.002+01:002015-11-08T00:48:26.007+00:00A US national park on the Moon?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Buzz Aldrin salutes the US flag on the Moon, 1969. (Wikipedia) <br />Should the site be a US national park?</span></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I want to say a few words about archaeology in space; and in particular a Bill in the US Congress mandating that the Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon will be a US national park. The Bill was introduced in July 2013; and though I have no reason to believe that it will ever go anywhere, for I've seen nothing about it since, nonetheless, as I started on this story a few years ago, I feel obliged to bring it up to date.<br /><br />Back in 2012 my eye was caught by a zany act of the state of California a couple of years earlier, placing preservation orders on the Apollo 11 Moon landing site. A bizarre act of extraterrestrial heritage imperialism I called it, in a blog post called <a href="http://peterhousehold.blogspot.ie/2012/01/boldly-preserving-where-no-man-has.html">"To boldly preserve where no man has preserved before</a>". <br /><br />But a Bill in the US Congress ratchets the whole enterprise up a notch. So it needs to be said that whilst protecting the Apollo sites is laudable, making them US national parks is not.<br /><br />Now without a doubt, the US Apollo programme was a premier technological accomplishment of the 20th century. Preserving the six historic landing sites of the manned Apollo missions is important, along with the mementos and equipment still lying around on the Moon. The same goes for other US missions such as Ranger and Surveyor, and indeed the Soviet Luna missions.<br /><br />But the US National Park System Act states that the parks are “managed for the benefit and inspiration of all the people of the United States”. A direct conflict therefore with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which clearly emphasizes that the exploration and use of space by nations is to benefit all peoples. Article II of the Treaty provides that “outer space, the moon and other celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” Whichever way you cut it, designating a national park on the Moon would amount to a territorial claim. Nor is submitting the Apollo 11 lunar landing site to UNESCO for designation as a World Heritage Site a way out, as World Heritage Sites are located on the sovereign territory of nations. So this would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty too. <br /><br /><i>Science</i> journal in November 2013 (Vol 342, p 1049) makes these points, and proposes instead an international agreement on lunar artefacts among the United States, Russia, and China. Other states could join in due course. This would be a far superior and long-lasting solution to a unilateral US proclamation, the article claims. <br /><br />
</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Private property in space</span></b></span><br /><br />There are plenty of corporations and their henchmen calling for private property rights on the Moon and elsewhere in space, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty framework needs supporting.<br /><br />Should you wish to follow up the private property in space debate, <a href="http://spaceexploreethics.blogspot.ie/p/international-law-of-space.html">I have a website with plenty of links</a>. You'll find clear expositions of the case for and against space property rights. My favourite has to be a piece called “Marx on Mars” by one Virgiliu Pop, a Romanian space lawyer. This is a frontal assault on the Moon Agreement’s embracing of the Common Heritage of Mankind principle. The principle is based (he says) on Marxism, and Marxism (he says) is a fallacy. Wonderful stuff.<br /><br />I'm going to Limerick soon to give a talk to the astronomy club there on the ethics of space exploration, and I just wanted to get this update in beforehand. By the way, if undisturbed, the <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">b</span>ootprints in the foreground of the Buzz Aldrin photo might outlive all human artefacts on Earth.</span>
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<br />Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2315629333109868789.post-39473656177164249472015-10-07T01:03:00.000+01:002016-10-05T20:55:34.830+01:00In which I seek an historical fact and don't find it<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Last week in Portugal I conducted some historical research about Christians under Muslim rule. According to the historian A R Disney, Christian monasteries and nunneries continued to function under Muslim rulers in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, and he cites two centres of Christian pilgrimage in the Algarve which were respected by the Muslim authorities. In search of one of them, a sanctuary of the Virgin Mary, I took the bus to Faro, and was in luck, for prominently displayed in the small municipal museum is a modern tapestry telling the legend of Santa Maria de Faro. During the years of Muslim rule, Muslims and Christians quarrelled over an image of the Virgin, which for the sake of a quiet life the Christians were obliged to ditch in the harbour. No sooner was the deed done however, than to the distress of the local fishermen all fish disappeared from the sea. Realising their mistake, the Muslims dredged the image up and restored it to its rightful place, whereupon the fishermens’ nets were filled more bounteously than ever before. This is numbered amongst the miracles of the Virgin. Incidentally, Mary is venerated in Islam, indeed according to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_in_Islam" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> is mentioned more times in the Koran than in the New Testament.
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: purple;">Tapestry in Faro municipal museum. The
panels show: a fight, throwing the statue into the sea, empty fishing nets,
pulling the statue out of the sea, statue restored on the wall, full fishing
nets</span></span></span></div>
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I showed the curator the passage in Disney's book (<i>A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire</i>) about the shrine to the Virgin, and asked him if any evidence of it has survived. Sadly not. Moreover, whilst he was familiar with the book, he told me that other than the legend, there is no evidence for these events. <br /><br />
Hmm ... history books are full of facts and you can hardly have history without them; but the one and only fact that I've actually checked for myself seems to have evaporated before my eyes.
<br /><br />If I'm back in the Algarve next year I'll dig some more. And I hope I shall be, because I missed out on the museum of dried fruit in Loulé. A circumstance which when mentioned occasions unaccountable hilarity, but I intend to prove the scoffers wrong.</span>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><b>More about that disputed image</b></span><br /><br />
A thought on the dispute between the Christians and Moors over the image of Mary. The legend mentions that the Moors resented the statue, with no explanation offered as to why. It occurs to me that to those who first heard the story no explanation was necessary – for the Moors’ prohibition of images would be too well known to need mentioning, and Mary being a figure of reverence to Muslims would make the Christians’ statue all the more abhorrent. <br /><br />
The source of the legend appears to be an old Spanish poem, or song, translated: “In Faro, there was a statue of the Virgin. It had stood on the seashore since the time of the Christians, and captives prayed to it. Christians called the city ‘Holy Mary of Faro’ because of the statue. The Moors resented this and threw the statue into the sea. As long as the statue lay in the water, the Moors could not catch any fish. When they realised this, the Moors recovered the statue. They placed it on the wall between the merlons [battlements]. Afterwards, the Moors caught even more fish than they had before.”
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Note: The poem is “The Moors of Faro who Threw a Statue of the Virgin into the Sea”.
It's no 183 in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of poetry in medieval Galician composed at the Court of King Alfonso X of Castile in the second half of the 13th century. <a href="http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/" target="_blank">See the Oxford database of Cantigas de Santa Maria</a>. This poem departs from the legend given in the Faro museum, where it's the Christians under duress who threw the statue into the sea, whereas in the poem it's the Moors.<br /><br /> Another note: I've seen medieval Persian depictions of Mohammed, which shows that the detestation of images has not always been a consistent feature of Islam.
</span></span></span>Peter Householdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04537256881744236389noreply@blogger.com0