According to today’s Guardian, our sports-mad monarch’s Christmas broadcast “will focus on how games and exercise can positively give people distance from their dreary little lives”. Early in the new year Buckingham Palace will issue the queen’s personal exercise video, which includes tips on how to glow with a greyish-white aura.
The obvious choice for a new monarch or head of state — assuming nobody except me wants a goat — is John Cleese. He’ll have to get rid of the moustache, but he’s very tall and he knows how to deal with foreigners.
A Bad Guide 
Sports-mad indeed: is that a figurine of a falconer in the background on the right?
Can’t the family afford a personal appearance adviser ? It is a mystery to me why little old ladies go for blue and purple – hair, glasses, clothes. Precisely these colors wash out any remaining sanguinity, creating a deathly pallor. Orange has a similar effect on me.
I don’t know much about color schemes for different complexions. Somebody once told me I should wear earthy colors like brown. But brown makes me feel like a farmer, and other colors make me look like Tinkerbell.
So I stick with black. Maybe that’s the best choice for old Queens. You can pass on that bit of advice to her, if you like.
You’re right to stay away from brown. You don’t want to look like a stew. Coffee colour is good for a suit, though, besides hiding coffee stains. And I like brown shoes.
That will be fifty dollars, please
The date here is 25 December (I think). Merry Christmas to all the queens and to all.
Merry Christmas, Sig.
Language used to live in Astoria, Queens. It’s a Greek neighbourhood of New York.
Wot I thought was: give ol’ Crown a Christmas present with a Norwegian flavour. I enclose the enclosed enclosure.
Here’s the rehearsal
John Cleese as the king!! Or the queen (I love him in stockings and high heels…). Fantastic!
But why would he take off his moustache?
As for the Queen’s advise “games and exercise can positively give people distance from their day-to-day lives”; nah! I prefer reading, blogging or alplazolam…
Thank you, dearie. How lovely to see Morecombe & Wise! I’d always thought André Previn was French Canadian, but it turns out he’s originally German.
Now, here’s a piece of virtually useless information, Julia: you aren’t allowed to have a moustache in the British navy. By “you”, I mean “one”, obviously you aren’t planning on joining the British navy or growing a moustache. Kings in Britain often wear naval uniform, and they couldn’t do that with a moustache. Anyway, that’s what we were taught as children — and it’s true the English kings never have had one, only a full beard.
Merry Christmas to you all. As we dance around the Christmas Palm in our briefs and/or corsage, we’ll be thinking of you.
Crown, I am relieved to see that you have an additional source of income as personal appearance advisor. I had always wondered how an architect manages to make ends meet out in the Norwegian woods. Your pictures from there have never shown any user-friendly housing estates, skyscrapers or memorial libraries.
Perhaps you could favor us with photoshops of Her Majesty in more suitable colors ? It might even put you in line for distinction. Just think: “AJP By Appointment to the Crown”.
Damn,the picture didn’t appear. I reworked it with Paint. The title is “striped majesty”.
Thank you, AJP. I supposed something like this. There’s not such thing as useless information. (And I have to say that your perspicacity is amazing, is the absolute truth that I have no intention of letting me grow a moustache.)
Ohh, Grumbly’s “striped majesty”!! Why can’t we see this? Though, I’m not sure I really want to…
There, I’ve managed to add it. I think if you want to add a picture to a comment you have to provide a URL for it. I just uploaded it to the place where all the other pictures for this site are stored; I’ve no idea where that is, probably down at the bottom of a mineshaft in Arizona.
Merry Christmas, Principal. I think it’s minus 16 or something here: very little dancing outside taking place, with or without swimsuits.
Perspicacity is my middle name, Julia. I just knew you weren’t a moustachio’d kind of a gal, not like that Mona Lisa.
How does she know a word like “perspicacity”? Because she knows Latin!
¡jajaja!
No, my knowledge of Latin is limited. But my Spanish is more “complete”, I think. I wanted to say “perspicacia” in English, so I looked in the dictionary, that’s easy. But what I don’t really know if this word is common in English or just a stain of alien weirdness…
I’M sorry, Stu, the Queen still looking bluish
It’s definitely not weirdly alien, Julia; it’s a word you don’t hear every day, but I’ve always liked it, when I was young I associated it with a TV cowboy called “Hop-along” Cassidy.
WHY???
There must be something interesting behind this association!
Hmm. I could think up a more interesting reason, but it’s only because –cacity and Cassidy sound the same to me.
Hmm, aha…
(said with the tone and gesture of a shrink)
It would have been very easy for them to have adjusted the queen a little bit, like this. I wonder why they didn’t?
The Guardian is not known for royalist tendencies, I believe. I assume the picture was provided by the Palace. If they didn’t care about the quality of it, why should Guardian bother ?
I thought it was the BBC. But I also had this image of the palace’s handlers. a big department, but it’s probably some old codger who’s barely heard of the internet and does part-time gardening.
I don’t think the Guardian is out-and-out republican, though some of its employees probably are.
“It is a mystery to me why little old ladies go for blue and purple”: on reflection, Stu, you may decide that it isn’t a mystery why little old Queens might wear purple.
How do I add a picture so that our host con fix the URL and make it visible?
One suspects that, given the opportunity to enlist Julia in a moustache into the Royal Navy, the Queen might wish to bend the rules a wee bit, just the once.
So are you having more snow there, Artur? Here we’re having more rain.
On the seasonal thematic front, am currently giving some thought to being reincarnated as a Red and White Christmas Tree Worm. Just the once mind you.
Happy infestation then!
Britannia rules the waves, Tom. She doesn’t waive the rules.
I cannot believe you’re still having rain in California. No, it’s not snowing, it’s just cold. Happy infestation to you too, of course.
Trond, if you send it to my email I’ll put it up. Otherwise you have to refer to a url in your comment. My address is written where it says “Crown”, at the top of the page.
it isn’t a mystery why little old Queens might wear purple
Gosh, dearie, is that get-up supposed to be royal purple ? I don’t have an eye for color, but I had imagined royal purple as more spectacular, more Ben Hur-ish. I bet Charlemagne didn’t look like death warmed over.
There must be something the old dear can do to smarten up her image – shoulder the scepter, say, don a tiara, or pin on bits of ermine here and there. On reflection, though, I suppose her appearance might be a deliberate attempt to appeal to the lower classes, with their blue rinses and dreams of better times.
I think what she’s wearing is more of a violet than a purple. Purple has more red in it.
Appealing to someone isn’t the same thing as blending in to the crowd. If she wanted to appeal to people of any class she’d be better off looking like Elvis Presley, or at least Michael Jackson. He’d work, actually, with the greyish-white aura and the white gloves.
Thanks. I thought Stu had some sort of trick where he added the image and then you made it visible. Anyway, when Stu said “striped majesty”, I expected something far bolder.
See. That’s a little bit Michael Jackson. I’m not sure the waistcoat is so stylish, but otherwise it’s a huge improvement. And you can still tell it’s the queen, because of the pearls.
Would someone please tell me the HTML I need to insert in order to get a picture to display ? Dearieme ?
I was trying to paint a fur collar, but I couldn’t get it right, so I brushed over it with black.
I’ve never taken the pearls from an old woman. Never. Not if she didn’t carry them around in her handbag, anyway.
Royal purple. One of my favorite bits of this article:
The Roman mythographer Julius Pollux, writing in the second century BC, asserted (Onomasticon I, 45–49) that the purple dye was first discovered by Heracles, or rather, by his dog, whose mouth was stained purple from chewing on snails along the coast of the Levant.
The colours are very reggae or African flag. Of course, she does have a long history with Africa and the West Indies.
Did you read that book Through The Language Glass, by Guy Deutscher, that Language Hat wrote about, Ø? I wouldn’t trust any description of purple made by the Romans unless I’d had my own dog chew the snails. Otherwise, by purple they could have meant anything: green, blue, black. Blue is very difficult to find as a dyestuff, you had to use indigo if it was available.
I’ve sent you one without the waistcoat, you fashion tyrant. John Cleese never looked sweeter.
“Would someone please tell me the HTML I need to insert in order to get a picture to display ? Dearieme ?”
No idea, old son. I lost interest in all this computery stuff when I realised that we were no longer expected to write our own code but to use other people’s. Where’s the fun in that?
But you get embedded youtube displays into your comments, for instance. How do you do that ? You must be copying and pasting some piece of HTML code from somewhere, because Crown’s editor has no provision to upload images or link to youtube. If I had an example of such code, I might be able to figure out what code to use for photos.
“But you get embedded youtube displays into your comments, for instance. How do you do that ?” I open the youtube, copy its address – if “address” is the mot juste – and then paste it into the comment. C’est ca.
Look, I used to write programs most of the day, every day. People turned to me for computery advice. Now I don’t know what HTML stands for – I pronounce it “hatemail” which gives you an idea of my interest in this irksome intellectual fluff. Oh but I enjoyed the old days of doing your own mathematical modelling, devising your own algorithm and coding your own program. What a happy fluke to experience that short window of human opportunity before the whole game was reduced nearly to production line drudgery.
the old days of doing your own mathematical modelling, devising your own algorithm and coding your own program.
Ah, but one can still do that, when one feels like it. I suppose what you mean by irksome intellectual fluff is this “web application” business, or things like youtube. I am happy to use these things, even though actually programming them would bore the pants off me. I say, let the obsessive young things stomp grapes all day and night if they want – only the well-aged end product is of interest to me.
I don’t do IT outside of projects. Instead, I read novels, philosophy and sociology. Still, I carry out little IT projects from time to time for my own use. I’ve just started on a search engine restricted to the languagehat site, so that e.g. one can find all contributions by marie-lucie, or only those in which certain words occur, save them all to a file etc. It’s not a browser app, but a standalone Java program that that other people could install if they like.
Last year I intended to set up a website with audio clips pronouncing the names of writers. But I gradually realized it would have required too much organizational work on my part – monitoring that the “right” people are contributing reliable pronunciations, converting between audio formats, organizing the pages, administering a server – so I didn’t carry through.
Stew, when are you going to unveil your search engine?
I remember your audio clips project. It would work well for food names too.
I pronounce it hatemail too. My prediction is that all code and suchlike will eventually disappear, or at least not be required by people who have a good idea and want to create computer programmes. When I was 11, we learnt the binary system; they said we’d need it to be able to use computers. But we didn’t, so ha ha.
when are you going to unveil your search engine?
Prolly in a few weeks. Like I said, I’ve just started. I’m going to make it so that it will operate on arbitrary blogsites, with a little extra work for each additional blogsite. In other words, the tool will accept site-specific “extensions”. I’ll write the extension for languagehat, and anybody else (or me) can implement additional extensions as time goes on. You will be able to choose from a drop-down list which site you want to search – from among those for which an extension has been added.
My god! It sounds invaluable.
“the tool with be accept” -> “the tool will accept”
The design is easy. Certain standard functions must be implemented for each website:
1. Given a website (for instance “languagehat.com”, provide a list L1 of all URLs of the comment thread pages at that site.
2. Given the URL of a comment thread page, provide a list L2 of the comments (HTML structure). Abstractly, each comment defines a date, contributor name and comment text.
3. Apply filter criteria to the L1 lists (only comment threads within a given date range, for example), then to the L2 list (a certain contributor, certain criteria that the comment text has to meet, such as containing a given word or phrase).
“Implemented for each website” is probably an exaggeration. Once an extension is implemented for one wordpress site, it should work for all others too. But I have to design for this to be the case.
That looks a bit technical for the likes of me, G. You need Ø, but he’ll still be asleep.
In the meantime, here is a very hard and cryptic Christmas quiz. A few of the questions are parochially British, but most aren’t. I got one or two, I think. It would take MMcM about 5 mins.
The quiz has trick questions, so I’m not going to take it. In “which city honoured a 1945 hero with its Große Siegel?”, the answer would have to be “none” because there is no “Große Siegel”, only “Großes Siegel”. Sheesh.
I’m assuming there is only one Siegel. Otherwise the question would not be defective and there might be an answer other than “none” – but that just makes the whole thing even trickier. Is this the kind of thing we pay taxes to have children learn ?
No, I believe it’s a private school.
My daughter hates seals, because they eat penguins.
She’s lucky they don’t eat blackberries.
Haha. They aren’t all dead, then.
“Großes Siegel”
not “with its Großem Siegel”?
You need Ø, but he’ll still be asleep.
In this regard I’m as useless awake as asleep. I haven’t done any programming since about 1972, and my response to technical innovation is usually some blend of fear, wonder, irritation, and “when I was a lad we didn’t have/need …”
Oh, good. So, regarding impenetrability, now I can say “You could have a Ph.D. in math and still not understand this stuff…”
not “with its Großem Siegel”?
You want to decline German expressions as if they were subject to German syntax, even when there is only English syntax in sight ? Do you decline Latin in an analagous way, for instance when you are reporting on an unsuccessful attempt to contact a deum ex machina on the phone ?
To attempt to do that raises all kinds of thorny issues – such as “what’s the point ?” – so most people don’t even try. Otherwise one could argue that “with its Großen Siegel” is correct, because of “mit ihrem Großen Siegel” (die Stadt -> ihr).
No, I believe it’s a private school.
I thought public schools were the ones that are private in Britain ?!
“analogous”. On my new notebook with Windows 7, some programs have pale, washed-out text that is hard to make out at a glance. I’m now going to try to correct that in my editor.
Though all public schools are private, not all private schools are public. (In this case I’m not sure and besides, I’m trying to give all that nonsense up. They only want me to charge over the ridge and be mowed down by machine guns.)
“with its Großen Siegel” That’s actually what I meant to type.
I am having trouble reconciling there is no “Große Siegel”, only “Großes Siegel” with “What’s the point?”
But let us avoid discord and rancor. It’s the season of Peace and Good Will.
(And at last we are getting a decent snowstorm around here. Hat must be getting it, too.)
But let us avoid discord and rancor.
Oh c’mon, let’s not.
I am having trouble reconciling there is no “Große Siegel”, only “Großes Siegel” with “What’s the point?”
Whoever formulated the question intended to use a German expression. If the expression was Große Siegel for “great seals” – the nominative plural – then the formulator is home free. If, however, the expression was Großes Siegel for “great seal” – the nominative singular – then the formulator screwed up.
My original criticism did not advocate adapting German and English syntax to each other, which I later suggested was pointless. Instead, it advocated quoting German as she is spoke, if at all, rather than just slapping any old words together.
Friends ?
Oh, let’s be friends in any case. And any number, too.
I was thinking of “Große Siegel” as being singular (z. B. “das Große Siegel”). When you get right down to it, none of them (-es, -e, -em) strike me as the right way to do it. I don’t think there is a right way.
If there were multiple seals then one could pedantically insist on “Großen Siegeln” on the grounds that, as one’s high school German teacher used to say, “dativ Plural endet immer in n“.
“You could have a Ph.D. in math and still not understand this stuff…”
Oh, you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that some people with a Ph.D. in math don’t understand.
I don’t think there is a right way
Indeed.
I was thinking of “Große Siegel” as being singular (z. B. “das Große Siegel”)
Those two words are the only German words in that quiz question. If you hear a German say only the two words Große Siegel and nothing else, then he is saying the German equivalent of “great seals”.
I’m sorry, but “thinking of it as being singular” just doesn’t happen when you speak German and a German speaker utters the words Große Siegel in your presence. What to you may seem to be mere grammatical artefacts to pin on the donkey in a hit or miss fashion, are actually living parts that are going to get you kicked hard if you try to remove them from their owner.
But I didn’t hear a German speaker utter two words. I “heard” an English speaker utter a full sentence into which some English words had been replaced by two German words.
in which
It seems that Kielers (?) actually call it their Prunksiegel.
There was an attack in the Grauniad a while ago on Alain de Botton’s idea of a good dinner party — serve supermarket meals because food ‘doesn’t matter’ but ‘challenge’ guests with questions like ‘what really makes you sad’ etc straight out of How to Get Ahead — all good fun, except one commenter got very serious and accused the piece of non sequuntur, that being the plural of non sequitur (though not of ‘non sequitur’). Pseud-o-nym fooled no one: we knew then that Alain de Botton himself had joined the fray.
Which isn’t to say that either of you learned gentlemen is a bit of a botton, far from it, merely to draw attention to the fact that these healthy debates go on in all strata of society and the world would be duller without them. If nothing else they keep the mind trim, sinewy and equipped with a full head of hair.
haha, hoist by me own italics.
I love the effort where the Queen suddenly becomes Ena Sharples.
I got a few right.
H G Wells
beehive (I think we will all get this one)
and, probably, Christopher Columbus and The Cavern Club (iron rule, whenever these quizzes mention quarrymen, the answer must be related to The Beatles/The Baetles.)
the letter Z
oops, what did Wells update. The History of the World.
I can see that I’m making an ass of myself, but it’s hard to stop playing The Prunksiegel on the Donkey pin.
The 12th series of questions all refer to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, but I can only answer about half of them.
plumbous abdomen – Leadbelly
lignified – Woody Guthrie
hurried exit – possibly, Flea (flee) Red Hot Chili Peppers
in SW3 – could be Eric Clapton (map not conclusive)
etc
I “heard” an English speaker utter a full sentence into which some English words had been replaced by two German words.
That reminds me of Quentin Crisp’s remark to the effect that he doesn’t hold with foreign languages, and is convinced foreigners actually speak English to each other when our backs are turned.
Stu,
That sounds precisely like the experience my dad complains of when he goes to Wales.
Surely much of the world behaves this way. Socks turn into wire coathangers or vice versa the moment your guard slips, foreigners speak English among themselves, primitive peoples bring out the TV, and the wax museum comes to life.
One thing some foreigners do is get up earlier than me. Others get up considerably later, of course.
I hadn’t noticed that she looks quite a lot like Ena Sharples, but she does, even though Ena Sharples probably wouldn’t look like Ena Sharples nowadays. It’s hard to get one of those hairdos, or the equipment to do it yourself. Or so I’m told.
I got the one about Tolstoy dying in a railway stationmaster’s office in 1910, I remember that.
Nice, Nordic O’Umlaut. I prefer the popular board game ‘Human, anger yourself not,’ at which my grandmother, implausibly, often cheated has (a tense in no way at odds with that she the daisies up-pushes these 20 years).
At any rate I’m sure you’re right, they just put what it says on the box — ‘das grosse Siegel’ — but wisely left out the definite article because ‘its’ acts in lieu.
‘Grosses’? ‘Grossem’? Why? English grammar has no power over adjective endings: you’re going to let a pipsqueak two-word interloper play havoc with our freedoms? If they come here they’re subject to the law of the land like everyone else. No, ‘grosse’ is more than just a triumph of common sense, it’s a principled stand against the tyranny of the European superstate.
Nordic O’Umlaut also goes by the name of “Empty”, just so you know. He’s an authority on empty sets — or perhaps they’re Empty Sets, or the empty set, I’m not sure. I did pass O-level maths (just).
Principal’s rhetoric recalls the patriotism of Pinhut this year.
http://www.bookarmor.com/?p=1901
Crown, there can be only one empty set. Denn: let A be an empty set and B be an empty set. I will show that the assumption that A and B are different leads to a contradiction.
If A and B were different, then one set would have to contain an element that was not contained in the other. (This is the definition of “different” for sets). But neither set contains any element at all. Therefore A and B cannot be different, i.e. they are the same. QED
Apologies, I tried to copy and paste the Ø as usual but the mouse bucked and whinnied like one possessed.
Pinhut, I enjoyed that. Maybe it’s no massive coincidence that all roads here lead back to the Queen, though it must be the pre- or semi-conscious at work. For in a sense what is she but the Grosse Siegel upon the realm, the Sublime Bockwurst, yet also a kind of Woodie Guthrie (‘This land is my land, this land is my land, from most of Scotland to much of Ireland’) ridin’ her hobo train of appointments, while for many Quentin Crisp was simply the queen.
Who the hell is … Oh … and Oh. But what incarnations of the queen are supposed to look like them?
The sign of the Ø is meant (by me) as a wide berth.
I’m very fond of the empty set, but I try to leave it behind me when I’m off duty. In particular, it would be all right with me if outside set theory there were more than one empty set.
Some kind soul(s) once explained, at LanguageHat (I guess we could search it out now, thanks to Stu, if we have to), the difference(s) between (1) the mathematical symbol in question (denoting the leere Menge in (the) Mengenlehre), (2) the Nordic letter of similar appearance, (3) the similar-looking version of the digit zero that some people use to distinguish it more readily from the letter oh, and (4) god knows what else, but it seems that I wasn’t paying much attention.
Zero is probably my favorite number.
I like to think of myself as a little bit Nordic — encouraged my wife, who tends to attribute my fabled resistance to cold and fatigue to my Viking blood. If I have Viking blood, it’s mostly by way of Scotland. This morning I have shoveled a lot of snow, and I have that virtuous sore-muscles feeling.
I didn’t mean wide berth. I meant big tent. Catch-all. R0rschach test? Blank slate. There is the adolescent or romantic or pseudo-eastern idea of nothing as infinite possibility. The empty set is sometimes taken to be the birthplace, or the egg, of set theory. But I am happy to be identified a vowel. And I was pleased to learn that a Nordic word for “empty” looks just my real-world name.
In particular, it would be all right with me if outside set theory there were more than one empty set.
That could happen if there were different kinds of inclusion. For example, you could define domain-specific types of set and corresponding domain-specific notions of equality. Then there would be different types of empty set, even in an empty universe. I think.
If Woodie Guthrie had been British, by now he’d probably be Woodie Guthrie M.B.E., or even Sir Woodie Guthrie. Lord Guthrie of Glastonbury. Sir Robert Dylan. The late Lord Jackson of Neverland.
I noticed yesterday that the LRB doesn’t include titled people’s titles, so Sir Keith Thomas is just Keith Thomas and Lord Sedley is plain Stephen Sedley. I was wondering if it was magazine policy. They don’t have any articles by the queen, so I can’t see how far they’d take it: “Mrs Elizabeth Crisp”, say.
That could happen if there were different kinds of inclusion.
It seems self-evident that the Queen and the likes of us could never belong to the same set. Yet this does not seem to follow from the usual axioms.
They do refer to him as Prince William.
I don’t think it’s a good policy if it strips titles from those who inherited them, if it just debaronises, delords, deknights, etc, those who acquired them, then fair enough, after all, it is somewhat disgusting that the stroke of a pen can inject a Lord Mandelson into the public sphere.
Yes, AJ. I’m glad we never had to suffer Lord Ian Curtis of Macclesfield.
It seems self-evident that the Queen and the likes of us could never belong to the same set. Yet this does not seem to follow from the usual axioms.
“Self-evident” is rather vague. It doesn’t follow from the usual axioms of set theory. But it is a direct consequence of the usual axioms of (social) class theory that we don’t belong to the Queen’s set of people. I’m sure that’s what you’re getting at.
Why does it say that my last comment “is awaiting moderation” ?
You’ve really ruffled some feathers at WordPress, G. They didn’t like that comment at all. “Are you SURE you want to approve it?”.
“…we don’t belong to the Queen’s set of people”
I’m not even sure we even belong to the Queen’s conception *of* people.
Did the WordPress prefects describe exactly wherein I sinned ?
She certainly doesn’t belong to my conception of queens.
This is a test to see whether “s*ocial cl*ss” is the inacceptable phrase:
the usual axioms of (social) class theory
I’ve no idea where you went wrong, Stu. You’ll just have to be on your toes.
QueEna
I’m repeating the comment, to see if it happens again:
It seems self-evident that the Queen and the likes of us could never belong to the same set. Yet this does not seem to follow from the usual axioms.
“Self-evident” is rather vague. It doesn’t follow from the usual axioms of set theory. But it is a direct consequence of the usual axioms of (social) class theory that we don’t belong to the Queen’s set of people. I’m sure that’s what you’re getting at.
No “awaiting moderation” flag this time. I tentatively conclude that WordPress finds it unacceptable when the first line of a comment is italicized, and contains the words “self-evident” and “Queen”.
These are abstruse issues.
It seems self-evident that the Queen and the likes of us could never belong to the same set. Yet this does not seem to follow from the usual axioms.
“Self-evident” is rather vague. It doesn’t follow from the usual axioms of set theory. But it is a direct consequence of the usual axioms of (social) class theory that we don’t belong to the Queen’s set of people. I’m sure that’s what you’re getting at.
I’ve just provided a demonstration that that is not the case.
I go with a server error that handed the comment off to be moderated, ie: there is no relation between message content and its being moderated.
there is no relation between message content and its being moderated
That’s what I meant. What I actually wrote is called “sarcasm”.
Crown, I think your server is about to go nuclear, so maybe you should grab the goats and head for the hills. Or possibly the valleys, since you’re already in the hills.
Terminal Failure – Pinhut, please reboot your Sarcasm Detector
This one, Trond. Whereas this is just plain old Mr Hurt.
Sarcasm is the default.
The original German translation of “default”, in the ’80s, was Standardannahme bei Unterlassung. Could anything be more pompous ? To this day I install databases on my notebook with English documentation, because I can never guess what the German version might be of a common English technical expression.
Stu: Yes, of course that’s what I was getting at, playing on two uses of the word “set”. I had not thought of bringing the word “class” into it, but that’s good, too. As you know, in mathematics every set is a class, but not every class is a set. The ones that are not sets — for example, the class of all sets — are known as proper classes. This could get very confusing for the Queen and her set.
In German, of course, the cognate word Satz is unavailable for mathematical use because it means “theorem”.
Some Ersatz is surely available.
Trond, you gotta know where to look. Though this is just plain Mr Hurt.
Haha! Well said, Trondy.