More watery stuff: thinking of La Grande Jatte, I thought I’d show you this picture of Richmond Hill taken from the Thames (it’s worth clicking on it to enlarge the image). There’s a magnificent sweeping view of the river from the top, but I didn’t go up there. 
I took these photographs last week while I was visiting my mother at Ham, in Surrey. If you walk down past Ham House
you can take a tiny boat called Hammerton’s Ferry
across the river. Because it’s to the west of London the Thames is still quite narrow,
and is sandwiched at that point – (that was a lot of work to get a title) – between Ham on the southern or Surrey side of the river and Twickenham on the north or Middlesex side. So small and close to the city, Middlesex is a county that no longer exists. It was absorbed into London in the 1970s, but I like to use the name as much as I can because I was born in Middlesex.
When you alight from the boat in Twickenham, first there’s a sign on the gangway floor written in weld:
and then, facing across the river towards Ham House is an eighteenth-century Palladian villa, called Marble Hill House:
Marble Hill House was built for the girlfriend of George II, Henrietta Howard. Apparently west London stately-home lover Alexander Pope used to spend a lot of time here, Dean Swift too. Here’s a Wikipedia photo that shows the lawn sloping down to the towpath and the river:
There’s an unsubstantiated story that the two houses are linked by a tunnel, but what would be the point of it? I like the ferry. It cost £1, each way.
Then we turned around, took the ferry back and went home. But on the way we looked in at a plant nursery that is taking advantage of global warming:
This huge old olive tree below could be yours for £3,999. I don’t think that included freight. You could probably make your money back over time.
We passed a pair of gatehouses to Ham House that looked like Hansel & Gretel gingerbread cottages:
This is my mother’s cat, Domino. He grew up in Brooklyn. He’s a VERY nice cat.
These two robins live in the back garden:
A Bad Guide 
I enjoyed the tour. I guess that boating on the Thames and on the Seine were very popular around the same time, before ordinary people had paid vacations and could travel. Witness Jerome K. Jerome on the Thames and Maupassant on the Seine. Does the Thames have islands in it too?
The olive tree looks like it was planted many years before global warming started. Does it actually give olives?
Nice to see real robins! These birds are much smaller and redder than American robins. Their French name is rouge-gorge, literally “red-throat”, you can see why.
Here’s one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_Pie_Island
Yes, I thought of Eel Pie Island. Nowadays, Eel Pie Studios is owned by Pete Townshend, who lives in one of those houses you can see on top of Richmond Hill. There are lots of islands. Another famous one is Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed by King John in 1215. Further downstream there’s the Isle of Dogs, but that was artificially constructed by cutting through a meander.
I ought to have pointed out that the olive tree hadn’t been growing in the nursery, it had been transported there from (I’m guessing) the Mediterranean. But it had overwintered. I don’t know whether it will give olives, it might help if it’s kept in a greenhouse. I seem to remember olive trees don’t bear fruit until they’re about 100 years old, which is probably why they bothered to import such a huge old one. But there were several smaller ones too; you can see them on the left hand side of the photograph.
We have European-type robins here in Norway too.
m-l, I only just saw your LH comment to me about A Yeoman’s Library in the Lake District. I’m sorry I didn’t answer it before now.
Oh, no problem, you are a busy man! I was very glad to see your gallery of Lake District houses, and also that you (as an architect) liked that house, because I liked it.
About the robins, I had actually forgotten how red their throats are, as I am so used to American robins now.
It is not too surprising that the Thames and the Seine are similar, even though they flow in opposite directions. I remember seeing diagrams of the geological strata on both sides of the Channel (la Manche): they are exactly the same, the strata curve under the sea and reappear on the other shore to create identical landscapes. The “white cliffs of Dover” are mirrored by the white cliffs of the coast of Upper Normandy, the apple trees and cow meadows of Devonshire are the same as in Normandy, and at the western ends Cornwall and Brittany have the same rugged coasts.
I always wonder about the nameless person who first called the prominent American red-bellied thrush a “robin”. Apparently someone who hadn’t ever really looked at robins, but remembered that they had red breasts.* It seems like something that a modern person like me would do, someone too civilized to be in touch with the reality of the natural world. No doubt there is a lesson here for me about my misconceptions about the olde days.
* Or maybe someone who put too much stock in words. I am thinking of Grumbly’s recent comment at Language Hat about names and meaning. “Robin” means “red-breasted bird”?
Ø, I don’t recall Grumbly’s comment, but “robin” refers to a red-breasted bird, it does not have to mean literally this, or even “red”. It is more likely that it is the name Robin (originally a familiar form of Robert), like the familiar Jack, Tom, etc used for some animals (jackdaw, tomcat, billygoat, etc): I think there is a nursery rhyme about Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren. Note that the words for the other animals are short (daw, cat, goat) and so are the names, and that may be why both parts were retained (eg Tom+cat), while redbreast which may have been the original name has been dropped from the usual designation of the bird, robin by itself being unambiguously applied to this one bird.
To expand on my comment, I was imagining that either
A. Some long-ago Englishperson, having learned as a child that robins are red-breasted, and so unreflective as to fail to appreciate the distinction between, for example, “the robin is a red-breasted bird” and “red-breasted birds are called robins”, arrived on the shore of America, saw a red-breasted thrush, and said “That’s a robin. You can tell by the red breast.”
or
B. Some long-ago Englishperson, having learned as a child that robins are red-breasted, but never having looked carefully at a robin or any other bird, arrived on the shore of America, saw a red-breasted thrush, and said “That’s a robin. You can tell by the red breast.”
My fantasy A reveals one prejudice on my part about “simple-minded common folk”.
An obstacle to my believing in fantasy B is my idea that common people in those days knew their local wildlife better than I know mine, but this belief is just another unwarranted preconception about “common folk”.
marie-lucie: “robin” refers to a red-breasted bird, it does not have to mean literally this, or even “red”.´
The most profound analysis of meaning, reference and intentionality I have encountered was epitomized almost 150 years ago. As far as I am concerned, nothing of any use has ever been added to it. I’m quite serious about this.
The analysis consists of two parts. This is Part 1:
`You are sad,’ the Knight said in an anxious tone: `let me sing you a song to comfort you.’
`Is it very long?’ Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
`It’s long,’ said the Knight, `but it’s very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it — either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else –‘
`Or else what?’ said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
`Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called “Haddocks’ Eyes”.’
`Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, trying to feel interested.
`No, you don’t understand,’ the Knight said, looking a little vexed. `That’s what the name is called. The name really is “The Aged Aged Man”.’
`Then I ought to have said “That’s what the song is called”?’ Alice corrected herself.
`No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called “Ways and Means”: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!’
`Well, what is the song, then?’ said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
`I was coming to that,’ the Knight said. `The song really is “A-sitting On a Gate”: and the tune’s my own invention.’
Here is Part 2:
`And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
`I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘
`But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.‘
`The question is,’ said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
`The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master — that’s all.’
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. `They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’
`Would you tell me please,’ said Alice, `what that means?’
`Now you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. `I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.’
`That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
`When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, `I always pay it extra.’
`Oh!’ said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
`Ah, you should see ’em come round me of a Saturday night,’ Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side, `for to get their wages, you know.’
`for to get their wages, you know.’
The wages of sense is minimum, but enough to get by on.
marie-lucie: I don’t recall Grumbly’s comment,
It was only this:
It’s hard sometimes to tell what “means” means. I remember a blog here last year in which the Russian word for a particular kind of tree was being discussed. Someone said that the word refers to “a particular kind of tree that occurs only in Siberia”, or words to that effect.
Now I find it hard to believe that a Russian using that word means to refer to anything but the kind of tree in question. He surely is not referring to “a particular kind of tree that occurs only in Siberia”.
Crown: A headline like this is worth the effort.
m-l: Robin is rødstrupe “redthroat” in Norwegian too. I suppose the name may have been calqued all over Europe.
Robin Redbreast: In Norwegian folktales the fox is named Mikk(j)el Rev “Michael Fox”. A mikk(j)el can be a fox. My grandfather had a theory that the name was conceived as a pun or a folk-etymology in a dialect with the homonyms rev /ræv/ “fox” and rauv /ræv/ “arse; tail”. Mikk(j)el would have been near identical to any late survival of mikil “big, great” — and may owe its popularity to this identification. (I used to think he believed in this as the etymology of the word rev, but he was too well read for that. Now I think it’s me who didn’t appreciate the distinction at the time.)
Stu: I also think that’s the best thing ever written on the meaning of words. Which, of course, is why it’s used in the head of every other textbook chapter on semantics.
Thank you, Trond. I was very interested in Ø’s and Stu’s observations and especially in the Alice piece (I haven’t got any semantics textbooks). For those of you who don’t look at facebook, I was also interested today by m-l’s facebook recommendation of an article in the New York Times about the mathematician Emmy Noether.
Death & Burial Of Poor Cock Robin.
Trond: Which, of course, is why it’s used in the head of every other textbook chapter on semantics.
Yes, and other parts of A in W and also Finnegans Wake are, or used to be, cited in every other textbook of particle physics.
The trouble is, what Humpty Dumpty and the Knight say is the last word on the subject in those terms. It puts semanticists, semioticists and and the rest of them on notice that they are out of a job. And yet they all believe that it gives them something to work on. They have completely missed the point, and are actually scraping by on unemployment benefits. Very peculiar, that.
My reading of H-D and K is stroppy and unforgiving: you simply can’t get anywhere with the notions of “meaning” and “reference”. “Semantics”, an abstraction of those notions, is of course equally utopic.
The chapter on sense in Luhmannn’s Soziale Systeme takes what H-D and K say to its natural conclusion (without cutesy mention of them or A in W). I just checked: I can’t find the word Bedeutung [meaning] anywhere in it. Luhmann dismisses the “sender/information/receiver” scheme, and talks instead of Information, Mitteilung und Verstehen [information, communication and understanding]. Note that there are no “agents” involved such as sender and receiver.
“Reference” occurs not as a term of art linking cognition and reality, but only as a word glued to other words: selbstreferentiell [self-referent] and Verweisungszusammenhang [cross-referential context], for example.
Luhmann’s works are high-table versions of Alice in Wonderland. When you can get into the spirit of the thing, they are just as entertaining, thought-provoking and whacked-out as A in W.
I also enjoy the tour very much, so as the discussion about robins and meaning.
In America (I mean America the continent, not the USA!) we have lots of unique plants and animals that were called or baptised by the Europeans with familiar names for them. It’s either that or fancy names took from the “fantasy” books of their time (chivalry romances)… but I think that’s more the case for places, like “California” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_name_California) or even as some says of “Patagonia” (from the “Amadis de Gaula”).
I love Domino, your mother’s cat! He looks a bit like the stray cat I use for my blogger account. I’m sure he loves to be a Brooklyn cat living in such a British environment
Trond: Mikk(j)el the fox :
This reminds me that in French the word for is le renard, but that was not the original word for the animal: in older French and in some dialects it was le goupil, from Latin vulpillus meaning ‘little fox’. But there is a “cycle” of medieval satirical stories or fables, most probably of Germanic origin, called le Roman de Renard, where the characters are all animals and have names: for instance the wolf is Ysengrin, and the fox, cleverest of all, is Renard (a name corresponding to German Reginhard, English Reginald, etc). As the stories around Renard were very popular, this name became the usual word for ‘fox’.
Alice in Wonderland (together with the Looking-glass sequel) is an endless source of linguistic examples, especially but not exclusively in semantics. The Russian-French linguist Marina Yaguello wrote an entire book on linguistics, an introduction for a general audience, called Alice au pays du langage ‘Alice in Language Land’, using examples from Alice au pays des merveilles, the French title of Lewis Carroll’s book.
Besides the HD and Knight episodes, another mine of examples is Jabberwocky, since only the lexical items (meaningful words) are invented but the morphology and syntax (and also poetic form) are resolutely Standard English.
Julia, that’s very interesting about California. Could the name really have come from caliph?
All these rufous creatures. A fox is en rev in Norwegian. I don’t know its etymology, but I’m sure Trond does.
Ekshuelly, Martin Gardner points out “…in Roger W. Holmes’ article[,] ‘The philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland,’ Antioch Review, Summer 1959[,] Professor Holmes (he [was] chairman of the philosophy department at Mount Holyoke College) thinks that Carroll was pulling our leg when he has the White Knight say that the song is‘A-sitting on a Gate’. Clearly this cannot be the song itself, but only another name. ‘To be consistent,’ Holmes concludes, ‘the White Knight, when he had said that the song is…, could only have burst into the song itself. Whether consistent or not, the White Knight is Lewis Carrol’s cherished gift to logicians.”
–The Annotated Alice, Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner.
I have that book! it’s a sort of deconstruction of the Carroll books. For instance, it turns out that most of the silly poems are parodies of actual, pious or edifying Victorians that Alice and her sisters would have known. There are also (in the text or the illustrations, done by a political caricaturist!) many references to contemporary figures. Worth reading, or in my case, re-reading.
… pious or edifying Victorian poems or songs …
Reynoir?
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Rare-black-fox-captured-on-camera-27032012.htm
Bassingbourn is very close to where my great-grandparents lived. That black fox may be my great-grandma.
I’ll have to look at The Annotated Alice.
m-l: Renard and Ysengrin
Yes, I was supposed to know that… That cycle is probably the origin of (or another reflex of the same tradition as) our folktales of Mikkel Rev and Bamse Brakar or ulven, bjørnen og reven “the wolf, the bear and the fox”. Ysengrin is transparently from Germanic “iron-grin”. (Bamse, by the way, literally “big-one; big eater”, is the regular word for “bear” in many dialects — or was before it came to mean teddybear. In other dialects it’s rugg, literally “big animal or man”. Brakar is there for the alliteration. It means “good guy”.)
AJP: A fox is en rev in Norwegian. I don’t know its etymology, but I’m sure Trond does.
Yes, I do. Well, nobody does. It’s exclusively North Germanic, so a common Germanic form behind Old Norse refr can’t be reconstructed. Bjorvand & Lindeman list two possible origins:
– Since Proto-North-Germanic *rebaR.would be the regular outcome of a loan of Proto-Finno-Ugric *repas, it’s a rare candidate for a “countercurrent” loan.
– If native it may be from the same root as rav “amber”, referring to its colour. Anyway it’s a fairly recent word, replacing the word known from English ‘fox’ etc. — which probably is yet another taboo replacement.
I’ve also seen an assertion that it’s an alteration of the same IE word as Latin lupus, but that sounds like a longshot to me.
Goat news:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/28/greek-statue-found-goat-pen
In Scotland “tod” is the fox. You can call him “John Tod” if you’re feeling formal.
We don’t see foxes here, but we occasionally see coyotes. Some people see them as a danger, but in the next town over there is a coyote-loving animal control officer who is taking good care of them.
That article makes it sound as if Emmy Noether’s name and accomplishments are not very well known among physicists, but that is certainly not true among mathematicians.
the wolf, the bear and the fox
Yes, in the French tales (written in the 12th and 13th centuries but most likely based on much older Germanic traditions) these are the three main characters. I had forgotten the name of the bear, so I looked up the Wikipedia.fr article on the story cycle: it is usually Brun, (probably a reflex of the Germanic name, like English bruin, both words being related to the word brown). In other French traditions the bear is named Martin, but not in these tales.
For Ysengrin (also Isengrin), the name of the wolf, I had guessed correctly that the first element was as German Eisen ‘iron’, but had no idea about the second element. According to the same article the Latin form of Ysengrin is Isengrimus, with m not n, something which points to a root grim the Germanic source. The article says that the name means either “strong, ferocious, like iron” or “iron helmet’.
The article shows a medieval picture of Renard dressed in high boots and a big fancy hat, just like the traditional picture of Le Chat Botté (known in English as Puss in Boots). It is likely that in this story (written in the 17th century) the cat has been given the traditional personality and role of the fox, that of a trickster. The cat here is a servant, a social role that would never do for the fox.
Emmy Noether: I did not know anything about her, and even if she is known among mathematicians, it is a shame that the rest of the world does not know her either.
(back to names for animals)
sorry about the typo: correction for the name of the bear:
it is usually Brun (probably a reflex of the Germanic name, like Engish bruin, both words being related to the word brown)
There’s a shortish but very interesting Wikipedia article about Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr Tod, which has this:
Very interesting about the coyotes. I’d always thought they lived in the wild West, not in Massachusetts. Poor animal control officer waging a one-man reeducation-of-the-public program. I guess he really likes them, he also donated the $70 to Tufts.
Thank you for the bamse and rev, Trond. I shall, in future, revert to foxen (vixen?), if that was the original word. If Ysengrin is transparently from Germanic “iron-grin”, is Lowengrin transparently from “lion-grin”? Oh. I guess that’s really spelt Lohengrin.
I shall, in future, revert to foxen (vixen?), if that was the original word.
That’s the English word. If I remember correctly from B&L ‘fox’ is a masculine -si-derivation from *fú:h- f. “vixen, fox”, attested in ON as fó/fú f. “fox”. Incidentally, this seems to mean that if the word had survived, it would have been homonymous with fu f. “arse, tail”. I wonder if my grandfather might have known? A Norwegian cognate of ‘fox’ would have been something like *fusse. ‘Vixen’ is s feminine -en-derivation with umlaut (fux ~ fyxen). I’ve no idea how it got the initial v-.
If Ysengrin is transparently from Germanic “iron-grin”, is Lowengrin transparently from “lion-grin”?
Since I was wrong on ‘grin’, I’ll refrain from further transparing.
I ought to have said ‘strong and ferocious, like a lion’. That makes somewhat more sense, but I suppose it’s still wrong.
The initial v in vixen:
According to what I have read about the history of English, vixen is a borrowing from a dialect (I forgot the name of it but it is the southeasternmost in England – perhaps Kentish?). In that dialect, English initial f became v, so the locals also say vox not fox. Perhaps Londoners knew the word fox but were not close enough to nature to know or care about the difference between male and female foxes, and those who went fox-hunting in that district learned the local word vixen there. In general use, the word is more likely to refer to a certain type of woman than to a female fox.
I think that in the film Tom Jones, the heroine’s father, a dialect-speaking country squire, says the vox.
Norway and foxes – phooey! What about Norway and wolves?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2121810/Call-wild-Amazing-reaction-wolves-come-running-woman-befriended-woods-returns-visit.html
And, by the way, I add my voice to the compliments on the photos – a delight.
Oh, I forgot to suscribe to this thread. I have nothing to say now, but I just leave a comment so I can receive the next things you have to say. It’s always a delight, chez Crown.
black fox
I saw a black fox once in Northern British Columbia where I used to live. It was running along the edge of a large lake, and I was on a road on the other side of the lake. All-black and all-white animals are very easy to see against the natural mixed-colour background of temperate climates (not white against snow, for instance), and a black fox with its white tail tip is hard to miss. These foxes must be occasional avatars of the regular reddish-orangeish foxes, which I have seen many times, not a different species.
What a thrill to see a black fox – or any fox, really.
That’s a great wolf story in the Mail. I listened to the video using headphones to avoid disturbing my wife who was on the phone, but Topsy could still hear the the wolves and started barking. When I put the sound on properly Tops was very interested, though not in the pictures; I suppose for Topsy the sound is completely authentic whereas the video is flat and a step removed from the event.
Julia, I don’t know what it means to subscribe to a thread. Do you receive it as an email every time someone writes something? That must save some time.
Thank you all for your praise of the pictures, it means a lot! I’m not very expert with cameras, I can never be bothered reading all the directions, but I can use Photoshop to squeeze the last drop of digital image out of flat shadows and highlights.
I don’t know what it means to subscribe to a thread.
I assume you have some kind of blogger administration software that you use primarily. But try accessing your site the way everybody else does. At the bottom of the comments for each blog post, there is a “Leave a reply” box for new comments. Beneath that, at the very bottom of the page, you will see two checkboxes with the labels “Notify me of follow-up comments via email” and “Notify me of new posts via email”.
When someone posts a comment for a blog post with the “notify me of follow-up comments” box checked, they effectively subscribe to subsequent comments for that blog post. When someone posts with the other box checked, they are notified by email when you create new, subsequent blog posts. That’s why Julia speaks of “subscribing to a thread”.
I wish Steve @H@ had such a subscription service. I always have to check and recheck his comment threads to see whether anyone has posted a new comment.
That’s it, Crown. ¡Gracias, Stu! I was thinking wich words I was going to use for explain what you just did.
Don’t you know, AJP, that you can do this in almost every blog (not Hat’s and it’s a real pitty)
H@
I like that.
I receive all your comments by email, but I only read them here on the site.
I read the RSS feeds available under “Meta” on the sidebar. I think I had to choose an RSS-reader the first time I subscribed to a blog, but since then they’re just added to the list of RSS feeds in Thunderbird (below my mail accounts and above the newsgroups).
On most blogs I only read the entries that way, but here I even subscribe to the comments. It’s not totally reliable, though — now and again a comment goes unnoticed. So I open and look for comments anyway, but I let the RSS feed remind me to do so.
On photography: here’s a photo of one of the local places I liked visiting when I was a child. Is it possible to guess whether it was taken from a helicopter, or a blimp, or a hot air balloon, or ….? Are there any clues?
http://imgur.com/yoyQd
In the visual field under which is the shady area on the middle right, I think I can see the tip of a helicopter rail. But I may be imagining it.
On the other hand, if it is were a helicopter rail, then it should appear larger, given that the photographer must be in the bay just above it.
It could be ballast hanging from a hot-air ballon.In such a ballon, the photographer could lean out farther to take what seems to be nearly a vertical shot – farther, that is, than would be possible from the cabin of a blimp.
So I change my guess to a hot-air balloon. By the way, what do you think the legend “516.73 MB bandwidth” means below the picture ? Could it be a satellite photo ??
I don’t “subscribe” to any blog, thanks Grumbly for explaining what this means. I already receive so much email, much of it unwanted even if not spam, that I would not want to receive notice of every comment or even new post on each blog I read.
On LH I check in the right column since updated posts are listed with the latest on top, and each of them shows the number of comments. When I see a number different from what I remember I go look at the new comments. Here new comments show the post title in blue next to the commenter’s name, but the last comment read is in black, so I check back to the last black comment I read and open the next blue one.
I don’t know, Stu.
marie-lucie: there is a way to stay abreast of blogs you’re interested in by “subscribing” to them, and yet not increase the volume of email entering your mailbox. Namely by having two mailboxes (or more).
<Mounts soapbox:> Life in western societies has changed in the following way. Used to be, you had to chase down information. Now, information hounds you night and day. Before, you had to scratch at a library dam to obtain a trickle of information. Now there is no library and no dam – just a flood of flotsam from the internet.
So: to reclaim a spot of dry land, just leave the floodgates open, but set up drain-offs just downstream from where the information is coming. Let it come, and let it be diverted.
<Dismounts soapbox:> Many email providers offer mail accounts for free. In addition to your current mail account with one provider, you could set up a second account with the same provider (or a different one), under a different, made-up name. You could “subscribe” to certain comment threads at A Bad Guide, say, simply by signing your first comment to the thread with your new second mail account, and checking the “notify me of follow-up comments by email” checkbox.
This is a good solution when you simply want notification emails, but not anything you want to keep. You would only download your emails for this email account only when you wanted. The same maneuver works for “RSS feeds” as well.
Sorry, dearie, I can’t see anything that would tell me. If I’d have taken it, I’d have tried to keep the verticals vertical, but only because I find axonometric drawings are more legible like that. I’d guess… a helicopter. I can’t see Stu’s rail, though. It’s a lovely looking place; perfect for children to play.
Stu, I didn’t know we had all these options. Most days I only look at Language Hat. Can anyone besides me see a tiny smiley face at the very bottom left of the screen on this website?
I see the smiley ! But the head outline is missing, so it may be the Cheshire Cat.
What are you up to, closely inspecting the bottom left-hand corner of your own website ? Is it time for spring cleaning ?
A good point. I’m going shopping.
How cute! It seems to be the wordpress stats/counter gif, if I read the code properly. A nice touch to use a tiny smiley face insteads of an invisible gif for the purpose.
Some things are cuter when you don’t look too closely.
I feel that, since conversation here has ground to a halt, it might be a good time for a total change of topic: Tales of a Proud Parent.
I just want to mention that our musical 18-year-old Asa, who over the last few years has become very much involved in dramatic productions at his school — at first as a musician, and then sometimes when no musical work was required as a tech guy, arranging the lights and the sound effects and so on, really enjoying being the thrill of being a part of the team (there’s no business like show business, and all that), to the point where this year he really has had to pay some attention to passing on whatever he has learned about sound and lights to others before he graduates — but was never never the least bit tempted to be an actor: it’s one thing to play the guitar in front of people, or even to sing, but acting was just not his cup of tea … Well, this year the annual student-directed play is a musical, Sondheim’s Company, and the student directing it was determined that for the male lead part she was going to get someone who could sing — never mind if he can act — she can teach him to act if she has to — and, yes, she talked Asa into doing it. So over the last few weeks he and a handful of others have been intensely involved in preparing this show, and we can’t wait to see it. It happens in two weeks.
(Of course, with his overdeveloped sense of responsibility or whatever it is, he has also become a little more involved than he really wants to be in the sound and light work.)
I really don’t understand why WordPress sometimes insists that I am tgoodwillie rather than Ø.
I can remove the name if you want me too. I have the power.
Please make sure some video of this Sondheim production comes our way; so far we’ve only seen Asa singing.
I have sort of a proud-parent true story that I’m not making up. Rather than going riding, Alma spent the afternoon reading to me from a book about Descartes that she’d bought. I told her she was “putting Descartes before the horse”. Goal, goal!
huh?
it tells me that my email address belongs to a wordpress account that i am not currently logged into, and the only way past this obstacle seems to be to follow the offered link and login, and then i have the identity i did not want.
then after i post a comment under the unwanted identity, the next time i post a comment there is a little thing below the box where i type my next comment, which includes the options logout/change; so i can choose “change” and turn into Empty again.
and then the next time i try to post a comment i find that i am tgoodwillie again, with no visible option to change
no, wrong: this time i was Empty. oh, well, who knows.
Anyway, do please change my name, but only if those powers give you pleasure.
What a wonderful opportunity to use that Descartes/horse line!
Empty (I don’t know why I can’t copy the character – I usually can, but this time my attempt to copy it opens your blog),
Very glad to hear about your talented son. I too hope we can see the production.
Julia would particularly appreciate – her brother is an opera singer.
Wonderful news, Ø!
I hope we can see a video of him performing.
Which musical will they do? Or is it a new one written by them?
I do particularly appreciate, as M-L said, but not because I have my brother’s skills or opera knowledge, but because I love Asa’s voice
It’s this one.
Ahhh, thank you! I didn’t understand this was the name of the play.
Descartes, eh? Word to the wise: if she thinks she might go off to the uni to read philosophy, she might try wrestling with the book called “What is the name of this book?”. When our youngster was so advised, the first lessons she got was from the reaction of bookshop staff when she said she wanted a book and they asked the title and she replied.
Do young people today even know what “putting the cart before the horse” means ? Wouldn’t you have to phrase it as “putting the Book before the Face”, or something like that ? But then what do you do when they answer: “Yes, that used to be called ‘reading'”,
I like that book, dearie. I may get it for myself. At the moment she’s thinking of doing architecture, but she’s still got one more year of school and things could easily change.
Stu, you’re right that many, many hours are spent on facebook, but who am I to say it’s wasted time? Sometimes, at least sometimes, I know they’re discussing schoolwork. They have a special facebook site for it.
There’s also “Who am I ? – And If So, How Many ?” by the youngish German publicist-with-philosophy-PhD Richard David Precht. The book has been all the rage for several years now, so I haven’t read it. Televisually he is a bit of a crumpet, likely to appeal to the female cognitive apparatus at least.
I hope that the book and the WiPe entry were translated into English by different people.
Yes, that’s a disturbing translation. To look at he reminds me of Brian Cox, Britain’s tv science pinup.
To look at he reminds me of
That’s a bit difficult to parse, without a comma after “at”: “to look at, he reminds me of …”. I initially thought you must have meant “To look at him reminds me of …”.
That’s good to know. I originally had a comma and I removed it. I usually have way too many and in the wrong places.
It was from German that I learned to use commas when in doubt. There are more rules for them there than in English, possibly because there is more of a risk that you and other people will get lost in your long sentences.
I nowadays use commas liberally even in English, but for a different reason: in order to mark the timings in what would otherwise be speech delivery. This requires a certain rhetorical stateliness that I’m sure you could muster too, since it sets in with age. You don’t seriously want to seem still as spontaneous and incoherent as we all were in olden times, now do you ?
No, but that’s not the only alternative. I don’t read Language Log and I can’t stand the guy, but I once noticed how fluently Mark Liberman writes using very few commas. Of course there are others who write beautifully using lots of commas. I recently noticed Winston Churchill’s My Early Life has the maximum required (but no more).
As for learning commas from other languages, although their commas are more strictly regulated than ours the Norwegians and Germans put them in what seem to me the most extraordinary places, like always before dass: “Ich möchte, dass die Welt für Frauen anders wird” is a random example. The comma adds nothing to my parsing. I can think of only one way to construe the sentence, but maybe that’s because I don’t know enough Tysk.
The commas in German are like the bread crumbs that Hänsel strewed behind him as he and Gretel strolled towards their fate. They allow you to return only a short distance and start again when you get lost. Of course you still have to watch your back as you go, which Hänsel didn’t.
The fairy tale is essentially about the dangers of long, unpunctuated sentences in bird sanctuaries.
I agree, that’s a great help.
How do the French use commas? I never got that far (with French).
As to the comma before daß … well, I suppose it doesn’t have a justification all by its little, but it’s consistent with the general use of commas to set off a welter of subordinate phrases. Consider this: Ich möchte, daß die Welt, in der wir trotz besseren, in den öffentlichen Diskussionen der letzten 30-40 Jahre vielfach erörteten, auch gegen institutionalisierte Vorurteile erkämpften Wissens noch leben, für Frauen, die Wert darauf legen, anders wird..
Commas in French have never forced themselves on my attention, so I must assume they are a harmless lot. Had there been anything to complain about, I would have noticed it.
Oh yes! That’s really good, Stu. Thanks.
I can’t remember being told anything about commas in French: maybe we were supposed just to copy Maupassant? Or perhaps the use is so similar to that in English that no instruction was thought to be required. (Our French teacher had a goatee beard, wore a beret and had – we all knew – Been In The Resistance. You don’t argue with a chap who had presumably been instructed in how to cut your throat.)
That’s funny, we had a Latin master who’d been in the SAS. He used to flick a knife into people’s desks to attract their attention. I wonder if it’s a typical route for the linguistically gifted.
dearie, I’ve been meaning to ask you: is that kind of triangular castlement (sic ?) found elsewhere in Scotland as well ? I had never seen such a thing before Caerlaverock. On Arte TV recently, however, I saw one somewhere in France.
Are you talking about the triangular plan when you say you’d never seen such a thing?
I don’t know another Scottish castle like it. We used to live on a village green in East Lothian, looking across it to the castle: it was rectangular.
It was one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.
I hate Oliver Cromwell. Big vandal. John Mortimer said you could still divide the British into cavaliers and roundheads, calling himself a left-wing cavalier. Well, I’d banish the royal family, all except the corgis, but I’m no roundhead.
He didn’t knock this castle about out of vandalism, but because his foes were inside and he was outside, with artillery.
French commas: in traditional French prose there were lots of commas, but nowadays when French writing is so heavily influenced by English (especially among journalists, because there is so much bad translation done by people who think they know English and translate almost word for word), commas have become much more rare.
The British press abhors commas; they must occasionally crop up, I suppose, but I certainly never see semicolons. The rest of the country – including schools and colleges; writers of literature, technical papers and poems; fishmongers, restauranteurs and the police – continues to deploy them. Doctors don’t use them much but they’re a law to themselves (see how they dress). Journalists must have to do a lot of rewriting to avoid commas so completely.
He didn’t knock this castle about out of vandalism
He did his fair share, but he wasn’t half as destructive as Henry VIII, the worst vandal in England and a horrible man. England’s monarchs have been such lowlife for the last thousand years, poking people’s eyes out and destroying buildings and works of art, it’s beyond me why anyone still wants them hanging around (the royal family, that is). I’d like to have them all imprisoned on a small damp island.
They are already on a small damp island.
I mean one where you can see from one side to the other, even smaller than in Lord of the Flies, possibly off the Welsh coast. They would be subsistance farmers, living in small stone huts without electricity, vehicles or any animals, chopping firewood and growing potatoes and oats. Together they would have access to one battery-powered computer, and they’d write history essays by candlelight during the long, cold winter evenings.
They could still catch Welsh rabbits for Sunday dinner, though, and later sell the furs to tourists. I like this stern but humane approach. Have you considered doing consultancy work for the jüngstes Gericht ?
Haha, I was wondering if that was some kind of German juvenile court.
That’s Jugendgericht. The authorities have gone soft on teenagers, so it tends nowadays to be more like a warmes Gericht than a jüngstes Gericht.
A hot meal or the Last Judgement. Yes, this must be the source of many jokes in German.
I suppose so. I don’t watch or listen to comedy programs. I find them to be rather like organized crime – they make you guffaws that you can’t refuse, to judge from the audience response.
Recently I saw some prisoners watching a comedy show on a TV with stony, indifferent expressions. Crime does not pay.
Or if you put them on the right Mediterranean island they could collect the gastropods that very special purple dye and make their rabbit pelts into royal robes. If there were rabbits. Oh, but it wouldn’t be damp. But on the other hand the dye-extracting process is supposed to be terribly smelly.
Together they would have access to one battery-powered computer,
An update of the story of the Graeae with their one eye and one tooth.
An update of the story of the Graeae
Yes, brilliant!
I think it’s important that they are put somewhere cold and damp. I’ve noticed that many of them (Prince Charles, for example) have lizardlike skin from excessive sun exposure.
They’ll all have to be sterilised, or they will just be kidnapped and reinstated. Even so they might be cloned, I suppose, but is a cloned monarch authentic-seeming to the general public? Probably. They’ve put up with the current lot.
I don’t watch or listen to comedy programs.
Neither do I, though I sometimes listen to The News Quiz on BBC radio, because I like Sandi Toksvig.
I could just fancy a two-egg omelette.
http://www.oakviewpoultry.co.uk/cream-legbarchickens,-grey-rheas,white-rheas
” they make you guffaws that you can’t refuse” – the mark of good comedy shows is the absence of any laugh track. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide was like this on radio, and two of my favourite US sitcoms similarly have no laugh track. If the writers are confident enough of their work to feel no need to say “you’re supposed to laugh here”, they are generally right, in my experience.
Julia, that’s very interesting about California. Could the name really have come from caliph?
Erwin G. Gudde (pronounced “goody”), the dean of California topographic etymology, writes:
“The name was probably coined and has no definite meaning. It is, of course, possible that the author may have thought of Spanish califa ‘caliph, Muslim ruler’ (from Arabic khalif, lit. ‘successor [of Muhammad]’) when he formed the word. In spite of Christians’ hatred for Muslims, the Islamic Orient had exercised, since the days of the Crusades, a strong influence on Western European culture. Indeed, a similar name for the Arab domain, Califerne, is found in the French epic, the Chanson de Roland. (For a detailed discussion of the various theories about the origin and etymology of the name, see Ruth Putnam, “California: The name,” UCPH 4:356-62; Chapman, chap. 6; Stewart, pp. 346-54.)
I second our host’s feelings about both Cromwell and the royals.
On the subject of goats, have we already discussed Mannish Water Ram Goat Flavor Soup Mix? With artificial goat flavor!
Oh, and about subscribing to blogs (he said chattily), I highly recommend Google Reader; it’s easy enough that even a technoidiot like myself can use it, and it infinitely lightens the task of keeping up with infrequently updated blogs — you just go to Google Reader and it will show you which of the blogs you’ve told it to follow have new content. I’m afraid it doesn’t help with knowing when there are new comments on old posts; for that I use marie-lucie’s method of looking at the totals in the right margin. My stepson/site administrator and I keep talking about a major upgrad of the site (which is currently run on MT Version 2.63, from 2003!), but he’s too busy at the job that actually pays him to take time out for that; if it ever happens, though, I imagine you’ll be able to get e-mail updates on posts like the cool kids have.
it infinitely lightens the task of keeping up with infrequently updated blogs — you just go to Google Reader and it will show you which of the blogs you’ve told it to follow have new content. I’m afraid it doesn’t help with knowing when there are new comments on old posts
I don’t understand. I would have thought that an “old post” to which one or two comments are added much later is an example of an “infrequently updated” post. You did write “infrequently updated blog“, but I don’t understand that either.
Are you using “blog” to mean “a blog post”, or to mean “a blogsite”, i.e. all the blog posts posted on a website ? There is an ambiguity in the general use of the word “blog” that drives me crazy, because I am never sure what is meant.
What is the relevance of the frequency of blog posts and/or comments on them ? Perhaps you are saying; “when comments are frequent, I go to the comment thread regularly anyway, so I don’t need Google Reader”. On the other hand, if Google Reader is so convenient, why not use it all the time for everything, instead of fretting over the question of which blog sites (or blog posts ?) to use it for ?
¡Hola, Hat! About “California” all i know is that in a Spanish chivalry romance published in 1510, there’s an Island called California. The romance is Las sergas de Esplandian and was the second part of the very popular Amadís de Gaula.
The Spanish reach that part of America years later, so rumor has it they named it after that fantastic island…
I just found this paper about that etymology, but I’m not sure how trustworthy it is.
Click to access palabracalifornia.pdf
A wiki article in Spanish about Las sergas de Esplandianhttp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_sergas_de_Esplandi%C3%A1n
And a very short one in English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_sergas_de_Esplandi%C3%A1n
¡Hola, Hat! ¿Qué tal?
About “California” all i know is that in a Spanish chivalry romance published in 1510, there’s an Island called California. The romance is Las sergas de Esplandian and was the second part of the very popular Amadís de Gaula.
The Spanish reach that part of America years later, so rumor has it they named it after that fantastic island…
I just found this paper about that etymology, but I’m not sure how trustworthy it is.
Click to access palabracalifornia.pdf
A wiki article in Spanish about Las sergas de Esplandianhttp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_sergas_de_Esplandi%C3%A1n
And a very short one in English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_sergas_de_Esplandi%C3%A1n
Grumbly: I don’t understand why you don’t understand.
You did write “infrequently updated blog“, but I don’t understand that either. Are you using “blog” to mean “a blog post”, or to mean “a blogsite”,
The latter, because that is what it means. (And don’t quote fucking Humpty Dumpty to me or I’ll have to whack ya.) When I say an infrequently updated blog, I mean a blog that is infrequently updated, like (say) bulbulovo (on my bloglist); there are new posts maybe every few months, and I used to irritatedly click on the link every few weeks and mutter “Damn, still nothing.” Now I never have to give it a thought; if there’s a new post, it’ll show up in Google Reader.
On the other hand, if Google Reader is so convenient, why not use it all the time for everything, instead of fretting over the question of which blog sites (or blog posts ?) to use it for ?
I do not understand this question. I don’t fret over anything; if there’s a blog I want to follow, I add it to the Google Reader list of blogs to follow.
Julia: Yes, that’s what Gudde talks about immediately before the bit I quoted; when he says “the author,” that’s the author of Amadís de Gaula. I think he says all that can usefully be said about the etymology.
Grumbly: I don’t understand why you don’t understand.
That’s OK, because I think that I now understand you. When one registers a blogsite with Google Reader, the reader tracks posts and comment threads only from then on. It doesn’t respond to changes in posts and comment threads before that time. As I suspected, the word “infrequently” was distracting me from your main point.
More precisely: “changes in posts and comment threads created before that time”.
Thank you very much for this information, all of you. I’ll try this Google Reader one of these days when I’ve got more time to figure it out.
I’m very interested in Manish Water with artificial goat flavor. I’m apprehensive about ram flavor, I thought rams were the bad-smelling ones, but I’d still like to try it. Twenty-five years ago, we overheard a man in Jamaica who was slaughtering a goat telling the goat he was very sorry about it.
Julia, seeing your two comments I was very disappointed to see that they were both the same. But then I saw it was twice as informative as most, so it didn’t matter, it was still a bonus.
The truth is that I was twice an idiot… But wordpress helped me with my duplicate comment. I have nobody else to blame but me in respect of their content, which afterwards I realized it was a bit useless… I should have looked up Putnam’s book before I write!
Thank you very much for that, dearie and also for the rheas. It’s not often that you see bulldogs doing sports activities. I liked seeing its sense of balance, leaning backwards as the snowboard stopped. They have a low centre of gravity, so I can see that they’d be ideal, but it’s nice to see that they’re interested too.
I have a dog story; my wife & daughter recently met a Pakistani man in London. He said his father in Pakistan used to take their dog with him when he went to the mosque and she would wait for him on the steps outside. He had to stop though, because the dog would pick up his slippers that he’d left on the steps and carry them home in her mouth, leaving him to walk home barefoot.
I thought muslims were averse to dogs. Is it only Arab muslims?
No, there are lots of dogs in Pakistan. They don’t let them in mosques, though. I was just reading somewhere about the Canaan dog, a very ancient breed from the Middle East.
Is that the Canine dog ?
I warmly recommend Go The Dogs, a short film I saw on Arte last night. It starts with a bulldog.