I should have known this, but I didn’t: squib is a real English word, with a meaning that lends itself to the metaphorical extension used in the Harry Potter series. Also, rodomontade and enjambment.
Category Archives: Britain
Autoanthropology
But what would be so awful, I asked each of my informants, about a brief friendly chat with a fellow commuter? This was clearly regarded as an exceptionally stupid question. Obviously, the problem with actually speaking to a fellow commuter was that if you did it once, you might be expected to do it again […]
Back to happier news
Language Log extols Edinburgh Uni’s results in the UK’s RAE “But with these figures out, even these shy people will have to admit, if pressed, that if you want to study in the biggest language sciences community in the U.K., and the best one as judged by volume of work judged to be of world-leading […]
Edinburgh!
A sunny afternoon in the Botanic Gardens today with friends, plus Calton Hill, Holyrood Park, and a terrific Highland dress wedding in previous days. I’m loving being back, and sad I have to leave again so soon.
tying together two themes of my life lately
I’ve been to or known of a lot of weddings of people I know this year, including two in June (both lovely, and very different). Thus I was charmed to find my interest in transit combined with this recent swell in weddings in Annie’s post about a couple traveling to their own wedding on the […]
Scots-Texans of the past
This is too funny. I was looking at the area around Dallas on Google maps, and found that there is a city in Ellis County called Midlothian, which is also the name of the area around Edinburgh to the south and the historical government area in which Edinburgh is located (these days it’s a council […]
Unusually for an X, he was also a Y
While re-reading The Right Attitude to Rain, I came across several quotations I thought about memorializing in my Facebook profile, including this one: How many people in the United States believed that they had been abducted by aliens? It was a depressingly large number. And the aliens always gave them back! Perhaps they were abducting […]