Things I learned while looking up other things, 2024.07.11
Dear friends,
Notes and Queries never fails to bring me new and charmingly hyper-specific terms: “But generally a "kneeler" is "a small mat upon which to kneel," as distinguished from a door-mat, and from a mat on which to stand (as at a lectern), which last mat is properly a pedemat.” Don’t miss the note from Walter William Skeat on the same page, where he complains of receiving insulting anonymous letters … disputing the existence of a particular edition of a dictionary. (“Yet I have had a copy of it in my possession these twenty years,” he writes. TAKE THAT, anonymous coward!)
In the early 1930s, Portland Oregon renumbered basically the entire city. It took 23 months, with the city sending workers to install the new ceramic number tiles onto every house and business.
There’s a new book about Charles Fort coming out and this sentence from a review in Nature (quoting a review of one of Fort’s works, so a kind of meta-review) is a banger: “For every five people who read this book four will go insane”.
In the category of “human language is really cool”, “Illustrating the wide range of possible classifying principles for nouns, the Awa language of Papua New Guinea regiments nouns according to how ownership is assigned: as alienable possession or inalienable possession.”
In the category of ‘odd Wikipedia claims’ please find being “possibly the first female [bicycle] rider that the Italians had ever seen.”
Speaking of things not seen before, perhaps you have seen a life-size R2D2 made from repurposed antique bronze ornaments? (I hadn’t.)
“To a degree, the historical novelist must create a sort of dialect – I call it “Bygonese” – which is inaccurate but plausible. Like a coat of antique-effect varnish on a pine new dresser, it is both synthetic and the least-worst solution.”
The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin used the word Pallaksch to mean “both Yes and No at the same time.”
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin