Things I learned while looking up other things, 2024.04.11
Dear friends,
I wish I could start this email off with a cheery "hello from Point Nemo!" But I can't, because it's the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility and so, pretty hard to get to on a Thursday evening.
Speaking of places I'm not, I'm also not at the Grotto at the Ship on Shore in Sheerness, made from plundered barrels of Portland cement.
"The 14th-century Northumbrian poem Cursor Mundi ... provides the first attestation anywhere for over 1000 English words, from abaft to zizany." [from The Makers of the OED] (Zizany is used as a name for darnel, "one of the few reputed deleterious grasses".)
"The [conjoined] twins [Millie and Christine McKoy] prove so popular an attraction that the receipts from their exhibitions help their father, Jacob, buy Mr. Smith's plantation, the same plantation where Jacob himself had once been a slave."
"The 11th-century calligrapher Mi Fu, often regarded as eccentric, believed that some of these rocks [scholar's stones, or gongshi] had their own souls and would pay them his respects by bowing."
"As he put it, ‘one of my favourite definitions of the difference between architecture and sculpture is whether there is plumbing’."
Lots of sentences in this installment, but this sentence in particular has absolutely put Jules Verne's rapacious capitalism/steampunk geoengineering novel The Purchase of the North Pole on my to-read list (sorry, spoilers!): "[He] had discovered that J. T. Maston, while computing the size of the cannon, had made a calculation error; he had accidentally erased three zeros from the blackboard when he was struck by lightning during a telephone call from Ms. Scorbitt." (Could happen to anyone, really ...)
If you have an apple tree, there's a song you can sing to it to encourage it to produce lots of apples:
Health to thee, good apple tree!
Well to bear pocket-fulls, hat-fulls,
Peck-fulls, bushel bag-fulls.
Just FYI, "it is also customary in some parts to fire [a gun] at the apple trees."
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin