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Notes:

from SModE 'Bother' (representing Esturine or Cockney pronunciation) and 'boy' in the sense of 'young adult (or quasi-adult) male'
A skinhead, one who aggressively (qv aggro) pursues conflict.

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By abbreviation from SMoE 'aggravation' or 'aggression' with diminutive suffix -o, skinhead etc usage

1. Aggressive or violent behavior. 2. Irritation or exasperation

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I've always thought that it represents the Esturine pronunciation of 'with' though the Wikipedia article on Estury English specifically denies this, so perhaps it is just Cockney or (as these things so frequently are) some sort of hybrid.

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OE Old English (~ s.8-s.12)
ME Middle English (~ s.11- ~ 1500)
eMoE Early Modern English (~ 1450-s.17)
MoE Modern English (~ < s.16)
SMoE Standard Modern English
Esturine MoE Dialect of East London and the Thames Estury

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vt to berate or to insult someone

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This seems to be a rather playitagainSammy non-quote from East Lynne¹ . The nearest thing in the book being
"Crying, sobbing, calling, she flung herself upon him; she clasped him to her; she dashed off her disguising glasses; she laid her face upon his, beseeching him to come back to her, that she might say farewell--to her, his mother; her darling child, her lost William!"
which isn't really all that close.
However there were many versions, both legal and pirated, of the play of the book and "Dead! Dead!" (or "Gone! Gone!") "And never called me Mother" might well be in one of those. It was then picked up by music hall comedians in the early 20th century and used to send up what they saw as hammed up Victorian emotionalism.

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sometimes Radi-ectomy
The more-or-less surgical removal of roots. Save the Cones Fund usage, early s.xxi.

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Not to be confused with Nonbinkleyphones! Thomas Binkley was a seminal figure in the recent history of old music. Someone on the Early Music mailing list once suggested (whilst we were discussing the difficult taxonomy of earlier musical instruments) that classifying them according to whether they were played by Binkly was as good a scheme as any, hence our dichotomy.

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Not to be confused with Binkleyphones! Thomas Binkley was a seminal figure in the recent history of old music. Someone on the Early Music mailing list once suggested (whilst we were discussing the difficult taxonomy of earlier musical instruments) that classifying them according to whether they were played by Binkly was as good a scheme as any, hence our dichotomy.

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¹ Prospero .... What seest thou else 60
In the dark backward and abysm of time
The Tempest Act I. Scene II.

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I hope this isn't too obvious a reference to the George Orwell (Eric Blair that was) essay Why I Write.
Boy I wish I could be as honest and aware as he seems to be.

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This story of their meeting has been in my head for absolute ages, but I have no idea where it came from, nor can I find any reference to it in my books or on the web. Let us say no more than that it ought to be true and if it's not historical then sod history!

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"...people who can write to each other need not necessarily be able to talk to each other at all." A good example of this was in my beginning Japanese class: there were some mamalochen Chinese speakers who could read a surprising amount of Japanese's Chinese derived Kanji.

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"Wireless Essays" Why wireless? It's old-fashioned British usage, that's why. Back in the early days of Radio in Britain curious folk would look in the back of this new-fangled device and see all these wires and would immediately think "Now that looks like it should be called a wireless if anything ever did!" (see the etymology of 'Sleepover').

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Here is a more literal modernization:
Me lykyþ ever þe lenger þe bet
I am always pleased (the longer the better)
by Wynchestyr þat ioly cite.
By Winchester that attractive city
Þe toun ys good & wel yset,
The city center is good and well situated
Þe folk ys cumly on to see.
The inhabitants are of an attractive mien too
Þe ayr is gode boþe yn & out.
The air conditioning is good as is the air quality index
Þe cyte stont bineþ an hylle.
The city has excellent vistas of the adjacent uplands
Þe ryvers rennyþ al about.
There is good access to riverine facilities both for commercial and leisure activities
Þe toun ys rullyd uppe skylle.
No one has yet found out about the Mayor's little peccadillo.

Notes:

1. "... presence of his own Absinth" As they say 'Absinth makes the heart grow fonder', ...or is it 'Absinth makes the brain grow blubber'?

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¹ Well, OK, the closest Tube station to the Purcell Room isn't actually Charing Cross, but it is if you like crossing the river. And Embankment used to be called Charing Cross too. So there!

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That's RubeGoldbergiform to you Yanks

From the British Artist W. Heath Robinson, the translation being from the American Rube Goldberg

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Museum Britannicum---the British Museum, probably the world's greatest receiver of stolen goods.

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Though you should note that the Americanisation of Richard has not proceeded far enough that he would spell the word with a 'z', nor that he would call that letter anything but 'Zed'.

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"... Anne Catherine Emmerich's Visions Thing" Rather strange stuff, at least to me, Anne Catherine Emmerich seems
to have had a lot of influence on Gibson.

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Obviously thus for safe guarding.
Hey, I tell 'em like I see 'em.

Think yourself lucky that I have been mature enough to avoid any jokes
with the words "head" and "give" in them.

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Eary, from ear---being in that state in which one can truly say "I'm all ears"; listening closely; (a possible nonceword)

"I not only have hearers but actual listeners! Who pay attention!!! ...these eary people" rhb 2006

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A comment on the essay title: it has recently (i.e. after I finished everything and posted it and it was too late to change anything) become apparent that the ironic use of the term "bright spark" is solely British and not widely known over here. Over there we might well refer to someone (usually male) who has done something stupid (and could well be a candidate for a Darwin Award) with the expression "Huh! He's a bright spark." (with emphasis on and a possible caesura before 'bright')

The title then sort of makes a bit of sense to a certain degree--more or less.

Here are a few essays that might appeal to the brighter sort of Bright!
The Evolution of the Evolution Cartoon
Don't Believe a Word of This
Unwise Monkeys

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nobody loses all the time

nobody loses all the time

i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle

Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added

my Uncle Sol's farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner

or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol

and started a worm farm)

-- E. E. Cummings

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With the one exception of the schwa in "/hazebrə/" there is, I'm afraid, nothing IPAish about the pronunciations. The slashes are only there as a hint.

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But wait...
It gets much worse...
with Diachronic Ethnodeficiency

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I'm sure you'll be relieved to see this

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1. "... presence of his own Absinth" As they say 'Absinth makes the heart grow fonder',
...or is it 'Absinth makes the brain grow blubber'?

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¹ "... adjust your heartstrings before leaving" Back in the old days in the old country, when I was growing up, I remember how the public lavatories had signs near their exits that read "PLEASE ADJUST YOUR DRESS BEFORE LEAVING". Whether this resulted in the extremely low incidence of cases of indecent exposure experienced at the time, or instead was inspired by their very high incidence I don't know. And of course 'DRESS' was meant in its widest sense (as in 'formal dress') rather than as an indication of widespread cross-dressing, but I always harboured a sneaking suspicion that in the 'Ladies' bemused women were staring at "PLEASE ADJUST YOUR TROUSERS BEFORE LEAVING", while back at the Council Offices some poor dyslexic employee was being hauled over the coals.

My phrase is, of course, a reference to that.

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The title, which should be sung*, is a reference to 'Come fly with me' by Jimmy Van Heusen with lyrics by Sammy Cahn and most famously sung by Frank Sinatra. It starts:
"Come fly with me, let's fly let's fly away/If you can use, some exotic booze/There's a bar in far Bombay/Come fly with me, we'll fly we'll fly away"
Ah! they really had good family values in those days!

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And I may be succeding even at de-ethnodeficiencizing because I just found this!

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This essay could just have easily been called "Swords and goats and sheep, Oh my!" but it wasn't.

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The title Why I Don't Write

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¹ "... iSight camera ---thingy" Apple has this weird thing about words beginning in i- and I remember (or should that be iRemember?) my disappointment when they named their answer to Internet Explorer "Safari" rather than the more consistent and much more satisfying "iBrowse"!
² "... blue commemorative plaque to prove it" After writing, recording and sending the essay off to the studio, I did some research into this plaque (Note to self: Do check the direction of the arrow of time first next time) and I cannot find any reference online to the thing*. Either it wasn't an official one, or history has been changed again, or my memory has finally rotted, anyway to give you the flavour of the thing, here's a totally different and rather sweet plaque from a street nearby.

³ Lansdowne "... soon the pub progressed" and after that it just got raunchier and more crowded and raunchier and louder and raunchier,
even attracting the less salubrious sort of sub-Hippy, as the poet says:

Just think how many royal boners
Sleep among these heaps of stoners
Ah! but just see The Lansdowne now-a-days, as the poet (same one) says what a change of flesh is here!
* Times (not to mention tides) wait not, and things change. A few years later I found it on line:

Legal Notice The management wish to state categorically that the title 'Lansdowne Ho!' is merely a metaplasm on such well established expressions as 'Land Ho!' or 'Westward Ho!' and contains no implications about any of the extraterpsichorean** activities of any exotic dancer.

** "... extraterpsichorean activities " another possible coinage: from Gk. Terpsikhore (terpein delight + khoros dancing) one of the nine Muses, ruling over dance and the dramatic chorus + Lat. extra (outside)---sorry about the miscegenation.
Meaning 'over and above dancing' and sadly, in this case specifically street-walking over and above piano-dancing.

Notes:

I am intensely proud of the titles of my essays (they are the high point of most of them), though occasionally I do come up with a right bummer.

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As a perfect illustration of my problem, the title of this essay came in a flash and then the essay just charged out after it, and then when I read it for the first time I realised with astonishment that the title was at the very least the wrong way round, that it should be something along the lines of 'epiphanies at breakfast', or even better something entirely different, but I just don't know how to change it--there's nothing there in my brain to change it to.

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A scientist replies...

Dear Richard:
Where to begin?
First, I can't wait to hear how you will pronounce your derived equations on the air.

Second, your assessment of neoteny as an evolutionary "strategy" seems generous, at least to me, since I have always dismissed neoteny as little more than a genetic reluctance to ever throw anything away. I think however you may have a point.

Third, I respectfully submit that your equation correlating the calculated center of hirsuticity (COH) on the aging male body overlooks two phenomena, one internal and the other external. Is it just a coincidence that the COH shifts as though attracted by gravity (the external force) and more or less in parallel with the changing distribution of adipose tissue towards lower skeletal muscles for whom tone is merely a memory (the internal force)? Is a little covariance speculation called for here?
And by letting neoteny rear its ugly juvenile head, you flirt with 'ontegeny recapitulates phylogeny', which then runs the risk of disappearing into the dim gloom of Hegelian dialectics. Sorry, I think that sentence was prompted by your essay this past Saturday, which I enjoyed.

M J Temple O. Carm., Ph.D.

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And yes I do know about Chesterton's Father Brown, but I think that those stories were somewhat different in spirit and definitely did not exclude anyone (well anyone who can read that is), so there!

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Yet another in my generous, but I fear ultimately doomed, attempts to give you guys more well-deserved holidays. (Just like this one)

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First broadcast on Simon's Scintillating Sunshine Show as 033 Crime in the Wedge on Wednesday 15th October 1985.

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OK! Yes! Well anyone who actually knows Texas can tell you that it's really the Texas Renaissance Festival, and I don't even have the old "names were changed to protect the innocent" excuse---I really did forget what it was called!

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The title is of course a reference to Henry Reed's wonderful poem, and here is a wonderful site on the same.

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I must admit that my basket scoring story didn't entirely end there. Years later in Dryden, NY I was playing defence in an indoor soccer game, at one point I was being sorely descended upon by a couple of stong and enthusiastic players, and chose the well-known cowardly, panic tactic. I lobbed the ball right down the wing as far as I could manage.
Gymnasia are of course shared facilities, and the basketball hoops are all cleverly bound about with belts and pulleys so that they can be wound back more-or-less out of the way when not in use (things like vast guitar-string winders on poles are used for this vital function) so that their axes are almost horizontal.
My pathetic, illconsidered lob went further than even I intended. I scored my second basket.
So the secret to life might turn out to be more complicated than I've suggested above.
Contributions were of course non-refundable.

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Count the syllables in the title, note the cynganneth and then go check Nabakov's book :-)

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November 2005---New Scientist has either stolen my word or convergently evolved it in it's Feedback column "Words for inverted actions ...our piece about emordnilap words - words that form a new word when spelt backwards, such as 'swap' and 'paws' (1 October)"

Notes:

But wait...
It gets much worse...
with Diachronic Ethnodeficiency

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Eventually they did come up with a solution, sort of.
They changed the manual: Below are a pair of before and after images from the pre-solution manual and its brilliant successor

Before the solution

The solution

Before

After
Of course there is still the slight problem that the replacements don't really fit.
But Hey! This is Apple man!! Their service is legendary.

Notes:

This is someone's* (and I can't for the life of me remember who's) etymon of Rochester.
________________

*Bede of course! My brain must be totally fried.
And now having said that I feel bloody hungry.

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¹ "... not a complete Ozymandian desert" Shelley's poem has (Usr Maat Ra Setep-en Ra Ra-messu Meri Amon---Rameses II) suggesting that he is so powerful that the mighty should look on his works and despair, but ironically it ends:
... round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The whole sonnet is here. For a different take on this sonnet see Graveyard Shift.
2
"... Kurosawa's Shichi Nin No Samurai" The Seven Samurai, one of the great movies of all time Shichi Nin No Samurai should only be avoided if you wish to die unfulfilled.

³
"... or Eisensein's Aleksandr Nevskiy" This is the other great Movie, and should only be avoided if you wish to die unfulfilled and ignorant of just how unimportant special effects are.
Aleksandr Nevskiy has great Prokofiev music too (See this essay for more Pro and Con Kofiev).

⁴ Dogma
"... a movie called 'Dogma'." If you really must, you can see notes on Kevin Smith's Dogma here.

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No, what you are thinking of is Onanism and you should be ashamed of yourself because it's from quite a different root. Onomasticism means the practice of naming things.

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At the time this was broadcast moves were afoot to create (or in my reality re-create) a strong elected Mayor.

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I have included some of the slides here, though, somehow, they unaccountably appear to have been left out of the original radio broadcast.

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Not only a formal portrait, but a trick one too, as the 19th child is hidden inside Mrs The Grey.

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That is Leonardo's left, of course, not yours.

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A humorous plural.

VAXen: /vak´sn/, n. [from ‘oxen’, perhaps influenced by ‘vixen’] (alt.:vaxen)
The plural canonically used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers.
“Our installation has four PDP-10s and twenty vaxen.”

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DEC: /dek/, n.
Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment Corporation, later deprecated by DEC itself in favor of “Digital” and now entirely obsolete following the buyout by Compaq. Before the killer micro revolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures described by this lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1. Subsequently, the PDP-6, PDP-10, PDP-20, PDP-11 and VAX were all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine population.
DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix early cost it heavily in profits and prestige after silicon got cheap.
Nevertheless, the microprocessor design tradition owes a major debt to the PDP-11 instruction set, and CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2, Windows NT were all either genetically descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC was for many years still regarded with a certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC machines.

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Epicenter
"... epicenter" When are you absolute bastards going to realise that 'epi-' is not an intensifier modifying 'center'?
An epicenter isn't a really, really central center, but is merely the point on the Earth's surface that is immediately above (Gk prefix epi-) a subterranean event, like an earthquake.
It's just like that other bloody annoying bit of intense ignorance 'sea-change'.

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Hypocorrection
"... being hypercorrect" If you correctly correct a hypercorrection is that a hypocorrection?

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Walt
"...dear old Walt"
Don't be a twit, Man,
It's Scott not Walt Whitman

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Armed
"... He rode all unarmed" isn't it an interesting comment on humanity how we have got to the modern and transitive 'armed and dangerous' from the old and intransitive 'armed and (therefore) safe'---as in wearing armour!

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Dastard
"... And while we're at it dastard" Apart from presence of rhyme, absence of alliteration and possible ethnicity 'dastard' has little to do with 'bastard' (as in Willie the so-called Conqueror or as I like to call him, with a bit more cultural sensitivity, Vilhjalmr in Bastardr).
I've of course crossed pens with Billy the Bastard before.

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Debride
"... most definitely debrided" and then, as a clincher, consider line 10 from the poem (v.s.) "De bride had consented, de gallant came late:...". I had 'Debride had Consented' as a working title for the essay.

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"...the words are modernized" Actually if I were really going to modernize the thing it would be more like:
"I get a hell of a lot of spam these days that says stuff like:
'want armed man pi11$ & kev1ar ve$t$?---no one need kn0w'"
but you try doing that on the radio!

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"... he axed me to come" Ask could well be the poster-child for metathesis: the sibilant whizzes round the velar plosive so fast that I'm surprised that it doesn't fly off and hit some other word in the i. The joke here (such as it is) is that the Old English form was usually acsian and that it was probably still the dominant one at the time of our tale.

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"...what J.R.R. Tolkein once called (though in different circumstances) Man Food" I'm thinking of the passage
"...man-food as Treebeard calls it. Will you have wine or beer?" Book III, Chapter 9-Flotsam and Jetsam
(The Two Towers: p166 of the Allen and Unwin hardback edn)

Notes:

"... sea-change" When are you absolute bastards going to realise that 'sea' is not an intensifier modifying 'change'?
A sea change isn't a really, really big change, but is one effected by the sea.
The phrase is, I assume, a reference to ~~Francis Bac~~ Shakespeare's song from The Tempest "Full fathom five---My father lies! It's only two point eight" or whatever it is that Ariel sings.
It's just like that other bloody annoying bit of intense ignorance 'epicenter'.

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"... the roll-top bureau: there, alone" I might possibly be mis-remembering this quotation. Anyway the original is here

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"...one of its less interesting languages" This is so palpably not true, and I should be (and I am) utterly ashamed of myself for being so carried away with the moment that I could write such rot. ME is a fascinating language as I (who can recite from memory more poetry in ME than I have ever found a willing audience for) should well know.Shame on me! I shall now go and recite the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales "When þat Aprille with his shoures swete þe drought..."

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"... Martin Luther ...or his brother Lex"
Lex Luther!... Superman Comix! Duh!!.

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"... paddle my barbed-wire canoe" This section is a play upon the humorously deprecatory phrase, if you will forgive my descent into taboo usage, and since we are all scholars inter pares here, "Up shit creek in a barbed-wire canoe with no paddle"

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"... into adulthood" or in extreme cases into adultery!

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"... ineffable, affable name" Of course I know that the effing name in not ineffable---I just like the phrase!
So there!!

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"... here it is"
...epeita holon ênhekastou tou anthrôpou to eidos strongulon, nôton kai pleuras kuklôi echon, cheiras de tettaras eiche, kai skelê ta isa tais chersin, kai prosôpa du' ep' aucheni kukloterei, homoia pantêi: kephalên d' ep' amphoterois tois prosôpois enantiois keimenois mian, kai ôta tettara, kai aidoia duo, kai talla panta hôs apo toutôn an tis eikaseien. eporeueto de kai orthon hôsper nun, hopoterôse boulêtheiê: kai hopote tachu hormêseien thein, hôsper hoi kubistôntes kai eis orthon ta skelê peripheromenoi kubistôsi kuklôi, oktô tote ousi tois melesin apereidomenoi tachu epheronto kuklôi. ...

Sorry, that was cruel. Here is a link to a site with a pretty full apparatus, but I suppose you just want it Englished.

Notes:

In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.

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"... his post-saltic questioning" I suspect that this might be an actual coinage meaning 'after jumping out in a wild and obnoxious manner with the presumed express intention of causing distress in another'

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"... refusing to teach Latin to girls" If you happen to be a mediæval girl, or otherwise missed Latin in School, I suppose I should translate that:
'of all creatures women are the best
of which the opposite is the truth'

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¹ Kennewick Man
Here is proof positive of the real origins of Kennewick Man!

Left-Mr K's skull; Middle-a reconstruction; Right-Not Picard! No!! No!!!

Enterprise will obviously do the old slingshot round the Sun and into the past once too often.

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¹ Asymptotic
"... preferably asymptotic taxes" Real progressive taxes: taxes that stop those bastards at the top getting to have that third yacht while there are people around having to get that third minimum wage job.

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"... Testosterone Pride Day" Held annually on the 18th of May for reasons we don't need to go into¹.
________________________________
¹ Obscure
This, I'm proud to say, is my most obscure reference! And no I'm not going to make it any less obscure.

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Though it might well have been Douglas Adams

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"... we have all those gates!" Of course reality suggests that this use of 'gate' represents the Old Norse gata: street (related to gait) rather than OE gæt, as is appropriate for a town in what was once the Dena lagu, but reality is not as much fun so it can go take a running jump.

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Expatriotism: /eks´paitriotisim/, n. [from ‘ex’, out of and ‘patriot’, a fool] (alt.:ex-patriotism)
Ex-patriotism is that form of homesickness which leaves its sufferers both sick for their far away homes, and at the same time sick of them should they have the misfortune to return to them for a while or, to put it in more explicit and less romantic terms: expatriots are those people who leave somewhere and then spend the rest of their lives saying how wonderful it was back home and how much they regret leaving, though they never do seem to go back much. We should note that expatriots should never be confused with expatriates who merely exhibit some discontinuity between their natality and their locality.

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This essay commemorates the 30th anniversary broadcast of Simon's show.
It was the least I could do for him (I know, I checked)
_______________________________________________

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...and þe yonge sonne
Hath in þe ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
Þat slepen al þe nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages)
Chaucer: Prologue to Canterbury Tales
and the young Sun has passed half-way through the sign of the Ram, and small birds sing and can hardly sleep for excitement.

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pronounced Knee-at-any-ell, and not for one moment to be confused with Nathanial Rochester (whoever he was).

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parritch, porridge noun, formerly frequently treated as a plural, the dish of oats boiled in salted water.
Some say porridge should only be stirred in a clockwise direction using the right hand to avoid attracting the attention of the Devil. The stirring to be done with a straight wooden spoon or stick without a moulded or flat end and known is Scotland as a 'Spurtle' or 'Theevil'.
Porridge should always be spoken of as 'they' and old custom states that it should be eaten standing up. A bone spoon should always be used for eating porridge.
Oats being as Dr Johnson defines them:

Notes:

Disclaimer (I claim dis)

The whole premise of this essay is a downright lie (or as I prefer to think of it 'a contrafactum'). I really was on Simon's 30th anniversary show (though that one wasn't actually on the 30th anniversary, but that's a different matter and you need to take up the thorny subject of time keeping with him directly). However I was brought up in Britain just after the War when we had to live by the principle 'waste not want not'. I wrote this as a backup just in case we couldn't do anything more interactive and since I spent absolute minutes writing it, minutes that I'll never see again, it seemed such a pity to waste it, so I lied so we wouldn't want it.

Well either that or I was too lazy to write another one for this week.

Notes:

¹ Angelica Puce
"twentieth century sinning..." No that is not an error, and it's certainly not something I want to discuss here.

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¹ After it had been distainfully rejected by Colley Cibber and the Drury-Lane theatre
² And that’s without even calling it the ‘Bugger’s Opera’ in a brilliantly obscure reference to Sir John Betjeman’s Ghastly Good Taste.
³ Compare written Chinese with, on the one hand spoken Chinese, and on the other written Japanese of the Kanji persuasion; or again compare all those foolish jokes and 'pomes' one sees, often circulating on the internet and perpetrated by the illiterate or at least the etymologically challenged, that claim that English spelling is illogical.
⁴ By Longfellow, or possibly Tallchap.

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Ahh! the perils of the half-breed!

I am clearly either a Scot and a half or an Englishman and a half, the logic being as follows:---

Each of my parents insists, following ancient tradition, that one of their race is equal to any two of the other.
Thus my composition is either:
one half English plus one half Scottish times two, totalling 1.5
or
one half Scottish plus one half English times two, totalling 1.5

Hence a Sesqui-Scot since that flows so much better than *Sesqui-Englishman.

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Here we see the RHB Chorale rehearsing for a performance of Here We Come a-Bovverboy

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How on earth did I write this without using the term "Nominative determinism"? Beats me!

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The title is a reference to the traditional calling, in a pub, of ‘time’ at closing time, that is of course when pubs in Britain actually had closing times.
T.S.Eliot also alludes to it in the pub scene of The Waste Land (The Waste Land: II A Game of Chess l.141 et inf.)

¹ ANSAX-L---Anglo-Saxon and Northern European history and literature: ANSAX-L is a special interest group for scholars of the culture and history of England before 1100 C.E. Scholars interested in the later English Middle Ages and those interested in the early Medieval period throughout Europe are also encouraged to join the list. You can join this group by sending the message "sub ANSAX-L your name" to listserv@wvnvm.wvnet.edu

² Good Lord, several years actually

³    Gk:τόποϛ place ‘A traditional motif or theme (in a literary composition); a rhetorical commonplace, a literary convention or formula.’ OED

⁴    ad. L. tropus a figure of speech, ad. Gk:τρόποϛ a turn ‘1. Rhet. ... a figure of speech; figurative language....’
in this case I'm thinking in particular of:
‘5. In the Western Church, A phrase, sentence, or verse introduced as an embellishment into some part of the text of the mass or of the breviary office that is sung by the choir.(Tropes were discontinued at the revision of the missal under PopPius V in the 16th cent.)’ OED

⁵ G., f. gedanke thought + experiment experiment. OED

⁶ Hobbes-goblin: conflation of the philosopher and the puca (for puca, see additionally this .)

⁷ Emerson Fittipaldi, who never (as far as I know) maligned the Mediæval period, unlike Ralph ‘Where’s-Waldo ’ Emerson who did. (and think yourselves lucky that I stopped there and didn’t bring in Emerson, Lake & Palmer , etc)

⁸ Or whatever name he hid behind: he of the laboured joke and the nasty disposition

⁹    Mother Carie's Chickens: conflation of a mis-spelled name for the Storm Petrel, Mother Carey's Chicken (Hydrobates pelagicus ) for no very good reason, with the dental disease for a pretty-good reason.

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¹ However there is this somewhat unbelievable report of a whole series of them.

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¹ Not that it matters, but I’m not actually sure what time I was born on that Day, since I unfortunately couldn’t tell the time at the time.

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To come over all exo-diegetical for a moment the paper actually is from 1659: being a scan of the first (and only) edition of a blank page from this:

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Look at the tongue!

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He wanted to use a skull in a shoot, but the only one he could lay his hands on was used for teaching and had its top cut off. He called on me to round the whole thing off. When it comes to modelling I never know when to leave off, resulting in my photo, which is of course a bit off.

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Unless it's just something I put there to control the lighting...

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Which is EXTREMELY unlikely to be accurate, given the length of time, not to mention my somewhat limited mnemonic skills.

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In the Lower Sixth Form I was cast as the hero of Romeo and Juliet: Mercutio (Duh!)
We had French windows rather than a balcony as such and, during the dress rehersal, Juliet tripped as she entered and Romeo quipped "But, soft! what twit through yonder window breaks"
I'm sure it was a set up, though very funny.

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Ha! Ha! Ha!! sort, a funny compositors' joke, geddit???

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¹ 𒄑𒂅𒈦, originally 𒄑𒉈𒂵𒈩

² 𒈹 or possibly, with a name like I-Nanna, his Grandma.

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I've only heard it spoken.

Robert Forby The Vocabulary of East Anglia (Vol 2 1830) gives it in the form:

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πρόσωπον (prósōpon, "face") and ἀγνωσίἀ (agnōsía, "non-knowledge"). Duh!!

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Apart from today.

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That is 're-', not 'sup-'!

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And don't just take it from me:
Seagulls don't deserve our protection
Seagull rage

¹ Pringle Of Scotland® - Luxury Knitwear Since 1815
² Desert Island Discs
³ 2019
⁴ Only if you are really desperate, or really, REALLY curious (in all senses of the word)

Notes:

No computers were harmed in the making of this essay.

¹ Though, just to make things worse, the actual fourteen days of those weeks are largely non-contiguous.
² In spite of what I said in Feathers an' Fluff last year I really do miss the little buggers.
³ Busily keeping Austin weird.
⁴ I really wish they'd deliver to Beccles.

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Sadly no longer archived anywhere but here. [Sob! Sob!]

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The Title: "Mensura Imperii" as distinct from Imperium Mensura

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¹ "Parlement of Foules": ll, 301, 310

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If you haven't already been put off the Hairimeraku, this should do the job:
Hairimeraku
And if that doesn't, there's this:
Hairimeraku Two
And of course this:
Hairimeraku Trek III: The Wrath of Camus

The management accepts no responsibility for any physical, psychic or poetical damage done by visiting these pages.

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