Variations on English

English in different parts of the world... Links and comments are welcome! Because I'm going to England in a month and a few days, I'm reviewing how I could get myself in trouble or seem rude and tacky. This is one of my favorite sites about that:


The Septic's Companion: A British Slang Dictionary—A dictionary of British slang, written by a Scotsman living in America

It's been linked on my English Oddities page for a long time, and I was one of the contributors before it was a book, so cool! It's more fun that some of the other dictionaries I've seen, though I just love dictionaries and I love stories of words.

Hema Bharadwaj wrote recently that her son, Raghu, is having a hard time in India because the English is so different from what he learned in the U.S. My favorite part of watching "Slumdog Millionaire" was hearing the game show host's English.

I had lunch with my friend Charles Thursday. He's English, and told of a road trip to the Midwest last year or so, and of being in a restaurant with three friends of ours who grew up in New Mexico (one in Texas and New Mexico) who all ordered water and that was fine, but when he tried to order water, the waitress couldn't understand what he wanted at all, no matter how much he repeated it. That's because the main sound in the word "water" in that part of the U.S. is a heavy "r" and Charles has no "r" at all. Plus he pronounced the "t" in the middle of "water" as though it were, well... a "t."

Once I sang in a folk club in England. Maybe at St. Neot's, in a pub. Maybe in a different folk club meeting in a different pub. It was the late 1970's. I sang The Titanic, and showed them the singalong parts, and when they got to their part I laughed because I was used to "...to the bottom of the the sea" sounding like a southwestern U.S. "boddum" and got that very hard "t" from a group of Brits!

Getting jokes

Fractalpus

That's from Neopets.
It's not important.
If one gets the joke, it's like "passing a test," but if one doesn't get the joke life can still continue, the sun will shine, people will play and eat...

It did remind me of "...To Get More Jokes," though and I should link that with it. Here's a quote about an epiphany-esque moment when I was teaching:

I would be asked "Why do we have to learn this?" Sometimes I gave a serious answer, and sometimes a philosophical answer. Sometimes I made light of it. Sometimes the honest answer was "You don't have to learn this, but I have to try to teach it so I can get paid." Or "Only some of you will need to know it, but they don't know which ones yet, so I have to say it to everybody."

Then one day, the question came phrased a new and better way: "What is this GOOD for?" The answer I gave then changed my life and thinking. I said quickly "So you can get more jokes." I think we were reading a simplified Romeo and Juliet at the time. I could've gone into literature and history and fine arts, but the truth is that the best and most immediate use of most random learning is that it illuminates the world. The more we know, the more jokes we will get.

http://sandradodd.com/connections/jokes

Google maps views of medieval castles

Google Maps of Castles, Cathedrals and Abbeys

Imagine all the people in the past who would have been thrilled with this technology. It's pretty thrilling now, but think back to all the scholars, geographers, historians, kings and generals whose lives would have been different had such images existed in past centuries.

Alphabetical Food

Apple, Banana, Cookies, Dumplings, Eggs, Fish, Goat cheese, Hummus, Ice cream, Jelly, Ketchup..... but not like that, like this!


I got it here: Crooked Brains, and they got it here: Gugazine (or maybe here: Doise Dois). It's by Luiza Prado, an artist in Brazil, and is called "Eatphabet."



On her page you can see closeups of the various letters, too!

It certainly does remind me of Monkey Platters, which reminds me that this fall (maybe in November, date to be announced when I know it) there will be a three day happening for unschoolers with young children in Albuquerque (local/regional, not "big conference" at all) called The Monkeyplatter Festival.

And that reminds me of the January symposium in Santa Fe called SUSS.

Websites that are like Museums

More at lileks.com





I love these public collections! Please leave links to your favorites in the comments, and if you want to make them "clickable," the code is here: http://sandradodd.com/hotlink

Corn Bags and Kirschsteinkissen

About fifteen years ago, our friend Bela gave us two lumpy flannel pillows. Turns out they were "corn bags." They were like big bean bags filled with seed corn (whole corn), intended for heating in the microwave and using as hand warmers or footwarmers, sitting around on a winter's evening, or putting in the bed to warm it up. When those wore out, I made more, using terrycloth from towels. They're wonderful.

These are about 10" a side, and are based on the size of the piece of terrycloth, and not being too big to hold or to put in the microwave easily. If you want to make one, buy seed corn and put in enough for it to be a solid layer of corn when the bag's on its side, and to fill the bag half or less when it's held by the corner.


This morning, Keith sent me a link to a blog entry on medieval bed-warming techniques, and one of the things was a bag of cherry pits heated in a low oven. Bed warmers puzzle & answers

That led me to an image search, because it said the cherry-pit bags are becoming popular again:



Once when we were in Minneapolis (Keith was working on a contract, and living in an apartment) Holly was cold, and we hadn't brought a corn bag. I put rice into one of Keith's white cotton socks and put an overhand knot in the top. That worked, and so Keith kept it for future visits. We still have it, somewhere. Corn stays warm longer, though, and when the corn is new there's humidity with it too. I suppose cherry pits were good because the heat would last a while and heat up without destroying the seed (in those pre-microwave days of yore).

The blog is worth saving and exploring.
Old & Interesting, history of domestic paraphernalia, household antiques in use.

Antique household equipment, furnishings, utensils - housekeeping as part of social history. Domestic life, household management - how people organised their homes and did the daily chores. Yesterday's everyday objects are today's antiques or museum pieces, and we may view them with nostalgia or curiosity about past ways of life. Old & Interesting takes a look at how these everyday things were actually used, how people managed their home life - and more. Alongside articles illustrated by excerpts from advice manuals, period novels and other literature, this page is updated every couple of weeks. RSS feed or email will let you know about new articles.

Building a 19th Century Computer

An English mathematician named Charles Babbage conceived and designed a mechanical calculator in the 1820s and halfway through the production of the parts, a disagreement halted the project.

From the article at Smithsonian.com:

The plans looked good on paper, but Babbage was never able to build his machine. More than a century after his death in 1871, computer historians blew the dust off his 5,000 pages of notes and drawings and wondered if his ideas could work. In 1991, on the bicentennial of Babbage’s birth, the Science Museum in London unveiled his Difference Engine No. 2, a fully functioning calculating machine, built to the specs of the inventor’s drawings. A full-scale clone of that machine is now on display in Mountain View, California, at the Computer History Museum through December 2009.

There's a video there you can watch. Very interesting.
(Smithsonian article)
There's one in London, and the one in California, and I think those are the only two.

The Science Museum in London says this on their site:

Difference Engine No 2 designed from 1847-1849 by British computing pioneer Charles Babbage (1791-1871), which excludes printing mechanism. Size 2.1m high, 3.4m long, 0.5m wide. The engine was built by the Science Museum and the main part was completed in June 1991 for the bicentennial year of Babbage's birth. The printing mechanism was completed in 2000. Doron Swade, senior curator of computing and IT, oversaw its construction. Babbage conceived the engine to calculate a series of numerical values and automatically print the results. Difference Engine No 2 was never constructed in his lifetime.

The history of computers is fresh in my mind because of the local display at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. It's called StartUp: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution

Babbage's machine would've belonged to England, or something, if it had been finished, so I'm not suggesting it's "a personal computer," though if you read those articles, it seems that one of the two is owned by an individual.