@Bluesqueakpip

She was wonderful as Servalan, surely the most elegant and stylishly dressed villain ever. I read once that the brilliantly OTT clothes originated with a suggestion by Jacqueline Pearce herself; the intention at first had been to dress her in military-style gear which would not have had nearly the same impact.

Not least of her…[Read more]

@pedant

I have just checked my copy of Fowler and realised that it is the Burchfield edition. Bugger! that probably explains why I have found it of so little use, and consult it so rarely that the dust cover appears pristine.

@thane16

There is a great deal of unnecessary fuss about making and serving tea, and the milk-in-first/milk-in-last…[Read more]

@Craig

Thanks for your vigilance! I zapped both Ariana and Lambarth Peter into the trash bin as soon as spotted in my inbox today. All these dodgy looking strangers begging for my friendship leaves me feeling anything but friendly 😡

@thane16

It’s donkey’s years since I read the quartet, and your memory for the details is a far better than mine. What remains in my mind are chiefly the general impressions. Probably I read too much for my limited brain to retain everything, and/or I just have an inefficient memory. In any case it’s high time I read the books again as a…[Read more]

Oops  😳 Blank verse, not bland verse, and the inevitable typo, to instead of too.  Memo to self to proof read before posting although, in extenuation, I was in a hurry.

@ichabod

More the latter, I think.

Shakespeare is credited with introducing about 1700 new words into the language; some of them of completely new coinage, usually based on Latin or Greek roots; others created by combining existing words or elements of existing words in new combinations so as to convey subtler gradations of meaning, or by using…[Read more]

@ichabod

Basque is, I gather, difficult for a non-native speaker to learn and does not resemble any Indo-European language in grammatical structure or vocabulary.  It is generally supposed to be an isolated survival of an earlier  language or group of languages predating the arrival of languages of the Indo-European group in Western Europe, t…[Read more]

@TempusFugit  @ichabod

I seem condemned to continue in linguistic/grammarian mode at the moment, so ‘wotthehell,  archie, wothehell  🙂

The English language stems from the same common Germanic root as most of the languages of northern Europe – German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian – so the latter start with an advantage when learning En…[Read more]

@thane16

is “to totally…” THAT much of a grating alliteration?

It’s all down to personal opinion, of course, but it certainly grated on my sensitive inner ear. Those were the opening words in what was, as far as I recall, a piece publicising the excavation in question, and I may have been influenced also by the way it fitted into the sente…[Read more]

@pedant

 Moffat has stated repeatedly that the original intent was to cast someone older, but they were won over by Smith’s audition as old in a young body.

And how right they were!

I hadn’t come across any of Matt’s earlier work, and the initial publicity photos didn’t impress me: he looked so impossibly young. It just shows the folly of ju…[Read more]

@pedant

Care is needed. Many of the grammatical truths were taught were not, in fact, truths at all, but the consequence of 19th Century Oxbridge nobs applying Latin rules to a High Germanic language.

What you say is perfectly true, and I have no quarrel with it; but that is not really what I was writing about, and it doesn’t really reflect how I…[Read more]

@janetteB

Since I seem still to be in grammar pedant mode 👿

It’s an interesting point: why aren’t people now generally taught basic grammar and syntax as a matter of course?  It needn’t be anything more than the basics. Most people who read a lot a will probably pick it up by a kind of osmosis even if, like you, they don’t know the t…[Read more]

@thane16

My skills lie elsewhere 🙂 Or is it “lay.” That particular word and its usage has always troubled me.

Ah, the joys and confusions of our mongrel language!

If we are using the verb in the present tense, the first is intransitive, the second transitive.

to lie, verb, intransitive; present lie, past lay, past participle lain: to assume or…[Read more]

@thane16

SJW – Social Justice Warrior: a label applied as a pejorative by the Usual Suspects.

As for your comment above, I fear you credit me with too much!  And the brain at the moment feels like mush; maybe because I have just been browsing the morning news and getting depressed in the process, or maybe I just need more caffeine. Perhaps…[Read more]

Somewhat against my better judgement I ventured BTL after reading the piece in today’s Guardian about the women in Doctor Who. There was some rational discussion, a fairly large dollop of nostalgia, and the usual disproportionately noisy contingent of whingers wittering on about how the show has not been the same since …. , and about the f…[Read more]

@thane16

Talking of Aussie place names; one of my great grandmother’s brothers* emigrated to Queensland in the 1880s and named the place where he settled Delamere, after the township where he had lived in Cheshire. I’ve no idea where exactly this was or if the name survives.

* i.e. a maternal great uncle of my mother. I have a cream jug from a…[Read more]

@thane16

There is also a St Sexburga, cause of much sniggering among young adolescents, who was abbess of another double house at Ely. The -burg, or -berg element derives from the word meaning ‘protection’, ‘stronghold’ or ‘defended settlement; ‘wer’, I think, is as in wergild or werewolf, meaning ‘man’ in the inclusive sense of ‘human being’;…[Read more]

@pedant

And what they all have in common, but which Moffat pushed to the foreground? That they are women who had the brass-bound audacity to talk back to the Doctor.

I hadn’t really considered it in that light. Because I don’t often have the patience to stick around the kind of fan site where this sort of push-back figures largely, I have tended…[Read more]

@ichabod

Woah — an Abbess, in charge of monks?

Yup.  There were a number of such double houses founded in the 7th century in England; exactly how many is uncertain, because the records are relatively sparse.  The majority were in the northern half of England, which may reflect the influence of the Celtic/British church and associated tra…[Read more]

@thane16

Many people like to say Moffat can’t write for women. I find this a bleak and frankly stupid idea.

Agreed, although with some very minor reservations.  All the major female characters in AG Who, whether or not  written by Moffat, are strongly delineated and well able to hold their own in the Doctor’s colourful and sometimes bew…[Read more]