Personal Blogs

You've probably seen those YouTube videos where someone texting in a shopping centre doesn't notice a fountain and falls in.

Something similar happened to me yesterday, except I was in a medieval theme park and it was a well.

Luckily just as I started my descent someone strong caught me by the ankles. Phew, I thought, lucky escape! But then they started talking. They went on and on. I tried to keep my end of the conversation up, in difficult circumstances, I have to say. But this went on for ages and ages - imagine it! -  and the person who had hold of my ankles was a crushing bore and wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways. Just when I was losing hope they uttered the words I welcomed but dreaded.

"Well, I'll let you go then".

"Remove that colander at once", Tom said dismissively.

At the fencing school I couldn’t get anyone to speak to me. They were all touché.

My advice in never use the word “comeuppance”, especially if you’re sitting on a termite hill.

I’ve just finished reading Shipbuilding in the early 20th century. I’m not sure how I’d rate it for interest. Part of it was boring, but the rest was riveting.

Pandemic 1918, by Catherine Arnold.

First published in 2018 this eye-opening book tells the story of the Spanish Flu, as see by those alive at the time. Meticulously assembled from the testimony of those who lived, died, and tended others, set against the media and political response at the time. It's impossible not to be deeply moved, and impossible not to see parallels – and to wonder whether, if our current world leaders had read this book when it was published two years ago, we might be in a better place now.

Why did the fox cross the road?

To get to the other chicken.

Not everyone appreciates how smart fish can be. For instance flatfish - soles, plaice, flounders, and similar - are often highly intelligent. Astonishingly there are undersea crime gangs operated by these fishes.

Once, in a submarine investigation I had a sea cliff at my back, whilst in front was a flatfish I knew had been paid to kill me.

And as it happens I had just put my foot on some gluey seaweed. I thought: has my life come to this?

Stuck between a rock and a hired plaice.

James Joyce is said to have disliked inverted commas (AKA quotation marks); in Ulysses and elsewhere he avoided them in favour of the dash. He referred to perverted commas, although the quip seems to go back earlier [reference needed]. Here's a famous example

~WELL~...

I like quotation marks (a.k.a 'quotes', I think they are fun. You can nest them and that's the kind of stuff I like, it's the wordpuzzleist/programmer/mathematician/... in me. In the UK the nesting goes

""
"''"
"'""'"

In the US they start with the single quote*.

You can in principle nest as deep as you need or please, but it gets hard to construe after about three levels. Grammar books often have artificial examples such as

Jack said "Jill said, 'Never say, "Never say, 'Never'"'"

The deepest nesting I know where it arises naturally from the plot is from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (who  —they said,  —spoke in Polish, thought in French, and wrote in English, which was more or less correct). The narrator, Marlow, is describing what someone else said about someone else. Marlow says

“I was broad awake by this time [...] The fat man sighed. 'Very sad.' 'And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the other; 'he bothered me enough when he was here. “Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.” Conceive you—that ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it's—' Here he got choked by excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit."

Colours help us follow the speakers

“I was broad awake by this time [...] The fat man sighed. 'Very sad.' 'And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the other; 'he bothered me enough when he was here. “Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.” Conceive you—that ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it's—' Here he got choked by excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit."

I am pretty sure Conrad is using this as way of building up the atmosphere of the book, which is quite (and quote) deep. Heart of Darkness has many levels; the grammar echoes them.

* Why? I don't know either but the sparkling David Crystal explains somewhere in one of his books (I think).

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