What about the pyramids???

[Andy in Sig]

"Rooves" hasn't been used for hundreds of years. As far as I remember from my linguistics lessons (many years ago), "Hooves" takes the form because it was one of the words that resisted the change from to using "s" as a plural the longest (even in Chancery English) and retained the change from "f" in singular to "v" in the plural form, much like modern Dutch still does. Tolkien insisting on "dwarves" was a linguist's joke (not a very funny one admittedly...) but this spelling has gained currency lately (but perhaps not yet to the extent that it's "correct").

There is a really good book that covers all this and more - "The History of the English language" by NF Blake from Sheffield University.

Well I've kept the flag flying in the face of modern linguistic sterility.

For anybody who's interested there's a very good book called From Old English to Standard English by Dennis Freeborn. It shows how everything went downhill from 1066.

 

[Andy in Sig]

It didn't read like that to me - good book though! I've read some of his stuff on dialects, which was pretty interesting as well.

Anthony Burgess used to argue that we should return to germanic terms wherever possible and he used to use words like "farspeaker" instead of "telephone" - lost cause I'm afraid...

Are you sure that he argued that? I remember him discussing the Victorian chap who did but I don't recall him pushing it himself.

 

[Andy in Sig]

Yeah, he goes into it in "little Wilson and big God" and "You've had your time"; he went to Manchester University (well Owen's college as it was called then) and there was a movement interested in purifying English popular there at the time. He spoke about it on some arts programme with Melvin Bragg that I remember seeing a few years ago and some of the words he came up with were very entertaining.

I've just been flicking through A Mouthful Of Air (I collect first editions of Burgess) and couldn't find anything. I'll have to take another peep at the autobiography.

 

[Andy in Sig]

Some of them cost a bit!

You can get a lot of bargains on Ebay: say £30 for one of the more common ones. But a first of A Clockwork Orange would set you back hundreds. He was very, very clever and I think the slight pomposity is a kind of teasing of the literary establishment of which he was never a part.

His journalism collections are brilliant. Try getting hold of Homage to QWERTYUIOP and One Man's Chorus. They are very entertaining.

 

[Arch]

Are they not fossilized tents from the legendary lost CTC camping trip of 1883?

'I'm just going to mend a puncture - I may be some time...'

I don't hold water with the Toblerone theory - I like Toblerones, but I don't like biting a chunk off and having it dig in the roof of my mouth painfully.
There's something deeply wrong with chocolate that tries to injure you.

When my Mum and Dad started courting (as you did back then) they went to the pictures and he bought a Toblerone to share afterwards. Having sat in a warm cinema for a couple of hours, when he produced it with a flourish from his coat pocket and unwrapped it, it had gone rather limp...

Easier to eat though!

 

[ufkacbln]

The pyramids are in Portsmouth

 

[Blue]

Why once in a lifetime? Did you go there in a hot air balloon piloted by Alfred Hitchcock and his faithful sidekick Bruce Lee, which means it can't be repeated?

I just don't think the awe of that first visit would be repeated if I were to do it again - although they would still be fantastic. Unfortunately my wife can't take the heat of a country like Egypt so it would seem that it will, indeed, be a once in a lifetime experience.

 

[spesh]

Seems like a lot of effort to go to just to sharpen a razor.

Contrary to popular opinion pyramids don't sharpen razor blades. They just take them back to when they weren't blunt. It's probably because of quantum.

~ Terry Pratchett​

 

[Rhythm Thief]

Anthony Burgess used to argue that we should return to germanic terms wherever possible and he used to use words like "farspeaker" instead of "telephone" - lost cause I'm afraid...

I heard a thing on Radio 4 once (where else?) about a German chap who was claiming that the bagpipes were actually a German invention and should really be called the "tootlesack".

 

[Andy in Sig]

I heard a thing on Radio 4 once (where else?) about a German chap who was claiming that the bagpipes were actually a German invention and should really be called the "tootlesack".

"Dudelsack" is actually German for bagpipes.