Hope you aren't missing me too much. Had a nice time in Devon (despite having a bit of marking to do) and just checked in at home long enough to flood the bathroom and stuff before heading off to Ireland for hogmanay.

See you next year,

B-)

Just finished a weekend of parties (5 in 3 days, including 1 put on by us, and 1 we didn't go to).

One of our guests (on Friday) and hosts (on Sunday) revealed to me that he is the grandson of J.R. Firth. I've been trying to find someone who'll be impressed with this ever since.

B-)

Jed writes:

Billy!

I just read your blog on apostrophes and wondered if you are interested in my apostrophe story: A million years ago when I was making TV Commercials with D.A.Pennebaker (he of 'Primary' and 'Woodstock' then and 'Startup.com' now) I also helped Penne in the closing post production on his film of Bob Dylans English tour. I designed the poster (now a collector's item - and No, I don't have a copy) and took his title 'Don't Look Back' and did an all caps title that became 'DONT LOOK BACK'. We had a lot of talk about it ( and I have some current emails from Penne discussing it again) and when it came out Safire of The New York Times went ballistic - never mind the movie, he wrote a whole column blasting the movie just for that missing apostrophe. I was quoted by Penne as saying something like 'Well, we wanted to be controversial' (which I'm sure I never said!). But today, all over the world that movie and my poster are still working together quite well without the aid of that apostrophe.

Cheers

jed

ps. did you notice the apostrophe he missed out on this message too? ;-)

Well, I'm back in London after a most enjoyable trip to Scotland to see Bessie and Ted and everyone. The kids particularly enjoyed seeing their Scottish cousins. Another highlight was not having millions of reasons to jump out of bed every day and run around like headless chickens until we use up our energy supplies. I'm trying hard not to get straight back into the old ways now that we're back.

Today is Kiloh's birthday so we've had a house full of e-kara and have just seen The Two Towers followed by a pizza. The movie was an improvement on the first one, partly because it had something more like an ending, but I got bored for the first chunk of it as one fight followed another and everyone took turns at being presumed dead and then turning out to be alive after all.

Pizza Express was fun, reminiscing about the (alleged) previous bigger size of the pizzas and hoping the kids weren't going to get us thrown out. I took care to make sure Kiloh didn't cut her finger off while cutting the cake, and so managed to get her to cut me instead (not too badly or anything).

B-)

Our cat flap's broken which we think is the reason why the cat's peeing everywhere. This is apparently how cats tell you they're pissed off.

So today I've just finished laying out all the stuff I'm packing for my trip on the bed when she decides to express herself on my Belle and Sebastian CD. I'm praying there hasn't been any trickle-down. Three days in a hotel room with the smell of cat wee is not my idea of a nice change. Luckily, I have discovered the antidote.

Why can't she just learn to talk about things like other people?

B-(

I'm just busy.

This is 'audit-culture-gone-mad' week for me. I'm off to external a linguistics department while another group of academics are doing the same to us (by post). Today, another committee is looking at an application we put in to them. Meanwhile, Robbie just sent us a beautiful Christmas card informing us that 'Santa fails the audit'. I think it's Santa's wife they should keep an eye on. I don't think I can stand another discussion of the story of whether or not the story we're discussing is a story - has academia taken over the media or something?

B-}

Thought I was dreaming yesterday morning when some religious geezer was giving us his 'thought for the day' on the Today programme (they won't let you talk unless you're a religious geezer, which is quite a phenomenon in itself, imho). Anyway, he was giving us a hardline version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He went as far as to say something like that if you say 'he walked through the mud' to a Spanish person he'd think about where the walker was going while if you said it to an English speaker they'd think about what it felt like to be walking through mud. This being because 'English is a dynamic language'. Maybe I WAS dreaming...

B-}

ZNet just sent me a modest proposal from Chomsky which seems not to be up on their site yet but will be soon, I guess. I'll tell you when it is but in the meantime, here's the basic idea:

One simple plan seems to have been ignored, perhaps because it would be regarded as insane, and rightly so. But it is instructive to ask why.

The modest proposal is for the United States to encourage Iran to invade Iraq, providing the Iranians with the necessary logistical and military support, from a safe distance (missiles, bombs, bases, etc.).

As a proxy, one pole of "the axis of evil" would take on another.

Chomsky is talking at the Institute of Education in London on the 10th of December, btw. Tickets are 10 quid and details are at Red Pepper

B-)

Enjoyed listening to Lynne Truss this morning on a programme called Cutting A Dash where she revealed how seriously she takes punctuation.

It was all about the endangered apostrophe and the vigilante groups who are out to protect it, using marker pens to add apostrophes that have been missed and sticking stickers on apostrophes that shouldn't be there. (One guy on the show was also a member of 'pipe down', a group who stick protest stickers in restaurants with muzak).

They had David Denison, a linguist from Manchester University, on explaining why people find it so hard to get the rules right, and also suggesting that the existence of 'greengrocer's apostrophe' errors is evidence that apostrophes are on the way to extinction.

Personally, I'm on the side of the exterminators even though I have some sympathy for the people who report that they feel physical pain when they see apostrophes misused.

B-)

Jonathan's University net nanny won't let him visit grammarporn, surely the most seductive sounding website of ever.

I've decided not to tell him what he's missing, but I will mention that there's a link there to get your war on which is where I keep myself up to date with current US thinking.

B-}