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Marking time

Marking time on words

Monday 22 June 2020

The names of trees

William Pettigrew (1825-1906) migrated from Scotland in the ship Fortitude, and arrived in Moreton Bay in 1849. He es­tab­lished the first sawmill in Brisbane in 1853, and was active in community and political affairs.

I have only recently discovered that he also recorded the names used by Yuggera, Gubbi Gubbi and Badtjala people for some of the trees in their country. This reflects the connections he de­veloped with the traditional custodians of the land.

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Tuesday 18 February 2020

National Library cancels the OED

About a year ago I wrote that I was sad to be a member of a library [that is, The State Library of Queensland] that has so little regard for historical knowledge, but I am pleased to belong to the National Library of Australia which continues to provide online access to the OED.

That pleasure has not lasted. The other day I was having trouble getting a connection, through the national library website, to the online Oxford English Dictionary. I asked for help, and received this email reply:

As part of its ongoing collection management activities, in 2019 the Library conducted a review of the eResources collection to ensure that it is a coherent and cost-effective collection that meets the needs of a broad cross-section of the Library’s diverse audience. Considerations included relevance to the Library’s collecting policy, reader needs and interests, and subscription costs. Unfortunately, as a result of this review, the Library no longer subscribes to the Oxford English Dictionary online.
      In place of using OED online I recommend either the Macquarie Dictionary: Australia’s national dictionary online or Oxford Reference. Oxford Reference is a suite of databases and includes a shorter version only of the Oxford English Dictionary.

It looks like we are becoming a banana republic.

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Tuesday 29 January 2019

State Library cancels the OED

I occasionally visit the State Library of Queensland at South Brisbane​—​to consult the books, view the exhibitions, or meet people in the coffee shop. But barely a day goes by when I don’t visit the library online. I search the catalogue; I search for and download digital copies of historical photographs, drawings and maps; I connect to various databases and information services (eResources as the library calls them). The card in my wallet calls me a member of the library. I’m delighted to be admitted as a member of that club.

My favourite eResource is the online OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. The other day I couldn’t get the connection to the OED website to work. When I asked for help I was told the library had cancelled the subscription.

I was shocked. I asked why the library would do such a thing. Here is the nub of the answer:

Thank you for your enquiry about the cancellation of the Oxford English Dictionary. After speaking with teams across the library I can provide the following explanation about the process.
      State Library reviews all eresources (which includes databases, online reference tools, online newspapers and magazines etc) annually, or at the time when the subscription renewal is due. Oxford English Dictionary was reviewed by the Content Working Group by considering the content, the usage, the viability, other similar resources and the cost. The usage of this eresource was limited, less than 100 uses per month for users across Queensland. The library also subscribes to the Macquarie dictionary online which has significantly more usage. The Macquarie dictionary was considered a suitable alternative source for users of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Don’t get me wrong​—​I’m a fan of the Macquarie Dictionary. It is my first point of reference. It helps me to select the right words, and spell them correctly and consistently, in line with current Australian usage. I value the Macquarie, but it’s no OED.

The OED has quite a different purpose. It is the principal historical dictionary of the English language (Wikipedia), and the definitive historical dictionary of the English language (Encylopedia Britannica). It is what you need for digging deep into the history of words. As the Oxford University Press blurb says:

The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

I am sad to be a member of a library that has so little regard for historical knowledge, but I am pleased to belong to the National Library of Australia which continues to provide online access to the OED.

Postscript 18 February 2020: The pleasure did not last.

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Saturday 15 September 2018

Hunkering down

From my mother I learned a concern for the rightness of words. She had a good ear for them, and a leaning towards linguistic pre­scriptiv­ism. She had strong opinions about some words…

I am my mother’s child, although I find myself gradually leaning more towards descriptivism. I watch with interest as meanings of words shift, and new words and usages emerge. I generally hold back the peevishness.

But, each summer, as radio news reporters describe people bunk­er­ing down as the cyclone comes closer, the spirit of my mother rises in me, and I think to myself “hunker, you idiot, not bunker!”

The Urban dictionary has this definition of bunker down:

A term morons use, particularly when bad weather is afoot, to which they confuse the meaning of “hunker” with. Bunker is a noun, yet hunker is a verb, thus while the words sound similar, when thought of in their linguistic context, one is blatantly wrong.

Yes, the tone is nasty, and the expression is clumsy, but the sentiment is right.

The online Macquarie Dictionary takes a descriptivist line and, at some time since the hard copy second edition was published (1991), has added this under the headword bunker: Also, bunker down: to re­treat from the outside world to a place of isolation. In the dic­tion­ary blog (be­hind a pay wall, sorry), one of the editors an­swers the question Do you hunker down or bunker down?:

It depends on what kind of emergency you are facing. A bunker in the First World War was a reinforced concrete underground shelter, designed to withstand a bomb. To bunker down is to find shelter against attack, whether that shelter is physical or metaphorical. People preparing for a cyclone would bunker down.

They go on to discuss the origins and meanings of bunker and hunker, but …

Okay, I give up. I’ll get used to hearing it. Which does not mean I’ll say it myself.

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Sunday 25 June 2017

Contents of my library

Thanks to LibraryThing for revealing how my library stacks up against others of similar size. A new LibraryThing function can automatically classify my books using the Dewey Decimal System and produce a web infographic at the click of a mouse.

The results are interesting, but not surprising:

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Monday 1 August 2016

Old Museum Stories

Today the Old Museum Stories website went live. It is designed as a forum for people to share stories about one of Brisbane’s favourite historic places​—​a place that, since 1863, has been the site of horticulture, recreation, education, performance, and conviviality. Go on, add your story now.

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Friday 17 June 2016

The little lighthouse

The other day I was in Caloundra to talk to the Friends of the Caloundra Lighthouses. I am working with local architect Roger Todd on an updated conservation management plan for the old and new lighthouses (built in 1896 and 1968) that stand side by side at Caloundra. The Friends are doing this work with a her­it­age grant from the Sunshine Coast Council, aug­men­ted by pro bono contributions from Roger and me.

The Friends have recently had a part in producing a children’s illustrated book about the lighthouses, and I was delighted to be given a copy. It reminded me of reading to my daugh­ters​—​it brought fond memories of that special pleasure of reading stories together, and of the countless times we read one or other of our favourite books.

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Thursday 21 May 2015

Controlled vocabulary

I’m the kind of guy who uses a controlled vocabulary to keyword his photos. This means that I use consistent words to describe things. Am I sadly obsessive? Maybe, but there are benefits.

There are about 75,000 images in my Lightroom catalog​—​some scanned, some born digital. I have assigned keywords and other useful metadata to almost all of them. For keywords I use the Getty Re­search Institute’s excellent Art & Architecture The­sau­rus, the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus, and my own controlled lists of terms for projects, places, people, and specialised subjects.

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Wednesday 5 November 2014

Noel Pearson remembers Gough Whitlam

Thanks to the ABC for recording Noel Pearson’s powerful address at the state memorial service for Gough Whitlam in Sydney Town Hall today. The whole address is in the video below. Pearson spoke of Whitlam’s gov­ern­ment as the textbook case of reform trumping manage­ment. Here’s a taste:

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Friday 24 October 2014

Etymology of a microphone

As I was reading about the technicalities of sound recording, I wondered where the lavalier micro­phone got its name​—​(a lava­lier is the little microphone you sometimes see clipped to peoples’ shirts when they are interviewed on TV). I did some digging and here’s what I found.

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Thursday 17 April 2014

Britannica landscape

Here’s something delightful​—​24 volumes of an Encyclopaedia Britannica transformed into a mountain landscape by the artist Guy Laramée. I have already admitted to a liking for the printed Britannica, but I know that’s outmoded. Thanks to the blog Colossal for re­veal­ing this work to me.

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Monday 18 November 2013

Developing heritage places

I was delighted to hear that the recently published guideline Developing heritage places: using the development criteria has received a commendation from the Planning Institute of Aus­tra­lia. This is what the award judges wrote about the document:

The ‘Developing Heritages Places’ document is a clear and rigorous checklist of assessment criteria and considerations for stakeholders involved in site-specific development pro­pos­als relating to a Queensland heritage place.
      The checklist is supported by more detailed case studies and recommended (as opposed to required) actions to in­form the development of proposals, preparation of better development applications and prelodgement meetings with assessment authorities.
      The document is well presented, and as a result, will be accessible to multiple stakeholders. The judges were par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed by the inclusion of photographs of ex­am­ple cases studies, the comprehensiveness of the checklist from scoping through to construction and the ‘road-testing’ of the checklist undertaken by the Department with local government.
      ‘Developing Heritage Places’ has been endorsed by the Queensland Heritage Council and the judges believe rep­re­sent a model to be implemented in other jurisdictions moving forward
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Friday 1 November 2013

The Illustrated Burra Charter: how to buy it online

The Illustrated Burra Charter: good practice for heritage places has been widely accepted, often cited, and sometimes com­men­ded. But, sadly, the book has never been widely promoted or distributed.

It is hard to find a copy for sale in a book­shop or on the web. I have had quite a few enquiries from people who want­ed to buy one, but who couldn’t find a convenient source. In the past I have sent those people to the Australia ICOMOS website, where the online ordering process is a reminder of life before amazon.com.

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Tuesday 10 September 2013

Esoteric London: the book

Every morning, over a nice cup of tea, I check the Esoteric London blog and enjoy another quirky juxtaposition of a new photograph and a bit of old text. It’s a pleasure, and sometimes a hazardous distraction.

Roger Dean, the photographer and blogger, has been working on a self-published book which is now, at last, almost ready to print. This is not some quickie print-on-demand number, but a proper book (with belly band). Roger has just launched a Kickstarter project to get the job onto the press. I’ve pledged my support!

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Wednesday 8 May 2013

Heritage impact assessment lah

Here’s a sequel to my post about heritage impact reports. Dr Lee Lik Meng, Associate Professor of planning at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, took part in Donald Ellsmore’s workshop and wrote about the experience on his blog.

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Sunday 5 May 2013

Fingerspitzengefühl

I found this delightful German word in Oliver Reichen­stein’s fine piece Learning to see. He writes about design that combines functional and aesthetic value​—​You don’t get there with cos­metics, you get there by taking care of the details, by polishing and refining what you have. This is ultimately a matter of trained taste, or what German speakers call “Finger­spitzen­gefühl” (literally, “finger-tip-feeling”). He adds a photo of Jan Tschichold to illustrate.

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Wednesday 20 March 2013

Heritage impact reports

My colleague Donald Ellsmore asked me if I had ever seen a half decent heritage impact assessment in 10 pages or less.

I replied: I favour reports that are as short as possible (but as long as necessary…). The length needs to vary with the com­plex­ity of the issues and the nature of the other consultants’ reports in the development application. I am used to writing impact reports that go alongside stuff prepared by design architects and by town planners (who never learned brevity, or have since forgotten about it).

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Monday 11 February 2013

This predilection for sea idiom

This predeliction [sic] for sea idiom is assuredly proper in a maritime people, especially as many of the phrases are at once graphic, terse, and perspicuous. How could the where­abouts of an aching tooth be better pointed out to an op­er­a­tive dentist than Jack’s “’Tis the aftermost grinder aloft, on the starboard quarter.”* The ship expressions preserve many British and Anglo-Saxon words, with their quaint old preterites and telling colloquialisms; and such may require explanation, as well for the youthful aspirant as for the cocoa-nut-headed prelector in nautic lore. It is indeed remarkable how largely that foundation of the En­glish language has been preserved by means of our sailors.

—​from the Introduction to Admiral W H Smyth’s, The sailor’s word book: an alphabetical digest of nautical terms (London: Blackie and Son, 1867), page 6.

* my emphasis
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Wednesday 26 December 2012

Lucy

Thanks to the on-line OED I now know that lucy is the name of a fish​—​the northern pike, Esox lucius. Wikipedia adds some more detail: In heraldry, the pike is called a lucy. It is usually bla­zoned either naiant (swimming), embowed (bowed) or hauriant (jumping), though pairs of lucies may appear addorsed (back to back)…

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Wednesday 26 December 2012

Sally

I was delighted to find a new meaning of the word sally. I’ll let Charles Dickens explain, as he describes a visit to St Saviour’s Church at Southwark (now Southwark Cathedral). He has just climbed the stone stairs up to the bell ringers’ room in the tower…

The ropes of the twelve bells pass through holes in the ceiling, and reach the floor. Under each is a little raised platform for the ringer to stand on, with a strap for his foot to help him in getting a good purchase and each rope half way up is covered by some four feet by a fluffy, woolly looking covering, technically called a “sally” and intended to afford a good hold to the ringer as he checks his bell in the pull down.​—​Charles Dickens, All the year round, 27 February 1869. [via].
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Saturday 3 November 2012

A visit to the Eddystone Lighthouse

I feel guilty, just a little, because I support the vandals who cut up old books and magazines. I am part of that awful trade. I search for bits of paper on eBay, and I pay money to dealers. Forgive me.

But I rationalise that it’s a small transgression. If I don’t buy those bits of paper, somebody else will; and if nobody wants them, they’ll all go to landfill.

I paid a dealer to send me some pages pulled from a bound volume of the Strand Magazine (Volume IV, July-December 1892)​—​an article written and illustrated by F G Kitton, de­scribing a visit to the Eddystone lighthouse. It’s a nicely written piece that gave me a peek into the offshore light keepers’ life.

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Friday 11 November 2011

Renaming the Great War

This is a fitting day to mention some clever projects that Tim Sherrat has done to extract and process information from a mass of digital data. He describes in his blog how he worked with the Trove archive of Australian newspapers to see when people stop­ped talking about the Great War and started talking about the First World War. He discussed a wider range of work concerning the Great War in a keynote address.

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Monday 29 August 2011

The virtues of the snail

Was this gastropod outcomes-driven? And surely there should have been a pair of them?

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Friday 17 April 2009

50 years of Strunk & White

The elements of style (3rd edition, 1979) lurks on the shelf near my dictionaries and style guides. Some of its specific advice on grammar is weird, so it’s not a useful reference book. But as an argument for clarity in writing it’s wonderful.

White’s reworking of William Strunk’s original little book appeared in 1959, and was a publishing hit. Its anniversary has been marked by a new commemorative edition, and a flurry of comment.

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Saturday 4 April 2009

David Malouf at West End Library

My local public library opened in 1929, and today we marked it’s 80th birthday with a talk by David Malouf, and a birthday cake.

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Thursday 8 February 2007

Faded signage

Oh, how I hate the word signage. So unnecessary, when the ordinary word signs works so well.

I’ll drop that subject, lest I come across as grumpy and pedantic, and distract you with a beautiful collection of faded signage.

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Wednesday 30 November 2005

Apronman, bagman, chair bodger

An old favourite among my browser bookmarks: A list of occupations, compiled and published on the web by the late John J Lacombe II. It’s a collection of (mostly archaic) occupations, each briefly explained.

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Wednesday 25 May 2005

Understanding sarcasm

Yesterday I was talking to Lucy, my nine year old daughter, about irony and sarcasm and the difference between them. We looked up both words in the Collins Cobuild Dictionary:

Irony is a subtle form of humour which involves saying things that you do not mean.

Sarcasm is speech or writing which actually means the opposite of what you mean to say. Sarcasm is usually intended to mock or insult someone.

I mostly avoid sarcasm but I have a fondness for irony — a fondness that people of some other nationalities seem to lack. The dictionary can mark out a border between irony and sarcasm, with mockery and insult kept on one side. But there is contested territory where irony and sarcasm meet. Mockery and insult are feelings, not measurable commodities.

Today, I read that a research team from Haifa University has located the parts of the brain that comprehend sarcasm, according to a BBC News report.

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Thursday 7 April 2005

Oondooroo

This post commemorates a visit Thom Blake and I made to Oondooroo, a pastoral homestead outside Winton that has a remarkable collection of stone buildings. (Writing about this event is really just a pretext for linking to Thom’s website, and sooling the googlebots on to it).

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Saturday 5 February 2005

Knocking off time

In a post to the oldtools mailing list, Jeff Gorman explained the origin of ‘knocking off time’:

In case you might just want to know, the expression derives from coalmining when at the end of the shift, the miner inverts his pick and thumps the shaft end on the ground to release the head.
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Thursday 23 December 2004

Celebrating the Illustrated Burra Charter

In this, my three-hundredth posting to Marking time, I want to record that The Illustrated Burra Charter: Good Practice for Heritage Places has been launched.

Writing this book has been a long project for Meredith Walker and me. I have already mentioned it here a few times - at first draft, final draft, proofing, and printing stages. This is a project that seemed like it would never end. But now it has.

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Friday 10 December 2004

Dewey’s birthday

According to a mention in Garrison Keillor’s writer’s almanac, today is the birthday of Melvil Dewey.

This prompted me to look at the middens of paper around me, and think about Dewey’s invention of the vertical filing cabinet. Thinking turned into procrastination. Instead of putting those papers into those filing cabinets, I turned to Google. I found this book review: The social life of paper. Also see the short biographical entry in Wikipedia.

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Wednesday 11 August 2004

Checking the proofs

At last. The book should be on the press this week.

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Saturday 31 July 2004

Placeholder

Actually posted on 7 February 2005.

Until I posted this, there was nothing here for the month of July 2004. That was the month I came back from a New Zealand sabbatical and I was a bit busy. But having a missing month in the monthly archive just looked odd, and I had to fix it. So, here is a dose of lorem ipsum.

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Wednesday 16 June 2004

Ulysses in daily doses

Today is the centenary of Bloomsday, the day on which every­thing in James Joyce’s Ulysses took place.

I used to think Ulysses was unapproachable, until I bought myself the Naxos audio book. For long driving trips I load the four disks into the CD magazine, and switch on as soon as I get onto the highway. Jim Norton reads most of the text, with Marcella Riordan as Molly. It’s like having them in the car with me, telling me the story. It’s wonderful, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

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Wednesday 26 May 2004

Dub dub dub

I heard this today on Radio New Zealand — Linda Clark interviewed a guest, then announced his web address: Dub-dub-dub wildlands dot cc, instead of the usual clumsy dubya-dubya-dubya…

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Monday 10 May 2004

Engravings on wood

At a second-hand bookshop in Whangarei I bought a copy of E Mervyn Taylor’s Engravings on wood (Wellington: Mermaid Press, 1957). This book displays a body of work influenced by the natural environment of New Zealand, and embedded in the European tradition of printing from engraved end-grain wood blocks. The native birds, plants (like the toi toi), landscapes and people of New Zealand were his subjects, and he engraved them with freshness.

I had not heard of him before, but this says more about my poor knowledge of New Zealand’s cultural history than it does about the artist. I know now that Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964) was a well-known and well-regarded artist.

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Friday 12 March 2004

Dan Price’s moonlight chronicles

The Morning News has a delightful interview with Dan Price, artist, writer and publisher of The moonlight chronicles.

After working as a photojournalist for 10 years I sold all my cameras and began documenting my own little life instead of everyone else’s. Using a pen and paper I was able to document what I was seeing without a machine between me and the subject. If you draw lots you can become very addicted to that peaceful state of being. It’s definitely my drug of choice!
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Tuesday 30 December 2003

Stop verbing those nouns

Kick me in the shins if I ever write anything as obscure as the following — it’s the abstract for a new book published by IBM, entitled ‘Architecting Portal Solutions’:

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Thursday 18 September 2003

Hanlon’s razor

From the Jargon lexicon: Hanlon’s Razor /prov./ A corollary of Finagle’s Law, similar to Occam’s Razor, that reads “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” The full entry offers some notes on the origins of the term.

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Saturday 30 August 2003

Denis O’Donovan’s library

In 1874 Denis O’Donovan became Queensland Parliamentary Librarian. He was an unlikely arrival in the colonial frontier town of Brisbane — capital of the state of Queensland, separated from New South Wales 15 years before. O’Donovan was a cultivated man, educated in Ireland and France.

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Friday 25 July 2003

Digital Gutenberg bibles II

My post about digital Gutenberg bibles has a sequel. Another Gutenberg bible has been digitised. [via kottke.org]

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Friday 30 May 2003

The month of May

Lest the month go by without leaving anything in the archive, I should explain myself. Meredith Walker and I have handed over the last draft of the new Illustrated Burra Charter book. The project-with-no-end will soon be finished.

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Friday 1 November 2002

Being Googled

I can’t explain it​—​it’s just a funny feeling that I’m being Googled​—​caption to a cartoon in the New Yorker of two men talking over drinks.

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Sunday 8 September 2002

FontBitch

Thanks to Scott Johnson for inventing the term font bitch:

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Thursday 25 July 2002

Doggerel

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

      — Groucho Marx
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Wednesday 1 May 2002

Haircut blogs and other inventions

Pseudodictionary.com collects new words and credits their inventors. So we know who to thank for the useful term haircut blog. That reminds me…

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Thursday 25 April 2002

Driving Allen Ginsberg

Elsa Dorfman's fond stories and pictures of Allen Ginsberg reminded me of the time the Beat Poet came to Brisbane.

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Tuesday 9 April 2002

Irony recognition

From a UK think-tank: We are a charitable institution, founded in 1996, devoted to ensuring that standards of English comprehension are maximised throughout the World Wide Web. Our research revealed what many had previously suspected, and reported informally — certain web users were incapable of recognising, let alone using, irony or sarcasm. This was news to me, but I am pleased to know they have a solution. It’s a web browser plug-in that uses new algorithms to alert users to irony, sarcasm, satire and parody. Downloads are free, but donations to support the research are invited.

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Saturday 30 March 2002

Pebbledash people

The BBC’s E-cyclopedia: the words behind the headlines explains a new British use of pebbledash as a term indicating suburbia. Pebbledash people is spin doctor's shorthand for a social group.

Thought to be Tories' paradigm target voter, numbering 2.5 million in 178 target seats. Derives from “pebbledash subtopia”, one of 52 postcode categories employed by mar­ket research specialists Experian. Average household in­come: £25,000; likely to read Daily Mail; not very neighbourly; keen on DIY.
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Thursday 28 March 2002

Engaging self obsession

Michael Barrish writes: Google changed my life. This says something about my life. I find this blogger’s self obsession engaging. He carries a bag everywhere, he says. He describes its contents in forensic detail:

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Wednesday 13 March 2002

New word: NARU

I have spotted this new word on websites and news groups. It appears as NARU, but I predict it will shift to the lower case naru as it slides from acronym to ordinary word.

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Tuesday 5 March 2002

Australian word map

Word Map is an interactive website mapping Australian regionalisms​—​words, phrases or expressions used by particular language groups. Add your regionalism or search to see what others have contributed.
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Thursday 28 February 2002

Digital Gutenberg bibles

In March 2000, ten researchers and technical experts from Keio University in Tokyo and from NTT spent two weeks in The British Library creating digital images of the two [Gutenberg] Bibles and the other related items.
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Thursday 21 February 2002

Writing by numbers: 100

The idea behind 100 words is simple: Write 100 words, no more, no less, every day.

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Wednesday 20 February 2002

Ftrain spotting

Ftrain is listed in my bookmarks under the heading blogs. But it’s not the usual daily stream of jottings and outbound links. Paul Ford writes short pieces of fiction and non-fiction, each richly linked to other pieces on the site. You can follow con­nec­tions up and down a hierarchy of subjects, sideways to related pieces, or back and forth chronologically. Ftrain is built on a database of content, and (I guess) some nifty programming that maintains the pages.

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Tuesday 12 February 2002

Writing by numbers: 500

The Hoopla 500 is an experiment in text. Each entry is approximately 500 words in length, and topically can cover anything from absolute fiction to painfully detailed truth. It is not a diary, a weblog, an art project, a zine or a venue for storytelling. It [is] defined most precisely as itself: the Hoopla500. Sometimes it may be pretentious, others self effacing, but the goal is simply that it will be. In other words, its existence is the sole justification and explanation of its purpose.

That, and I like doing it. [Statement by the author, Leslie Harpold]

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Thursday 27 December 2001

Ratbag

Any person whose eccentricity I find appealing I am apt to call a ratbag. To me, it’s a word that implies fondness, an Australian idiom it seems. The British dictionaries either don’t know the word, or don’t see any positive connotation in it, and my old Websters doesn’t know the word at all. Here’s what I found:

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Monday 24 December 2001

Recipe for boredom

See this piece by Laura Calder: Recipe for boredom: why must the modern cookbook be such a flavorless affair? She quotes from Elizabeth David, Sir Hugh Platt, George Augustus Sala and Hannah Wooley to show the literary delights of the recipe, now lost. Like Hannah Wooley’s recipe from The Compleat Gentlewoman, published in 1711:

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Thursday 20 December 2001

Letterpress

I’m reading Counterpunch: making type in the sixteenth century, designing typefaces now by Fred Smeijers. Fred is a digital type designer who has gone back to the roots of printed type. He has studied early type-makers’ tools in museums, and taught himself to make type punches used for making moulds for casting type for hand setting. A fascinating book.

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Tuesday 18 December 2001

Omit unnecessary words

An unusual weblog, Textism looks good and reads well. Such economy. Just three words today​—​sometimes it snows​—​linked to wordless photographs. It’s been snowing in Pompignan. I want to go there.

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Sunday 25 November 2001

Mark time

Wait idly for something to occur, as in ‘We were just marking time until we received our instructions’. This idiom alludes to the literal meaning of marching in place to the time, or beat, of music. [Early 1800s].

—​from The American heritage dictionary of idioms by Christine Ammer.

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On this page
The names of trees
National Library cancels the OED
State Library cancels the OED
Hunkering down
Contents of my library
Old Museum Stories
The little lighthouse
Controlled vocabulary
Noel Pearson remembers Gough Whitlam
Etymology of a microphone
Britannica landscape
Developing heritage places
The Illustrated Burra Charter: how to buy it online
Esoteric London: the book
Heritage impact assessment lah
Fingerspitzengefühl
Heritage impact reports
This predilection for sea idiom
Lucy
Sally
A visit to the Eddystone Lighthouse
Renaming the Great War
The virtues of the snail
50 years of Strunk & White
David Malouf at West End Library
Faded signage
Apronman, bagman, chair bodger
Understanding sarcasm
Oondooroo
Knocking off time
Celebrating the Illustrated Burra Charter
Dewey's birthday
Checking the proofs
Placeholder
Ulysses in daily doses
Dub dub dub
Engravings on wood
Dan Price's moonlight chronicles
Stop verbing those nouns
Hanlon's razor
Denis O'Donovan's library
Digital Gutenberg bibles II
The month of May
Being Googled
FontBitch
Doggerel
Haircut blogs and other inventions
Driving Allen Ginsberg
Irony recognition
Pebbledash people
Engaging self obsession
New word: NARU
Australian word map
Digital Gutenberg bibles
Writing by numbers: 100
Ftrain spotting
Writing by numbers: 500
Ratbag
Recipe for boredom
Letterpress
Omit unnecessary words
Mark time

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