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CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter

Like all north Atlantic communities, Britain has depended for millennia on wool as a source of warmth and wealth, and Esther Rutter follows this thread by travelling around the sheepier parts of Britain, from Shetland to Guernsey and Norfolk to Monmouth. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/13/this-golden-fleece-esther-rutter-review

There are Guernsey cows, Guernsey goats and Guernsey donkeys but I didn’t know about the sheep. She’s probably thinking of Jersey people.

Revisiting activities you enjoyed when you were young is actually a neat way of structuring a piece of popular non-fiction.

Well, all right, here goes. When I was watching telly of an evening with the Guernsey half of my family during summer holidays, they were all clickety clacketing away knitting guernseys. Well, sort of. Each member of the family specialised in a different part of the guernsey (yes, I know, I didn’t know either) and then some mysterious woman would come round (actually all Guernsey women are mysterious) and collect them all up to be ‘knitted’ (I suppose) into whole guernseys. I found out later that even nanny (my Guernsey grandmother not a goat) the fastest knitter, earned less than tuppence an hour on average, but that got you twenty cigs and a bottle of milk stout in those tax-free, guilt-free days.

Even so, she remains good on the textile variations in knitting, the way that local patterns show up even within such apparently fixed practices as Fair Isle, Aran or Guernsey. For instance, a gansey (originally from Guernsey in the Channel Islands) from northerly Scarborough is uniquely marked by a yoke of double moss stitch step-stitched to the shoulders.

We cover some of this elsewhere, it's quite significant. Hatty will know.

A few miles up the Yorkshire coast at Whitby, one gansey variation incorporates 199 zigzags to echo the steps that link the harbour to the abbey on the clifftop.

Yeah, sure.

Even on Guernsey itself, the atmosphere is that of a knitted tower of Babel.

Can't quite get what she's driving at but I agree.

As sailors over the centuries fetched up on the tiny island to repair and restock their kit, they added their favourite stitches to the mix, giving their second skins the touch of both home and away.

Travellers’ tales, doncha love 'em? PS We were all obliged to wear guernseys, even my sister's teddy had one. While over there. We ripped them off as soon as we were back in Lunnon. And how glad we were to get back to Stork margarine.
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Mick Harper
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Mick Harper wrote:
This has not prevented low-life scum like Levi Roach and his gang of academic desperadoes accusing us of making up the laudatory quotes we stick on the back covers.

An interesting take on the way that academics view anti-academic books arrived today in the form of a Google alert from an archived source of yesteryear. You will, I’m sure, forgive the self-indulgence.

I was startled the other day when I wandered into Borders and saw, prominently displayed on the central "new books" table, M.J. Harper's book The Secret History of the English Language (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2008).

I ought to tell you civilians that you only get on the ‘new books’ table at any of the bigger booksellers by paying a pretty penny. (£800 I was told by my English publisher.)

It's possible that I'm the only Language Log reader who has encountered this bizarre book, but the current amazon.com Sales Rank (127,198) of the 2008 publication guarantees that a lot of people out there are getting to know it. That Sales Rank, and the readers' reviews of the earlier version on amazon.com, provide yet another sad piece of evidence that linguists are not succeeding in getting the word out to the general public about the nature of language -- in this case, the nature of language change.

Notice the air of lament that people might be reading challenges to ruling orthodoxy. If she had her way...

I also didn't enjoy the quotes Amazon gives from various newspapers about the book: "Unusual, funny, and provocative...This fascinating book is a useful investigation into the ways in which history is constructed and the dangers of unassailable academic truths" (New Statesman); "Mind-blowing, incredibly entertaining stuff....A well-written and entertaining book" (Daily Mail); and "The best rewriting of history since 1066 and All That" (Fortean Times).

That Daily Mail reviewer was actually the BBC's redoubtable David Shukman. How is an academic going to treat this apparently solid support from the non-academic press? By a kind of reverse cherry-picking

That last one reads almost as if they think Harper meant his book as a spoof; 1066 and All That is in fact a hilarious spoof. But I'm pretty sure Harper isn't kidding. I think he's serious. Faithful Language Log readers have seen other examples of credulous journalists, for instance here ___, so it's not a big surprise that the New Statesman finds the book "useful".

Now let’s try some ad hominem on the publishers

I was curious about the publishers, so I checked them on the web, but they didn't offer any insight into their motives (if any, other than making money).

She actually wrote that!
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Boreades


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I'm shocked, shocked, by the suggestion that some publishers are out to make money.

Surely all self-respecting academic publishers shouldn't be tainted by being "popular" or "commercial"? That's too much like grubby "being in business". Or pecunious Trade! (shudder) ... Infamy, infamy...

Surely they should be running at a loss? Or subsidised by government grants? (Or making a "profit" by being subsidised by Trust Funds, but that's another Grauniad story).

Chateau Boreades occasionally plays host to some seriously academic authors being published by Oxford University Press. Like translators, musicians and historians. They get to use the front door and assure me their publisher never has to worry about making a profit from their books. Or selling surplus remaindered stock on Amazon. I'm told that the small print runs and the wholesale book market are too carefully managed for that.
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Mick Harper
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Traditionally, British publishers prided themselves on being 'gentlemen' and that making money was strictly a necessary evil. Actually there was some commercial sense to this since it allowed for the flourishing of 'literary mafias' where you publish non-commercial books by people who will review your books favourably in the heavies.

I take your point about the Guardian, Borrie, except that the Guardian Trust has now sold the Exchange & Mart which used to cross-subsidise the newspaper and is in some trouble financially. Especially as they have now lumbered themselves with the Observer which was also a constant loss-maker but subsidised by the Astor family. (Read all about them in our Profumo posts.)

The OUP was for centuries a genuine, if specialised, publisher relying on making a profit though is now (I believe) part of Oxford University. Re Amazon: they have destroyed the old model which was that impecunious literary folk (i.e. all of them) would be sent dozens of books for review every week, which they occasionally did, but mainly they would sell them for half price to specialist booksellers in the Charing Cross Road who could sell them full-price 'as new' since reviewers rarely get beyond the blurb. Amazon have so weaponised the second hand market that nobody can make any money selling new books. Why pay £19.95 when you can get it quicker for a penny 'as new'. But I'd be interested to know how the 'academic' publishers have short-circuited this. Perhaps you have to buy the books on your undergraduate booklist direct from the lecturer.

But for the rest of us, it's a bit like the post-Spotify record industry where you have to make your money via gigs. I myself sold out Chatsworth during the summer with my readings from The History of Britain Revealed.
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Mick Harper
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Here's a great business plan I've just come across. The demand for seaside holidays in out of the way places is inexhaustible. So build a bunch of hotels wherever there's a good sandy beach in an out-of-the-way place. Hotels need squillions of tons of sand (for the concrete) and there's squillions of tons of sand on the beach. However 1) untreated beach sand is useless for concrete, there are no treatment works and the local authority is too corrupt to care 2) as the hotels go up, the beach disappears (carried off by photogenic donkeys to the building sites).

Hurry! Hurry! Impress your friends before one and two reach their natural end. Don't just Thomas Cook it though, that's a rookie mistake.
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Mick Harper
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Anyone can be a genius, it's being a polymathic genius that counts. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Ready for the day!
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Mick Harper
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Hi Michael Harper,
Just to let you know your order GB5AAXFQVM registered on 1 October 2019 10:41:36 BST will be on its way to you shortly

Look, I understand it would be over-pompous of me to object to being greeted with a 'Hi' by a Swiss coffee capsule company but surely, as a writer, I am entitled to point out that 'Hi, Michael' would at least be stylistically better.
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Boreades


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Mick Harper wrote:
Here's a great business plan I've just come across. The demand for seaside holidays in out of the way places is inexhaustible. So build a bunch of hotels wherever there's a good sandy beach in an out-of-the-way place. Hotels need squillions of tons of sand (for the concrete) and there's squillions of tons of sand on the beach. However 1) untreated beach sand is useless for concrete, there are no treatment works and the local authority is too corrupt to care 2) as the hotels go up, the beach disappears (carried off by photogenic donkeys to the building sites).


Sounds like you've been watching Endeavour Series 6 (Degüello) again?

Local dodgy builder uses bad sand, corrupt local authority building inspector turns a blind eye (for a bung). The building goes up. For a while. Then it comes down again, on top of the occupants.
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Mick Harper
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Yes it was. I just pretended it was an Al-Jazeera documentary called The Sand Wars for dramatic effect. I shall have to get up a good deal earlier to put one over on you, Borry. Put him on the list, Hatty.
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Harpo: "Just don't let me catch you plagiarising other people's scripts"
Borry: "I won't"
Harpo: "You won't what?"
Borry: "I won't let you catch me!"
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Mick Harper
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When they say 'spring cleaning' do they mean every spring? It is in my mind because of the need to prepare my home for the annual visitation of a relative from America. I always leave it to the last minute but such is my brilliance at knowing just what is acceptable to what visitor I have time to post stuff up on the AEL between bouts with the J-cloth and the hoover even though there's tons to do and she's arriving any minute. Sorry, must dash.
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Mick Harper
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Everybody plumbs the depths in my personal universe, none more so than women and blacks. However Zadie Smith has recently been sighted breaking the surface. More intelligence on this gaudy eruption, please, lest I make a fool of myself. I still remember Jack Wilshere with a shudder.
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Mick Harper
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Configuring Windows Updates
84% complete
Don't turn off your computer

Don't turn off your computer, please.
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Mick Harper
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"You know what your problem is."
"No."
"Exactly."
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Mick Harper
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One's relationship with one's mouse is quite a close one so it came as a surprise this morning when, pressing the wrong button, I discovered that you can turn the arrow cursor into a hand. I was quite freaked out until I worked out what had happened. But even freakier is, if you do it deliberately, it doesn't turn into a hand any more but a circular thing. How does it know?
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