Pedants' Paradise

[handsomefortune]

jean, i'm fine thank you very much. i can see you are on excellent form as always. though tbh i was rather enjoying a brief pretense of 'not knowing each other from adam'....... or, can i nominate someone else, from a different story perhaps?

i can sense that senna pods might well be really disastrous, having realised what they are caliban .... but thought perhaps they may be a percussion instrument, as they're sometimes full of pods ....as for the (outsized) 'trumpet', you can't call that a 'tuba mirum'.... more a 'maximum tuba' surely?

anyway, back ontopic and 'paradise'.

[LeMartinPecheur]

To be really pedantic, may I point out that that isn't a tuba, which in English would be trumpet...

But in German a trombone - "...zu der Zeit der letzten Posaune"

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

The very book I started with in 1962. We had a weekly ink exercise to hand in first thing every Monday.

I've been trying to track down a copy of this book (which I also started in 1962), but so far I've only managed to find "The New Approach to Latin", which pushes all the grammar to the back.

[Nick Armstrong]

i can sense that senna pods might well be really disastrous, having realised what they are caliban .... but thought perhaps they may be a percussion instrument, as they're sometimes full of pods ....as for the (outsized) 'trumpet', you can't call that a 'tuba mirum'.... more a 'maximum tuba' surely?

It's actually a bass bugle!

Vinteuil is the senna-pod expert: any questions to him please, on a postcard marked 'chez Swann'...

[handsomefortune]

yep, you don't support a tuba on your shoulder do you caliban?... and i did think of huntsman when i saw your pic...though that'd be some task: riding while blowing that huge bass bugle ..(i do hope macaroon trys it on that ex police horse mind you, it could easily be a valuable ritual of 'the big soc')!

[jean]

... as for the (outsized) 'trumpet', you can't call that a 'tuba mirum'...

You certainly can't!

It's the sonum that emerges from it that's mirum; the tuba itself would have to be mira. Or maxima.

Oh the fun we used to have on the old Beeb WH board!

[amateur51]

It's actually a bass bugle!

Vinteuil is the senna-pod expert: any questions to him please, on a postcard marked 'chez Swann'...

My Nain was the senna-pod expert - she believed that bowels were meant to be kept on the move and regulated at all times. She took charcoal biscuits after every meal to absorb the gases (!) and my father mused once that she probably needed an annual de-coke

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

[Nick Armstrong]

My Nain was the senna-pod expert - she believed that bowels were meant to be kept on the move and regulated at all times. She took charcoal biscuits after every meal to absorb the gases (!) and my father mused once that she probably needed an annual de-coke

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-NVMsj6lXA

[amateur51]

I've just checked in my Collins Spurrell and I'm relieved to find that there is no Welsh equivalent of petomaine

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm relieved

Glad to hear it, ams!

[Lateralthinking1]

The return of Lord Baker to the airwaves this morning. Subject - education.

14 year olds at the new technical schools will have a challenging "curricallum" (presumably somewhere between aka and Jamie). They will also be treated like "a dults" (what is a dults?). And then there were those ludicrous overly rounded vowels.

[handsomefortune]

perhaps he said 'dorks' lat!?

[mercia]

well well, I didn't know that decimate used to mean to kill 10% of a group - makes sense though

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17762034

[Panjandrum]

well well, I didn't know that decimate used to mean to kill 10% of a group - makes sense though
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17762034

Yes. One of those words, like fortuitous; or invariably; which is, er, almost invariably, used incorrectly.