Before the shift house was pronounced hoose (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced mood, and home rhymed with gloom, which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (Th...
I passed the time browsing in the windows of the many tourists shops that stand along it, reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world—kilts, bagpipes, tam-o’-shanters, tins of oa...
And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble h...
I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly...
85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of wor...
Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here...
It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a...
Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people.
Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your li...
Was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included
Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year.
Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well...
Comets develop their distinctive tails when their surface material begins to evaporate as they approach the Sun.
Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate.
Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother’s ankles, was banished to the freezer before she devel...
Partly for this reason Sir Thomas Gresham had recently built the Royal Exchange, the most fabulous commercial building of its day. (Gresham is traditionally associated with Gresham’s law—that bad mone...
People want everything. That’s their problem.
Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.
Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote. But
One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Countr...
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