Lexie’s Comments (group member since May 19, 2014)

Lexie’s comments from the Net Work Book Club group.

Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) wrote: "Lexie wrote: "I remember seeing a - difference of opinion - between two very elevated academics when I was an undergraduate. It began with 'With respect, Professor ...', then went on to 'With all d..."

It all reminds me of Yes, Minister, if you know it!

I remember seeing a - difference of opinion - between two very elevated academics when I was an undergraduate. It began with 'With respect, Professor ...', then went on to 'With all due respect, Sir John ...' 'With the greatest respect, Professor ...' 'With the greatest possible respect, Sir John ...' and so on - never an angry word spoken but boy, the temperature in the room certainly rose!

No, the painting one is the Forth Bridge, which is cantilever and Victorian, and for the railway. The Forth Road Bridge is about 1970s and is suspension. It has since been mostly superseded, if you want some bridge facts, by the Queensferry Crossing, an even bigger but rather more graceful suspension bridge, only opened in 2017. Lovely to look at from the Forth Bridge, but less exciting to drive across. Here's a link to the bridges' website! www.https://www.theforthbridges.org/

Brilliant - I hadn't heard either of these! I have been known to compare them to the Forth Road Bridge - but that might mean little to those outside the U.K.

Of course, this must be more confusing to the younger generation for whom, apparently, that word now means 'to win a medal at the Olympics'. It sounds very dodgy to me!

That's a good question. Don't have time to investigate at present, which probably means it will bug me all day!

Yet who wants to be bored? Hope it's a good busy time for you - and for your mother. Mine is busy with her garden, though the days grow colder.

Hello! I'm around, just about! Busy busy, as September is always my most hectic month of the year and it seems to be expanding into August and October.

Have I said before that my mother has a number of odd sayings, chiefly designed to stop nosy children in their tracks? 'What's that?' we'd ask. 'It's a thing for a gate', she would reply. 'Where is it?' 'In Nelly's room behind the wallpaper.' But one of my favourites was when she referred to casual clothes, the ones you'd wear for rough work, as her 'dishabells'. It took a couple of years of French classes before I realised she meant 'deshabille'.

I think I would have pronounced it Fooks, approximately (like the English surname Ffoulkes)!

We still use that in the U.K. - an unmade road is one that isn't tarmacadamed, or tarmac'd. Also, I think, an unmade-up road.

I love Saki, and frequently invoke those rodents of disbelief with the exclamation 'Beyond-rats!'.

In Sussex they tend just to say 'Oh, bless!' if someone does something daft - there, 'soft' is another word for 'foolish', which doesn't occur up here in Scotland. Unless it's 'soft in the head'.

Am I right in thinking it used also to mean 'foolish'?

Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) wrote: "Not really a "love", just a switch. Until just recently this would have been a phrase I hated. "If you don't know/understand, I can't tell/explain it to you."

Until just recently I would have clas..."

Yup. Sometimes it's impossible even to know where to start.

Love Shakespeare. Just watched a DVD of Merchant of Venice with Jonathan Price as Shylock, performed at The Globe. The groundlings were very well behaved.

They also say he spoke Brummie. I suspect he picked up all kinds of words and sounds on his travels.

Arma geddon - I like that.

The South from here (the south of the island, not of the country) could mean Mummerset - the derogatory word for a sort of stage-fake Somerset/Devon/Cornish accent of a vague West Country, Thomas Hardy type (characterised by the blank stare, chewing straw and saying 'Ar'), or Estuary - the dodgy London mix with a bit of Jamaican thrown in for street cred, man. A claimant at a job centre in Sussex once said to me 'I dint sign on last week cos I was sick or sumfink, innit?' Prime Estuary.

Degus are indeed lovely, very bright and intelligent and keep the cats in line. They're from Chile so I suppose it's a Spanish word?

Stands the church clock at ten to three,
And is there honey still for tea?

Oh, I know it means what I think it means - it's from the Latin, and anyway, we have degus (related to guinea pigs) who are crepuscular. But it sounds like creeping, creaking, the sound made by crunching on snow or crepe-soled shoes behind you in the dusk ...

Anyway, hello, too! I know I only drop in occasionally, but I love discussing words.

After a gentle quarrel at work yesterday (I'm lucky enough to do some odd hours at a university bookshop) about whether or not it would be dark when we all went home, and deciding it wasn't light but not quite dusk, I remembered the word crepuscular, which we all then used with enthusiasm. I'm not sure it sounds like what it means, but it's a lovely word!

Knees of lots of trees, not just cypress - Kipling refers to 'immortal oaken knees'.

Not quite relevant but I like it - the Scots for chest (as in storage container) is kist - just as church is kirk, and breeches are breeks. Somewhere that soft ch hardened up as it went north of the border!