Raining again
Monday morning and it’s raining again. It has been since Sunday and overnight we had a thunderstorm roll across which is now doing the rounds. They tend to come, go and come back again. Sunday, we spent some time at the Sunrise for a quiz, hence the photo today of the inside, warm and welcoming, and one of the cats. That made for a pleasant change and got me away from the typewriter where I have, of late, been very busy.
I ordered a book recently, the kind of thing that maybe only I find interesting and it’s called, “Passing English of the Victorian Era, A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase” which is a hefty title. The book was published in 1909 and is a mix of English and American English words in existence/use around 1870 and before. Some are still in use, others are not, but I’ve not read the whole thing yet. You can dip into almost any page and find a gem apart from two pages where the scanning didn’t work, and the text is blurred. This is a book from Forgotten Books (dot com if you want to look them up) where, I guess, they scan old copies and then print on demand.
A rather liked ‘A fair herd’ meaning, a good attendance of strangers. ‘We had a fair herd of day-trippers today’ still seems to work. I found one Greece related phrase, ‘Grecian Bend,’ for which the entry reads: (1865-70). A satirical description of a stoop forward in walking noticed amongst women of extreme fashion during the last years of the Second French Empire, and which was due to the use of enormously high-heeled French boots. The fashion fell with the Empire. (See Roman Fall, Alexandra Limp and Buxton Limp.) Another which just happened to catch my eye as it’s on the facing page is Griminess (literature). Eroticism in literature, especially French. That seems a bit harsh, and the book isn’t all about bashing the French. Anyway, it’s fun and useful and will give me something to flick through when it’s too wet to go out, as it is right now. I shall look forward to the summer to see if I can spot a fair herd of visitors milling about with a Grecian bond due to their ‘extreme’ fashion, whatever that is.
