What a glorious thing it is to have Henry V represented on stage, leading the French king prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to swear fealty.
The above are the words of the English Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, as quoted in 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which I’m obviously getting a lot of inspiration from. What obviously interested me about that quote was… the Dolphin. Continue reading
It’s that time again already: it’s next year! It seems like only yesterday that it was last year.
I’d set out my goals for the coming year and so on, but I don’t really do that, not on a yearly basis. I do have one hope for this year though, and that’s that this is the year we finally go back to saying the names of years as though they’re two separate numbers. You know, like ‘twenty-nineteen’ and ‘twenty-twenty.’ Continue reading
Oh my!
I was about to write a post, in fact I’d already started it, about the following tweet:
Imagine, completely hypothetically, that the President of Russia had information he could use to blackmail the President of the United States. Crazy, I know, but reading about this possibility recently made me think about the word blackmail. Continue reading
I was rooting through my George Orwell books this weekend, and realised that it had been a long time since I read his account of of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and grabbed it. It was only today at work when I questioned whether the title was a strange one.
Was it A Homage to Catalonia?
Or An Homage to Catalonia?
A minor difference, perhaps, but also perhaps all the difference in the world. Continue reading
Who would’ve thought this Monday evening that we’d all be reading and talking so much about a cemetery? But these days you just never know what’s going to happen, and now I’m thinking about the word cemetery. Continue reading
Usually, it’s capital that you need. But sometimes, and specifically right now if you’re in the United States, capitol’s the word you’re looking for. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 