General
I'm headed back to San Francisco.
After celebrating the new year in Hopedale, I took the commuter rail back to Boston, accessed a wireless network near MIT, and had more tea at Tealuxe in Harvard Square.
I'm reading The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson, which Riana gave me recently. It's hilarious! There's something incredibly amusing about historical linguistics, especially accounts of changes in usage.
Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice -- as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.(pp. 77-8)
There are lots of other funny parts. I liked the description of the Oxford English Dictionary (now discussed at great length in The Professor and the Madman). Bryson says that the famous dictionary insists oddly
that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledge that the commonest spelling "is perh. Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.)
