Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

Sorry about that; I hope it didn't peeve your pet too much.

Do you like "accordian" music?

But sheep don't burrow underground. Do they?

The above scans well, but you need a good title with a colon in it.
All really serious studies have colons in the titles.  I think it's a
rule.

[...]

(It is with infinite sadness that I find that the Spirit of the
Internet has apparently seen the greater wisdom of destroying my
touchingly beautiful original reply, in which I dared to suggest that
Destiny itself had proclaimed our Scientifical Union, and urged you,
in despite of all that a vulgar World might say, to come away with me
to my Phrontistery on the hill. The vital message has now dissolved
into no more than a swirling soup of icily indifferent electrons. It
was clearly Not To Be: so be it: wiping a manly tear, I jut my jaw,
and grit my stiff upper lip (ouch! that bloody well hurts!): what is a
man if he be not Man Enough to outface the Worst a Cruel World may
care to chuck at him? It was Not to Be: my long resounding shuddering
cry is: I Accept. Perhaps in the long years to come I shall learn to
understand that it was All For The Best. But yet let me cherish in
some quiet corner of my spirit the Memory of the Dream.)

Meanwhile, the tweed thing is a little more complex than you perhaps
appreciate. We later-born are lucky enough to know both Harris tweed,
product of the Hebridean crofter weavers and their waulkings, and
Irish tweed of various kinds -- particularly the lyingly-named
"thornproof": if that Magee bloke ever comes near me, I'll smack him
in the mouth (but then again, the Widow Barbour too was lying when she
told me her waxed thing was thornproof: I don't know where she lives,
but we have proper thorns round here, and my now decrepit coat has
been back to the factory twice for major surgery. Even my US-Army
combat coat has stood up better).

English and Welsh rustics didn't use the Scottish or Irish kinds until
the 20th century, as they were reserved for the gentry; instead there
was a curious substance which few of them could afford known as "Derby
tweed". Derby tweed is a closely-woven pepper-and-salt-coloured
woollen stuff about half an inch thick which you used to be able to
buy a ready-made suit of in Carmarthen market and other such places: I
wish I had, as I now appreciate that it had a certain ham-bone-chewing
style about it, and it seemed to last as long as a Savile Row Suit
(i.e., if they didn't bury you in it, your grandchildren would give up
trying to wear it out, and offer it to the Victoria and Albert
Museum).

In Scotland, tweed sometimes had a more precise significance: just as
the Scots Guards had an almost incredibly brash private pattern for
their officers' off-duty wear (so loud, that in the sixties or
seventies of the century just past they couldn't bear to be seen in it
in public and got it modified: they had to get permission from the
Queen Mother, or the Lord High Executioner Pursuivant in Ordinary, or
somebody), so particular lairds had designs available only to their
employees. An echo of this custom was visible as late as the 1980s
when Forestry Commission emloyees might be seen in pretty ordinary
green-mixture tweed sports coats with red flannel collars bearing a
brass crown like soldiers' "collar-dogs".

So in England "velvet" it had to be.

Mike.

I suppose a person that makes a living crocheting could be called a
hooker.

"On the Waterfront," I think. 1950s.

Well, you can't get by with only one colour, after all.

The little bugger disappeared in a Stetson.

Mike.