Is this a question fir anyone? I like mine made with coffee beans. If I’m forced to drink tea, yes, milk and sugar. Strong, two flat sugars, a glug of milk to colour it.
My invitation was misplaced, but I would not be attending anyway. Today is the birthday of my daughter, grandmother, mare, and dog.
Reminds me of a joke told by a Brit friend years ago (He was from Southampton) Joe sees his friend Barney walk into a bar. Everybody else does and shouts of "Barney!" "How ya doin?" "Good old Barney" ring out as Barney finds a seat next to Joe. Joe look over at him and says, "Hey Barney. Everywhere I see you everybody seems to know you." "Of course they do. I know everyone." "Well it's a small town. I know a lot of people too." "Really. I've traveled extensively and really do know billions of people." "Oh, c'mon!" "I'll prove it to you. Let's fly to London and I'll introduce you to the Queen." At the airport Barney was greeted warmly by the sky caps, the ticket counter, and pretty much by everyone. On the flight the attendants all swooned over Barney. The cabbie in that took them to Buckingham Palace greeted Barney like an old friend. The guards at the palace greeted him. "Sorry sirs, the Queen will see you Barney, but your friend has to wait here." A few minutes later HRH comes out on the balcony arm and arm with Barney to cheers from the assembled crowd. Later Barney emerges from the palace to find Joe passed out and being attended to by people in the crowd. As he comes to Barney says to him. "So? I know old Liz, come out of it." "It wasn't that but when the old lady next to me said 'Oo's the old bat with Barney' I just lost it."
The version I've heard from here in the States features the Pope instead of the Queen, and the punchline is "I don't know who that guy in the funny hat is, but that's Barney next to him."
Those of us who care about language know that you can't 'buy back' something you never owned in the first place.
also the queen isnt HRH - Prines and prioncessees are his or her royal highness, monarchs are his or her majesty...lizzie is sometimes abbreviated as HM the Q
Barney was the name used by the British guy that told me that. He may have Americanized it, or the name sounded silly to his Anglican sensibilities. He was also fond of a saying "pitching a barney" which I came to understand meant throwing a fit.
There are 689, 227 trees in New York City. The most common species is the London Planetree. https://tree-map.nycgovparks.org/
'Having a barney' is an argument in british slang,... had a barney with the ex on the phone, that lass is a complete hatstand it can also mean a fight as in 'there were these 8 guys having a barney in the street' That aside originally it was a posh boy name like Rupert or Giles...being short for Barnabas
Is that the one that grows in Brooklyn (books shoved down kids' throats to make them hate reading, entry #1)
Hey man, what are you up to tonight? Oh, just listening to vulture sounds on youtube for my new novel.
Well, we can look at animal sounds as a comparison for human protolanguage. Birds, some rodents and some primates have features that resemble half a language. Birds have song, and various social mammals have discreet systems of alarm calls that describe different threats. Those are were language would start, and it begins to become a full language the more complex and abstract it is. Orthographically, it is believed all written language starts as pictograms, i.e a more literal, more straightforward representation by icons. Something closer to emojis. Similarly, it then becomes more abstract and complex, with letters and words that no-longer resemble real things and more complex written sentences. Interestingly, quite a large amount of modern writing all descends, via the Greek and Roman, from the Phoenician Alphabet, whereas languages usually arise independently. Presumably because writing arises after language and is more scholastic and bureaucratic in nature, less useful for basic needs and not part of living in most hunter-gatherer societies.
Kinda had a general sense of much of that, particularly the first paragraph. Reading Darwin really opened my eyes to that. He even discusses some of it, particularly around sexual selection. In many species of mammal sexual selection favors size in the male. In birds it takes the form of flashy displays by the male. Was there an aspect of sexual selection in the development of language? One piece of evidence is poetry and song. These have developed in all of the languages that arose in isolation from each other.
Not sure about a sexual selection aspect, but poetry and song were ways a people would be able to remember things before there was written language. Also those long lists of ancestors people would recite when meeting someone, like in Beowulf or I think The Iliad/Odyssey, or Lord of the Rings. People would memorize those, and by reciting the list now and then it remains in working memory. Otherwise they'd forget it. Look into the word Poiesis to understand a little more about the importance of poetry, song, and art in the time before written language. It means to make or to create, much in the sense that a god creates—and art, song and poetry were considered sacred and very close to godlike. Hence why all religious books are written in poetry. It allowed the stories to be remembered generation after generation.
