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2014 Book List: February

February 28th, 2014 by pladd

I got through books this month from my 2014 booklist, which means 22% of my goal is complete! Here they are, in order of me enjoying them:

Code Name Verity

Title: Code Name Verity
Author: Elizabeth Wein
Amount Read: All
Rating: 4/5
Why was this on my list?: I think I already had it on my list because of a review I read, but then it won just all the awards

The best thing about this book is the point of view. It starts off as the “confession” being written on scraps of paper by a Scottish spy in a Nazi interrogation headquarters in occupied France. Things get intense, as you can imagine. I also really enjoyed a look inside women’s lives during World War II: female wireless operators, female pilots, female spies, female special ops. It’s not a part of wartime life that gets a lot of press (did you even know there were lady pilots being badass back then?) and Wein deals with the issue with such humanity that it hardly feels like history. Her characters feel very real, which is part of why this book is so crushing because, yeah, they are in the middle of a brutal war, so most of it is also terrifying.

Letters from Skye

Title: Letters from Skye
Author: Jessica Brockmole
Amount Read: All
Rating: 4/5
Why was this on my list?: I read a review of it, and I love epistolary novels.

This novel is a series of letters telling one love story that spans 2 world wars. It begins when a cocky college boy sends a fan letter to his favorite poet, a semi-recluse who lives in the beautifully remote Isle of Sky, Scotland. Make anything an epistolary novel, and I will automatically like it more. It also kind of made me miss the rugged beauty of Scotland, and all those sheep fields and hills-not-mountains I used to tramp around.

Who Could That Be At This Hour?

Title: Who Could That Be At This Hour?
Author: Lemony Snicket
Amount Read: All
Rating: 3/5
Why was this on my list?: Leeeemoooooonyyyyy Sniiiiiickeeettttt

The Series of Unfortunate Events dragged on too much for me, but I’ve always enjoyed Lemony Snicket’s writing style (in manageable doses), and some of Daniel Handler’s adult novels are really enjoyable and well-written (particularly The Basic Eight, a mystery, and Adverbs, a confused fever dream). This first book in a new series takes place in the same universe as A Series of Unfortunate Events, just some years earlier. It has the usual Snicket kind of things: an ex-island (now mountain) that mines ink from terrified underground octopi, sneaky note passing through library book request cards, and a grim, Edward Gorey-like pall hanging over everything. Basically exactly what you’d expect, and sometimes that’s comforting.

Delusions of Gender

Title: Delusions of Gender
Author: Cordelia Fine
Amount Read: All
Rating: 3/5
Why was this on my list?: A review I read, probably on one of the blogs I follow about gender issues

This book was intensely interesting, and, of course, all about a subject I’m already very invested in. Cordelia Fine gives an overview of the various studies surrounding the “neuroscience of sexism,” the belief that there are two kinds of brains in the world and, say, the lady ones are somehow inherently bad at math and the guy ones just can’t grasp the concept of emotion unless it’s about bacon. Which you know is total bullshit, and it’s nice to have a more thorough understanding about some of the studies that supposedly back this up, and all of the ones that disprove it.

Gifts

Title: Gifts
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Amount Read: All
Rating: 3/5
Why was this on my list?: A book list about interesting kinds of magical systems in fantasy

This book was very atmospheric and odd, but unmistakably well-written, at least from a language standpoint. I got to the end and really felt like I knew the place she was writing about–I just wished more had happened there. It’s one of those slow-moving, world-building type of books, but at least the world is an interesting one. The poor hill clans each have magical “gifts” that help them survive, at least when bloodlines run true. The main character’s family birthright, just like his father’s, is to be able to unmake things with a glance and a gesture, at least it would be, if it would show up already. Sometimes waiting for puberty to turn you into a killing machine is such a drag.

The False Prince

Title: The False Prince
Author: Jennifer A. Nielsen
Amount Read: All
Rating: 3/5
Why was this on my list?: It was nominated for a Goodreads award

I feel like I would have been all about this book when I was like ten (except for the lack of badass ladies–ten-year-old me had standards), but unlike other children/YA books, it was harder to get into as an adult. The main character and a few other boys are being groomed to impersonate the crown prince of their fantasy-medieval country, which may be treason or may be Their Civic Duty. Also, the ones that don’t get picked get murdered, so it’s good motivation to study hard.

A Queer and Pleasant Danger

Title: A Queer and Pleasant Danger
Author: Kate Bornstein
Amount Read: All
Rating: 3/5
Why was this on my list?: It’s full title is A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today

The best thing about this book is that on the first page there are a list of “Also By This Author” and the first thing my eye saw was Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure. I was immediately thrown back in time to the single greatest thing I ever found while wandering the undisturbed stacks in Fondren. This book was insane. It was written entirely in chatroom transcripts, at a time when “Infobahn” was totally a word people thought would be used to describe the Internet in the future. I think I gave James Fox a copy for his birthday and reaching similar levels of ridiculousness is our yearly goal for Script Frenzy (alas, never achieved). I was BEYOND psyched to read its author’s memoir. Although looking back, that expectation set my sights a little too high. This book was crazy, but real-world crazy that was often just sad.

The Wedding Planner’s Daughter

Title: The Wedding Planner’s Daughter
Author: Coleen Paratore
Amount Read: All
Rating: 3/5
Why was this on my list?: I have no idea

This book was… okay. I can picture a certain kind of 8-year-old girl really liking it, although not 8-year-old me. It’s less about pretty dresses than you might suppose, but it’s more about everyday life drama of dealing with loss and moving on and making friends. Nothing all that exciting happens, although I enjoyed a lot of the descriptions of Cape Cod.

Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures

Title: Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures
Author: Amber Dusick
Amount Read: All except one chapter
Rating: 2/5
Why was this on my list?: Recommended on Goodreads because I liked the Hyperbole and a Half book

I didn’t like this book for two reasons, neither of which were its fault. The first is that, because of the style and the way it was recommended to me, I was comparing it to Hyperbole and a Half, which is a comparison no one can win. Allie Brosh is amazing in every way (writing style, comedic timing, explaining something that is so true and sad somehow in a funny way) and it’s unfair to hold anyone else to that standard. The second is that it’s about parenting (duh), but mostly the really gross unappealing parts. Which is like all of them, when you’re me. I was already feeling sick when I read this, so I ended up skipping the chapter about being sick since the other ones had still been too much about bodily fluids for my liking.

Every Day

Title: Every Day
Author: David Levithan
Amount Read: All
Rating: 1/5
Why was this on my list?: I think it was nominated for an award or something?

The idea for this book is interesting–the main character is a new person everyday, wearing their body and accessing their memories until midnight when he moves on to some other random body (always the same age as him and within a close proximity). This premise raises a lot of interesting issues, almost none of which are explored. Towards the end, almost off-handedly, the protagonist discovers there are more people like him, and that they can learn to control what they do. But he dismisses finding out anymore about that because, whatever it’s not boring enough or something. The bulk of the plot is about his creepy relationship with the girlfriend of one of the people he possesses. Maybe it’s just because I really hate the love at first sight trope, but their relationship struck me as superficial bullshit. “He looks at her and only he can see her secret sadness” uggggggggh no. You can’t use that as a shortcut to establishing a believable connection between two characters. Plus, the ethical implications of dragging your host body around, wrecking its life because it’s your vehicle for the day are only kind of acknowledged. We’re supposed to realize that his stalker-Nice Guy(TM) love trumps all those concerns, I guess. Also, he hops into a lot of different teen-problem-novel-esque situations that we’re supposed to Learn A Very Important Lesson about, even though these people are portrayed as strange cardboard cut-out minorities with almost no humanity of their own. Except the one fat guy he possesses, who is described as “the societal equivalent of a burp.” The protagonist makes a big show of how non-judgmental he is, except of the fat guy, because since you did this to yourself, you deserve society’s scorn. A GIANT NOPE TO BOTH THOSE ASSUMPTIONS, David Levithan. Ew.

Goblin Secrets

Title: Goblin Secrets
Author: William Alexander
Amount Read: One and a half chapters
Rating: ???
Why was this on my list?: It won some awards

I wanted to like this book! I love Baba Yaga, and people with clockwork robot legs, and fish that swim in dust. But somehow the beginning and the main character both failed to grab me, and I found myself really unenthused about reading anymore. Maybe it’s the higher level of commitment you have to make to a fantasy novel, all the time it takes to understand the world it’s set in. I’m not willing to make the effort for just anyone! Maybe that makes me lazy, or picky, or something. I guess I have pretty high standards. But there’re too many books I want to read, so no sense wasting time on something that doesn’t excite you.

Previously: January

Tagged: 2014 goals, Book Reviews, books

Posted in 2014 League of Six, Book Reviews |

Theatrically Released Animated Disney Movies

February 25th, 2014 by pladd

For some reason, I found myself looking at Wikipedia’s list of all theatrically-released animated Disney movies the other day, and decided I needed to rank the ones I’d seen. There are 58 of them (and 47 more I haven’t seen), and I ranked them kind of haphazardly, by going through and asking for each “Okay, is this better than that?” until I’d made a list. Some of them are tricky, because the plot’s pretty crappy but the animation is beautiful or I really like the songs. Others I’m pretty sure have earned their spots only through nostalgia. Here’s the Top 10:

1. Frozen (2013; Walt Disney)
2. Mulan (1998; Walt Disney)
3. Spirited Away (2002; Studio Ghibli)
4. Beauty and the Beast (1991; Walt Disney)
5. Emperor’s New Groove (2000; Walt Disney)
6. Aladdin (1992; Walt Disney)
7. Finding Nemo (2003; Pixar)
8. The Little Mermaid (1989; Walt Disney)
9. Hercules (1997; Walt Disney)
10. Howl’s Moving Castle (2005; Studio Ghibli)

It was interesting to me that a lot of them are from right around the same time period. Is that because Disney was the most skilled then? Or because I was the right age? Obviously there are outliers, like Frozen at #1 and the original Fantasia from 1940 ranking pretty high at #23 (see full list at the end). I made a graph scatter plotting release dates with my rankings and you can see most of the top ones are clustered in the post-1985 range, although that’s also when Disney increased their output, and acquired other studios like Pixar and Ghibli.

Interestingly, the worst ranked movie is from 1985

Here’s the bottom 10:

49. Sleeping Beauty (1959; Walt Disney)
50. Ponyo (2009; Studio Ghibli)
51. Dumbo (1941; Walt Disney)
52. A Goofy Movie (1995; DisneyToon)
53. Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1998; Hyperion)
54. Pinocchio (1940; Walt Disney)
55. Bambi (1942; Walt Disney)
56. Tarzan (1999; Walt Disney)
57. Doug’s First Movie (1999; DisneyToon)
58. The Black Cauldron (1985; Walt Disney)

If anything, it’s harder for me to decide the worst than the best, maybe because my reasons for disliking a movie are more varied. In the end, The Black Cauldron beat out all crappy contenders by having a lot of the same problems of plot, characters, and art style but also trying to cram 5 books into one movie. Five books that I kind of really like, especially at the time I first saw this film. You can imagine the disappointment. Child-Me had not yet come to terms with the fact that movie adaptions of books you like are often fraught with terribleness, but this movie helped teach her that lesson, I guess.

You might also notice that this bottom list is more varied in terms of studio responsible than the top list. I was interested in that too, and if there was a correlation between studio and quality. The comparison is a little unfair, of course, since Walt Disney Studios has produced 37 of the films on this list, while the next most prolific, Pixar, only has 10.

Films on this list produced by each studio

Still, I thought it would be illustrative, so here are the average rankings of each studio on the list (out of 58, remember)

The results aren’t surprising

DisneyToon makes a terrible showing, partly because there are only 2 films it produced, and both are on the bottom ten. Studio Ghibli is a clear winner, even with the terribleness of Ponyo weighing it down from #50. Walt Disney Studios, where the bulk of these are coming from, is sitting comfortably in the middle. Because, sure, it’s got its Frozen and Mulan, but it also has The Black Cauldron and Tarzan weighing it down.

Here’s the full list: Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: charts, disney, movies

Posted in lists |

C

February 23rd, 2014 by pladd

Yay! I finally finished the C section in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. At 127 pages, it’s the longest letter. I’m still only about 23% of the way to completion, but that’s pretty good for February! Here are some interesting things I encountered in C:

Candidate: … Those who solicited a high office among the Romans, such as that of consul, dressed themselves in a loose white robe. It was loose so that they could show the people their scars…

Elections would be a whole lot more exciting if it was all about comparing scars! Although I guess they’re already like that, metaphorically.

That’s right! This hot fashion item was named after a dude!

Cardigan: A knitted jacket or sweater with buttons up the front, named after the 7th Earl of Cardigan (1797-1868), who led the Light Brigade in the charge of Balaclava.

What a way to be remembered.

Brewer’s sometimes likes to tell you etymology, although it’s not the OED. I assume the editors only include word origins when they think they’re poetic and interesting, like:

Cemetery: The proper name of the word is “sleeping place” from the Greek Koimeterion, “dormitory.” The Persians call their cemeteries “the cities of the silent.”

“Sleeping Place” makes it less creepy, “city of the silent” makes it more

Cento: (Latin, ‘patchwork’) Poetry made up of lines borrowed from established authors, an art freely practiced in the decadent days of Greece and Rome… An example of a stanza from a modern cento, with lines taken from 19th-century poets, is the following:

I only knew she came and went (Lowell)
Like troutlets in a pool; (Hood)
She was a phantom of delight (Wordsworth)
And I was like a fool. (Eastman)

Basically, I’ve discovered ancient sampling.

Chamberisms: Such may be called the idiosyncratic definitions that have regularly appeared in the various editions of Chambers Dictionary… the following remain in the 1998 edition:

he-man: a man of exaggerated virility, or what some women consider to be virility
jaywalker: a careless pedestrian whom motorists are expected to avoid running down
middle-aged: between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner

Judgmental reference sources are the best! Brewers can be pretty judgey itself sometimes.

Charivari: A French term for an uproar caused by banging pans and kettles and accompanied by hissing, shouting, and the like to express disapproval, especially at an unpopular wedding

The emphasis is mine because what??

I’m picturing bored villagers going to weddings to heckle

Also, there’s this list, of everything bad that’s ever happened to a king named Charles. Thanks, Brewers.

Charles: Many rulers bearing this name have been afflicted with misfortune:

England:
Charles I was beheaded
Charles II lived long in exile
Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, died in poverty

France:
Charles II, the Fat, reigned wretchedly, was deposed, and died in poverty
Charles III, the Simple, died a prisoner
Charles IV, the Fair, reigned six years, married three times, and outlived all his children except one daughter, who was forbidden by the Salic Law to succeed to the crown
Charles VI, the Foolish, went mad
Charles VII starved himself to death, partly through fear of being poisoned and partly because of a painful and incurable abscess in the mouth
Charles VIII, the Affable, accidentally smashed his head against the lintel of a doorway and died in agony at the age of 28, leaving no issue
Charles IX died at the age of 24, stricken with remorse for the part he had taken in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
Charles X spent a quarter of a century in exile, and after less than six years on the throne, fled for his life and died in exile
Charles the Bold of Burgundy lost his life at Nancy when he was routed by the Swiss

Naples:
Charles I lost Sicily and experienced many disasters
Charles II, the Lame, was in captivity at the time of his father’s death
Charles III, his great-grandson, was assassinated at the age of 41

I guess it’s the price you pay to look this fabulous

Also, apparently 18th-century Italy decided that husbands were necessary but so not fashionable.

Cicisbeo: The escort or lover of a married woman, especially in 18th-century Italy. At that time, it was unfashionable for a husband to associate with his wife in society or in public, and she was therefore accompanied by her cicisbeo.

I knew about the claque, which is basically the theater version of a laugh track, but I didn’t know there were so many specialties within it:

Claque: A body of hired applauders, as at a theater… The manager ordered the required number of claqueurs and divided them into groups. There were the commissaires, who committed the play to memory and noisily pointed out its merits, the rieurs, who laughed uproariously at the jokes, the pleureurs, mainly women, who held their handkerchiefs to their eyes during the emotional scenes, the chatouilleurs, who kept the audience in good humor with their quips and gestures, and the bisseurs, who cried bis (encore).

How great a job would this be? Anyone wanting to pay me to attend their show and react dramatically, just give me a call.

Plus, it turns out, everyone afraid of clowns is completely justified:

Clown: … [the standard appearance] is probably a relic of the Devil as he appeared in medieval miracle plays.

I always suspected this was the true face of evil

Also, very occasionally, Brewer’s will have illustrations:

Here’s one for the entry on different kinds of crosses

I’ve already made a start on D! It’s only the 10th longest letter, with 63 pages, so I’m hoping it won’t take me as long!

Previously: B
Next: D

Tagged: 2014 goals, brewer's

Posted in 2014 League of Six |

A Year With Pink Hair

February 21st, 2014 by pladd

Well, it’s been about a year since I dyed my hair hot pink. It’s grown out a little and faded a little, but it still looks pretty cool:

It’s weird how it didn’t grow or fade evenly either

Obviously it’s nowhere near as striking as it once was:

I miss you, all hot pink all the time

It’s pretty amazing how quickly you get used to something like this, how easy it is to forget there’s anything weird about you. It was hardly a month before I was wondering why people were staring at me in the store. I don’t get as many stares now that I’m less bright, but still some. And even though it’s not as exciting and dramatic as it once was, I still feel really happy every time I look in a mirror. It can make me smile, even if there’s nothing else to smile about, and that’s worth something. I’m looking forward to a time when unnatural-colored hair is more accepted by dress codes everywhere so more people will be free to express themselves. I haven’t redyed it for two reasons: future job searches and money. I hope within my lifetime, both of those issues will resolve themselves, and I’ll have the most awesome hair of any 50-year-old space pirate ever (hey, we all have plans for the next 25 years).

This might be my favorite picture of it because it’s the only bright thing in a drab world

Even though I’m not continuing my awesome look, I don’t regret getting it for a second. It makes me happy, and it seems to make other people happy too. One of the best things about having unusual hair is that strangers talk to you way more. Most of the time to say “I like your hair!” or ask questions about it, but also often on some other topic entirely. Maybe having hot pink hair broadcasts the message that I’m a cool person and that makes people more likely to talk to me. Maybe I seem friendlier and happier since I dyed my hair. Maybe both!

This was last May, already lighter!

I thought the most disapproving group would be older people, but they actually talk to me the most (besides children!). At the community center where I work out, there are always senior citizens waiting for other programs, who’ll often say things like “Look at that!” or “That’s the brightest hair I’ve ever seen!” Maybe they’re old enough to not care so much about being the Appearance Police, or maybe there are just way more cool old people in the world than I realized. I’ve had a lot of conversations with them this year, and it’s been awesome.

The other conversation I most often become a part of is when some child stares, points, and says “Mommy, that lady has pink hair!” The mom will respond with “Yes” or sometimes “Yes, isn’t it pretty?” or just kind of pull them away depending on how much they think I’m a Bad Example. This is Cary, so I expected a lot of the latter, but actually the first two are way more common! Also, there’s a lot of people in college or high school who compliment me and then ask questions like:

How long has it been? One year
WHAT? How is that possible? It’s a permanent dye and I’m part magic
What dye did you use? Elumen
Where did you get it done? Atomic Salon
Did you have to bleach it first? Yes:

WHERE MY DRAGONS AT? Maybe I should go back to this next!

It’s weird, because now I only notice people staring at me when I’m out of town, like a recent trip to Asheville or in Florida. I guess this could be because I’m more aware of my surroundings in an unfamiliar location where maybe I already feel somewhat like I don’t belong. But I prefer to think it’s the same reason I gave Rob when he remarked, at a Cary festival, that no one was really staring at me like he expected: “Well, they’re used to me by now.”

Yes, everyone in the Triangle has already seen my weird hair and gotten over it. This actually might be kind of true, at least around here, since the other HUGE perk to having weird hair is that you only have to go to a place once to be a regular. People remember you, and it’s the best. I’ll be a little sad to give up this Instant Regular status, but hopefully my favorite waitresses and grocery store clerks will gradually get used to the non-pink me.

This is from November. You can definitely see it’s much lighter, but I like that shade too

The only sort of negative consequence I can think of is that you have to start taking a different attitude to your wardrobe. Before I had pink hair, I knew some colors looked better on me than others, but nothing looked automatically hideous, just less flattering. Now, not so much. A lot of things clash with hot pink. It’s a bright color! You can’t avoid it. There’s a whole section of my closet now that’s basically in quarantine till “after pink.” Almost everything I’ve bought in the last year has been black or gray or a kind of turquoise or some shades of blue. Black is the best, because it’s the most striking against the pink. I definitely don’t wear as many busy prints as I used to either, just because it can easily be sensory overload. But I’m okay with that, and it doesn’t really affect my life that much. If you have a desire and the chance to dye your hair an amazing color, I say go for it!!! I have no regrets. It’s been the best year ever!

Previously: Pink Hair!
Two Weeks In

Tagged: hair

Posted in Let Me Tell You About My Life |

Snow!!

February 13th, 2014 by pladd

So maybe you’ve heard about North Carolina’s recent duel with icy winter death. Which isn’t just me being overly dramatic–Cary has sent me like 5 emails a day with titles like “SNOW COMMAND ACTIVATED: IT’S GO TIME” because that’s how the Town of Cary rolls. And I’m totally okay if you want to take this time to say something like “Why are people panicking over six inches of snow? Where I’M from we don’t cancel school unless children are eaten by polar bears and also I’m an ice road trucker and you are a wuss.” That’s fine. I get that saying things like that is the one consolation you get when you choose to live somewhere that turns into a barren frostscape of despair for half the year, so you do whatever you gotta do to avoid falling into a pit of Seasonal Affective Disorder or whatever. Call me if climate change brings another hurricane to the Northeast and you need tips. No hard feelings.

Anyway, Steven and I have both been safely at home for most all of it. The power’s been going off and on, and I definitely heard some transformers are Maynard blow up last night, but if you’re not immediately worried about freezing to death, it can be really pretty:

This was the view out my window yesterday around 5

It had slowed down by then (started around noon), although it continued to periodically rain icy pellets throughout the night.

Our apartment complex’s ancient AC units bedded down in the snow!

Of course, I had to go out to check on Trixie. Earlier we’d had the harrowing experience of driving home from the community center in the first blast of the storm, and she still might be traumatized.

We’re both from Florida, okay?

Which is probably why I couldn’t figure out how to get my windshield wipers to stand up like that. I actually tried this time, though, which is a first.

Clearly it means I’m becoming a Northerner

Yesterday evening when I went for a walk (to get the mail! Which had arrived! Neither snow nor rain nor glom of nit! Good job, USPS!) the snow was still all soft and crunchy and mostly pristine. Here it is near the mailbox, coming up around my ankles in my nice snow boots:

I don’t often get to use them for their intended purpose

This morning when I went out, the ice-rain overnight had hardened everything. Now instead of crunching down on the snow, your feet punch through a layer of ice:

That’s what it feels like, too, a punch. It makes for slow going

But I still walked around and took some pictures of things

Here’s Trixie, all covered in icicles

And here’s a pine tree, needles all icy and pretty when the wind blows

Here’s some dude’s truck all full of snow

Here’s the main road leading into my apartment complex!

It was looking pretty good this morning, thanks to Snow Command and Town of Cary’s A-Team (I have yet to really figure out the relationship between the two. The emails give clues, but nothing definite). Unfortunately, my apartment complex’s parking lot was still a sheet of ice:

Maybe it cleared up after I went back inside

Although I kind of doubt it because then this afternoon:

More snow!

Bring it, I hate leaving the house anyway.

Well, it’s true

Tagged: cary, snow

Posted in Let Me Tell You About My Life |

B

February 4th, 2014 by pladd

I finally finished the B section of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable! It’s okay that it took me a little while–B is the third longest chapter, after C and S. I guess theoretically this means I’m 1/13 (about 8%) of the way through this project, but really it’s more like 14% if you’re actually counting page numbers. You can’t really compare X (2 pages) and C (127 pages) and say that they’re both 1/26 of the whole.

Anyway, here are the best things I read about that start with B:

Babar. The elegantly dressed African elephant in the books for young children by the French writer and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff … His name, perversely enough, appears to derive from Hindi babar, ‘lion’.

So I guess he’s suffering from species dysmorphic disorder. In more ways than one.

Remember the rule that if the Professor is more than 10 minutes late, you can leave class? There’s definitely a better way:

Barring out. In former days, a schoolboys’ practice of barricading masters out of the classroom or the school. In 1818 soldiers were called in to deal with a rebellious outbreak at Winchester College.

Someone really didn’t want to take a midterm, I guess.

Bark. Dogs in their wild state never bark, but howl, whine, and growl. Barking is an acquired habit.

I really wish my neighbor’s dog hadn’t acquired this habit, at least at 7 in the morning.

To beat the bounds.An old custom … of going around the parish boundaries on Ascension Day. The schoolchildren, accompanied by the clergyman and parish officers, walk round the boundaries, which the boys ‘beat’ with peeled willow-wands. The boys were originally themselves sometimes beaten at the limits of the boundaries to make them remember the place.

A civics lesson at its best

Belle laide. (French, ‘beautiful ugly one’) An intriguingly unattractive woman.

Also sometimes you learn supposedly American slang you’ve never heard before:

Booby hatch. An American slang expression for a psychiatric hospital.

Or the strange origins of common words:

Bully. The original meaning of the noun was “sweetheart” as in:

“I kiss his dirty shoe, and from my heart-strings
I love the lovely bully.”
Shakespeare: Henry V, IV, i (1598)

Its origin is probably in Middle Dutch boele, ‘lover’. The sense development seems to have gone as follows: (1) lover, (2) fine fellow, (3) blusterer, (4) bully.

C is probably going to take me awhile! It’s the longest chapter in the book!

Next: C
Previously: A

Tagged: 2014 goals, brewer's

Posted in 2014 League of Six, Project Series |