The Bluestocking: Next stop, Christmas!

[ifIwerenotanandroid]

Join us as we open our slightly wonky advent calendar. 🌲

(copies available behind the bar £12.50 each, no refunds)

Absolutely. Infant robins are completely safe with me. Any sparkly jewellery or nice shoes they happen to be carrying, less so.

Sionnach, your cute fluffy snow leopard is giving my husky rat a run for its money.
In the Bluestocking they would be friends and would delight us by playing together.
'Can't catch me, Snowy!'

I'm glad you had a good sleep, Myrtle, and in fairness to the Dream Gerbil, she was only going along with the seasonal 'thy deep and dreamless sleep'

I can't explain the timetabling dream, Magpie -perhaps the Dream Gerbil accidentally dropped her own schedule into your dreams?

That’s good!
DH got up early and has gone to to a Big Shop at Waitrose, and also send off some documents re my pension arrangements by special delivery bless him. He read all the small print for me yesterday - my reciprocal task was cleaning the en suite which is ‘his’ but between sensitive hands (prone to eczema) and a bad back it was a sensible division of labour.
I need to refill the bird feeders. A search, for no particular reason, for ‘Robin and magpie’ yielded articles suggesting the latter are inclined to bully the former and the solution is to hang up CDs etc as deterrents. I’ve never noticed any particularly bad behaviour in my airspace so I sha’n’t. All birds welcome here.

(My device has underlined my pedantically correct contraction of “shall not”. Is civilization doomed? It’s also underlined ”civilization” - wasn’t there an episode of Morse where he caught someone because of his undereducated use of “s” rather than “z”? Either is acceptable; the ‘s’ spelling in such words is useful in crosswords so it’s slightly surprising Morse was so intolerant of them.)

Oh, how did I end up in Pedantry Corner?

Morse was in Oxford. The Oxford University Press uses z spellings. Hence his disdain for specialise rather than specialize.

I agree that sha'n't is pedantically correct, but I've never seen it spelled thus. Shan't is grammatically correct.

The Walrus has also been to do the Big Shop at Tesco. He took the new car and spent a while looking at its features. I think he's happy.

I think Lewis Carroll uses sha'n't.

A friend of mine used to write 'fridge.
I don't if she still does.

Fridge always threw me. Why is the long form, refrigerator, not also spelt with a 'd'?

It’s certainly in at least one of the classic children’s books.

You don't tend to see robins chumming up with magpies

Really?

Then how did this happen? Just give MN a mo.

Wikipedia tells me that's actually a flycatcher, Cake! Just one that happens to be called a magpie-robin. You can see why, though, it's a very handsome species!

because it derives from ‘refrigerare’ and doesn’t need one to guide the pronunciation - the ‘d’ has been added to fridge to make it like ridge.

Which brings us to those people who shorten vegetables to veges. I always mentally pronounce that as a single syllable.
I think the conclusion we can reach is that English doesn't make sense!

Why did my mind suddenly bring up the phrase meat and two veg?

😳

Freudian, I'm sure 😂

Oh the winding peculiar irregular illogical ways of the English language ...

Sloth brain is now musing on variations of the spelling OUGH ...
slough
bough
ought
borough
though

edit - not to mention cough!

And I think through is a bit different from those too.

You’re subconsciously wondering if you really need much more than that for lunch on Thursday. Obviously not including the roast potatoes.

Hiccough too

I need to stop looking at my phone and get back to work. Trying to concentrate on some Matlab code (any fellow users?) and really not in the mood.

I've managed to avoid Matlab, thankfully, but I do use R.

I didn’t use matlab, we had our own proprietary stuff. DD did in her degree though. Now I’m curious why your field is.

How do you spell the English word for piscine creatures?

GHOTI

gh as is tough
o as in women
ti as in station

Never mind English place names.
Hunstanton
Wymondham
Worcester
Leicester
Gloucester

I give you Woolfardisworthy in North Devon.

( Pronounced "Woolsery", if you were wondering).