Words That Mean Something Different When You Say Them In Britain

• "pants"
• "pissed"
• "johnny"

fun evening. after getting back from coventry (post on that forthcoming), choir folks had a noisy dinner at jamal's curry place, dropped by the corpus halloween bop, then hung out in catherine's room and eventually played a game of trivial pursuit. thanks to catherine's brilliance (she was quite impressive--she knew such things as the date of the chicago valentine's day massacre, and that jfk was shot in dallas--but had to ask me what state dallas was in), our team won. it was quite fun. i also had my first gin and tonic.

Things That You Don't Say Unless You're An American

• "folks"
• "automobile"
• "all y'all"

Status Report

physical status: the unbeatable cold is just about beaten. maintaining tea intake.

academic status: wittgenstein-induced fatigue has set in, but i made it through tutorial today, and i've checked out my reading for this week a full four days ahead of the standard timeline. looking up.

river status: blue flag. it's been red flag all week, due to the heavy rains, which means nobody gets to row. this had the upshot of my having nothing to get up at 6:30 for on tuesday, but i also missed the land training (on rowing machines) wednesday night due to aforementioned wittgenstein-induced fatigue. but now that the river is blue flag again (heaven knows how that happened--the rain certainly hasn't let up) saturday's outing should go ahead on schedule.

limericks status: 35. you can see my brilliance at oedilf.com using "browse limericks by author", if you're into that kind of thing.

sleep status: above-average nocturnality. gonna do better tonight, i promise.

political status: just filled out my ballot, and feeling chock-full of civic virtue. retaining my right to secret ballot, i'll just mention that it's a beautifully split ticket, and i'll be pleased to send it off in the morning so the authorities can disregard it with the rest of the absentees. 'cause everybody knows the elections are settled by the evening of voting day. right?

vocal status: the choir should have my resplendent tenor back in action tomorrow, lord willing.

weather status: dark and wet. all the comforts of home.

discovery status: did you know they had daylight savings in britain? i mean, i guess i should have noticed by now that i would be seven hours off instead of eight if they didn't, but it came as a surprise to me. didn't ben franklin invent daylight savings?

unknown intruder status: so here's a funny story. the other night this bloke wandered into the computer cluster, where i was pretending i wasn't writing limericks while my supper cooked. fiftyish, thick-bearded, alcohol on his breath, and not a straight answer in him. as you probably know, i would make a very poor authority figure, but i did my best to impress on him that, no, he didn't live here, and it would be best for everyone if he went back outside. communication, you'll have to understand, was a bit hairy, since between his irish accent and the alcohol i could barely make out anything he said. and next, somehow, instead of showing him the door, i was sitting down with him for supper in the kitchen. i had put more eggs to boil than i intended to eat, anyway, right?

so the two of us had supper (a simple meal--thick slices of bread with butter and hard-boiled egg) and as time went by, he drank lots of water, and i got accustomed to the accent, he grew more intelligible. and so i listened. gerard told me the history of ireland, his own story--his family fled to england to escape the violence in northern ireland when he was thirteen; odd jobs had taken him to france, holland, and algeria--the merit of the socialist cause, his ex-catholic atheism, his views on the gulf war, the rosenberg trial, capital punishment, and president bush. i didn't talk a lot; i didn't need to. eventually i told him i needed to get back to my studying, and he said he'd just sit and have some more water. so we sat together for another hour at the kitchen table while he read the newspaper and i read wittgenstein. finally i declared that it was bedtime, and so he went to the bathroom while i collected my books, and i said good night as gerard walked out the front door to the high street.

stephanie (programme administrator) sent an email out the next day reporting that an intruder of unknown intent had got into the stanford house, and for everyone to please be careful about closing the door behind them, and that if anyone should get in (while the instinct to be friendly is laudable) it is best not to entertain them, as they might remember and try to return.

i d'know.

blog status: updated.

OEDILF

two words: oh, yes. be sure to look up "academic freedom". i've made five submissions in all so far.

okay, back to the problem of other minds and wittgenstein's criticism of introspection. i need one of those poll thingies--do you experience states of consciousness?

Cool People

Today we went on our second and final Bing Grant Trip, this time to Stratford to see Hamlet. Okay, you all knew this, but man, that's a great play. The production (by the Royal Shakespeare Society) was quite good--I especially liked the way they portrayed the ghost: half-naked, powder-white, dragging a massive sword and swaying in a kind of ghoulish ballet. Hamlet himself was unfortunately histrionic even in the lull bits, but it happens. Oh, and Polonius was the most brilliantly comic self-important Polonius I've seen.

We also toured Shakespeare's 'Birthplace', which was a big laugh--basically nothing is known about Shakespeare's early life, and so we saw all sorts of replicas-of-spoons-of-the-kind-the-bard-might-have-used and that sort of business. And before that we saw Blenheim palace, with a quite good exhibit on the importance of the Battle of Blindheim and the War of Spanish Succession, and I managed to get watchlessly engrossed and hold everyone up for fifteen or twenty minutes.

But what I really wanted to mention, because I think people ought to know, is that the people in the Stanford-in-Oxford Programme are really cool. Like last night, I was hanging out down the hall (in a very extended sense of "hall", making allowances for the shape of the building. A hall of the kind that has doors and staircases in it.) until the wee hours, with Matt and Jenna, who were both SLE kids, with JD (for Jarrett Daniel), who was a high school Latin scholar and is also my roommate, and with Lisa, who is Jenna's roommate and a history major, and therefore also cool. And the five of us hung around in Lisa and Jenna's room until almost three am talking. And such wonderful talk! This programme has above all things been for me a realm of wonderful conversation, talk without end. I have never found a shortage of argument, discussion, or banter. Last night we talked about grammar and poetry and reverence for language, and an occasional smattering of international law. There have been countless impromptu discussions of accents, library policies, grocery stores, politics and religion, sustained by a passion for understanding one another and the world more clearly and the joy of conversation for its own sake, seasoned with wit and liberally sprinkled with laughter. Maybe being thrown together mostly strangers with our first two weeks holding almost inexhaustible leisure time brought this about. But I think a good deal of it is that we're basically nerds, and particularly the sort of nerds who thought that the Oxford programme, whose main attraction is doing a lot of hard independent learning and writing and talking about it, sounded like a good time. Anyway, I'll take it.

(Lisa said (about Stanford students, I think, not the Oxford programme), "Basically, we had to be uber-nerds to know when the application deadline was.")

The coolness is by no means restricted to the Stanford students. Dr. Greif, our Stanford-faculty-abroad-with-us-guy and economic historian, knows about everything and loves to chat on any terms. And my tutor, Dr. Oswald Hanfling, who has been doing philosophy for probably fifty years and has written books on stuff from logical positivism to aesthetics, is great fun to spar with, though I know he's only toying with me. And there are a miscellany of Corpus students I've been gradually getting to know through choir or rowing or the CU, and though I can hardly make out half of what is said in those circles the coolness is spread pretty thick there too.

Which is not to say that I don't miss the rest of you, because I do. But I thought you ought to know that I'm in good company out here.

Notes of a Linguistic Character

"happy-clappy": lively/charismatic/"low" church
"bellsy-schmellsy": liturgical/sacramental/"high" church

not sure if those are official english terms or coined on the spot (the spot being in this case the corpus christian union before-church breakfast this morning), but apt enough, and to my ear rather characteristically english.

some more commonplace vocabulary:

rubbish 1. n. trash, garbage. "the rubbish men went on strike." "there's a rubbish bin under the counter." 2. adj. of poor quality or bad taste. "that's rubbish music."
salad, n. vegetables of any kind in any context. "salad on your sandwich?"
first, n. 1. top marks at university. "do you think you'll get a first?" 2. a person who achieves top marks. "she was a first in maths at cambridge."
bloke, n. person, esp. male; guy. "some blokes have been working on the road all day."
footballer, n. one who plays soccer. (also cricketer, though not rugbyer)
swish, adj. up-to-date, spiffy, high-tech: "the screens in the Bod aren't so swish."

lots of rather subtle differences, too--you'll have noticed above that university is a mass noun (like "college" for americans, but i've only heard "college" as a count noun here). lots of vocabulary has no great change in meaning, but a change in commonness: "clever" supplants "smart", "brilliant" for "cool", etc.

further bulletins will be posted as noted.

Ireland

Getting this much anticipated post out has been a trick. Its posted date is a bit of wishful thinking, really.

The difficulty is that I've had quite an eventful week, eventful enough that none of you really want to sit through all the events. New things are like that, and I've had two new countries, fifty new people, and an entirely new sort of living to adjust to this week. On the other hand, within a couple weeks all the novelties will be exhausted, and I'll have nothing to write about except my insights into the Cartesian Circle. So I think the best policy is to pace myself, sating your appetite for my life in tiny bits.

Ireland is not a tiny bit, though. Ireland is a great emerald island an hour's flight to my west covered in an irregular patchwork of fields and pastures. It's a island that has been violently divided, that never experienced Britain's industrial revolution, and until recently was one of the poorest in the world. But you wouldn't guess that, at least not at first, stepping into Dublin, a bustling city of a million people on the Liffey River. The city center swarms with youth, bars and clubs and theatres and ethnic restaurants and fashionable shopping, with optimism and left-leaning social policies and lively nightlife and high art and culture and literary tradition. We stayed in an upscale hotel across from Trinity College--J.D. and I in a great big room on the top floor--within a short walk of everything.

And everything was about what Stephanie, our fearless coordinator, had in store for us. Pummeled from every side by a battery of walking tours dull and grand, we visited old paintings and old books and old houses and old churches and old castles. Ireland is an old place: we saw, for instance, the Book of Kells, a 9th (or was it 8th?) century illuminated manuscript, and we toured Dublin Castle, originally built by Norman occupiers in the 12th century, but at whose foundations has been discovered a Viking wall from much earlier. The castle, which has been used by every government since the Norman invasion, is like a physical timeline of Ireland: Norman battlements built on Viking walls, with a Georgian entryway leading up to a Victorian hall displaying portraits of the succession of viceroys, and a great state chamber where the Irish president is now inaugurated, displaying the flags of the orders of the Irish knights who once swore allegiance to Britain, the flag of the Republic of Ireland, and the flag of the European Union.

And the whole thing stands as a symbol of the main theme of Ireland, that runs through every monument, street name, and church. The deep-running pain of memory, of tension, of ambivalence. Statues of the martyrs of the 1916 uprising against England--gun smugglers and incendiaries executed for treason. And then also, less celebrated, of the English lord who brought Dublin its water supply system. Great breathtaking cathedrals like Christchurch, built as monuments to the authority of the Church of England and the Protestant religion, or like St. Audeon's, as security for the Norman occupation--political weapons. There are weapons everywhere--every beauty is broken.

We saw in Dublin Castle the layers of conquest built up on one another: all our cities are built and rebuilt on upward climbing layers of rubble. It's heartbreaking and distressing to think about how our cultures are built in every aspect on history's rubbish heap. It would be enough for despair, but for the promise--

And I will abolish the bow, the sword and war from the land,
And will make them lie down in safety...
Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice,
In lovingkindness and in compassion,
And I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness.
Then you will know the LORD.

That's kind of trite-sounding just whipping it out there like that, and the thought process is much longer than that, but this is getting too heavy already.

So instead, there's Kildare. On Sunday morning everyone was to meet down in the hotel lobby in order to board a bus for the day's activities: first a tour of Russbourough house, then a lunch stop in the townlet of Kildare, and then a jaunt through hill and dale to a secluded and ancient monastic site called Glendalough. This was all planned out in a fair bit of detail on our itinerary, beginning at the top with our departure at ten o'clock sharp. Very sharp. So sharp, in fact, that it sliced a few of us clean off, leaving us standing kind of disbelievingly in said lobby at 10:01. The five of us--Steph, Casey, Paula (that is, Christina), Sonia, and I--held a council of strategy.

The resulting strategem was as follows: a strike on the Dublin central bus station, followed by a maneuver by coach to Kildare, ETA 1330, which, being a small town, would afford ready opportunity to join forces with the advance party, scout the town, board the originally missed coach en masse at 1400 to continue our reconnaissance to Glendalough, completing the tour by the originally scheduled 1730. With precise execution, there was no conceivably difficulty.

So we five boarded a bus for Kildare and rode through strip-malled suburb, O'Reilly's-bar-and-peaked-roof-cottage-filled town, and open tree-bordered pasture country. We arrived at Kildare's triangular square (that's what the guidebook called it) at about 1340, and immediately fanned out across the four blocks of central Kildare. And continued to fan until a bit past 1400, by which point it became clear that, wherever the group might be eating lunch, it was almost definitely not Kildare.

So we had lunch ourselves, at a pub called Silken Thomas. A pub in the great pub tradition, with dimmish lighting and some unidentifiable sport on a big screen and locals hobnobbing loudly at the bar, and I had a steak and vegetable pie (think stew in a crust) with chips and veggies, since the atmosphere fit so well.

After lunch Steph and Sonia decided to head back directly, catching the next bus for Dublin. But Casey and Paula and I decided that Kildare wasn't such a bad place, and so we went Exploring. It was a very short walk out of the town center and into the great green countryside, on a long lane sporting authentic Irishmen walking small terriers, occasional gusty rain, and liberally sprinkled horse and sheep residue. It was wonderful and refreshing. We walked to the Irish National Stud (look no further), provider to the race industry (quite popular--every small town has its operating bookmaker) of breeding horses, though we didn't tour there. We wandered through a small cemetery--graves adorned with flowers, incense, and statues of the Virgin--and followed a short path to peaceful St. Brigid's Well, where the trees waved colorfully with ribbons and bells tied for blessings. We also wandered a bit more through the town proper: a harsh composite of sleepy (it being Sunday) and idyllic country town unknown to time, along with a drab drear (as the gray rain swelled) and disrepair that says, I've seen better days and don't know what to do with these. As we walked down a row of quiet old-world cottages like the one pictured above, we passed a handful of kids smoking in the street, and breaking their windows one by one with a tire iron. I don't know, though; maybe Kildare hasn't seen better days. Maybe it's still waiting for them.

Dang it, I've gone melancholy again. So, after our pleasant explorations our expedition party boarded another bus for Dublin, this time a wonderful double-decker bus, and we took the front row of seats in the top, looking out on the entire course of fields and highways and hamlets, until the rain came in sheets and the windows steamed up and Paula and Casey fell asleep and Ireland faded behind the mist and falling darkness. Mmmm.

Turns out, by the way, that the main body bypassed Kildare altogether in their rush, as they fell further and further behind schedule, and hit Glendalough (the main attraction, in my view) only very briefly. So our independent expedition was a winner all around.

Saw lots of other things in Dublin and surrounds, but your patience is already exhausted I suspect. Stay tuned for accounts of classes, my wonderful college, cooking, singing, rowing, and libraries. Or at least some of those.

Forthcoming

Spent four days in Oxford. Then spent four days in Ireland. Then spent one day trying to catch up with emails and trying to get a blog post written. Failed on both counts. Sorry. There, that's another Blogging Principle violated. Going strong here. You will hear about Ireland shortly. But not briefly. Cheerio.