[T]o correct a bad sentence satisfactorily is not always possible; it should never have existed, that is all that can be said.

From The King’s English, spotted by Maud Newton.

• A serpent. These seem to turn up quite often, but sell for rather large amounts of money.
• “Large quantity of Phillips London auction musical instrument catalogues.” Because what you need to buy at an auction is the catalogue for a different auction. Which has closed.
• A fife and piccolo. “Old” (which seems to be code for “broken-down but not antique”), went for 32 quid.
• “Fourteen various cast-iron flute key presses.” … For … pressing the keys on a cast-iron flute?
• Twenty cases: one hard cello case, three double-bass cases, and sixteen (sixteen) soft cello cases. Useful, I imagine, if you plan to bid on:
• Lot 206, six cellos;
• Lot 207, six 3/4 size cellos;
• Lot 208, another six 3/4 size cellos; or
• Lot 209, three 1/2 size cellos.
• Five trombones. Which sold, collectively, for 30 quid.
• Four basoon crooks. (—I bought five trombones, what about you? —Well, I bid on the “quantity of various bassoon sections” but lost. So I’m left with these. Fancy a bassoon crook?)
• A sousaphone.
• An ophicleide (which I honestly thought was a made-up instrument).
• A marching lyre.
• A marching lyre.

There are also some fine examples of the cataloguer’s art. Savour this one, for instance:

Early 20th century brass adjustable music stand, the shaped spindle ledge supported upon a circular column terminating in triple curving legs and pad feet; also a ukulele banjo, case.

Or the crisply implied distinctions between a “quantity” of bows and a “bundle” of bows, both as distinct from a “small bundle” of bows. (One bow, incidentally, sold for 1500 pounds. The small bundle, for in the region of 12.)

I have to say, I’m tempted to try to pick up a sousaphone or ophicleide. Although I can imagine some difficulties with RyanAir on the way back to Amsterdam…

Might it have something to do with this?

Here’s the other end of the spectrum. (I tried to do this recently with books: pages-per-day estimated from page counts and start/finish reading dates. Scrapped the project for a number of reasons: (a) I had to fill in pagecount manually, (b) my reading records were patchy and have since gotten even patchier, (c) given a small data set and not much continuity (tendency to finish one book before starting the next) the colours are not as informative and interesting, and (d) my attempt at making graphed area precisely informative turned out more confusing than I expected.)

A review of Max Hastings’ “family fable” Did you really shoot the television? picks out his headmaster’s observation that “his contemporaries do not like him, and they are not bad judges of character”.

I actually suspect the other one is not intended as an insult at all, but the misreading is too precious to pass up. Peter Maber says Philip Hook’s prose “effortlessly conceals a wealth of knowledge and experience”. Gives a good impression, then, does it?

Here are a couple of youtube clips that might help clear up the difference.

This one is about Australia:

And this one shows pretty much the worst thing that any New Zealand wildlife is likely to do to you:

(The first was featured on Pharyngula, not sure any more where I turned up the second one.)

There’s a smart initiative here, issuing stickers for on your mailbox that say “No unaddressed advertising, no house-to-house newsletters” (or no to one but yes to the other). They’re nationwide and highly recognisable, with a big “NEE/NEE” or “NEE/JA”. They might even keep some of the junk away, who knows?

Today’s post contained a flyer from GroenLinks, a political party whose name translates literally as “GreenLeft”. The flyer informs us that because of our NEE/NEE sign, they did not leave a house-to-house newsletter in our mailbox. It also tells us where we can go for more information about the party.

Funnily enough, the flyer doesn’t mention the fact that despite our NEE/NEE sign they did leave unaddressed advertising in our mailbox. But perhaps they realised that we could figure that out without their help.

He handed in a homework containing the immortal line “Je bent een aap, dat je dat weet” (“Just so you know, you’re a monkey”) instead of one of the answers.¹ He went on to accuse me of not being able to produce my own answers, which (after some puzzling) I decided probably meant that he found the exercise too hard.

It took me almost a week to work up a response. First I had to cool down; then I had to find out the official policy (I’m only a teaching assistant, am I allowed to kick students out of my classroom for rudeness?); then I hoped to talk to the guy at the lesson but he didn’t show up. At that point I decided this was probably a flamboyant way of announcing his decision to quit the class.² Finally I sent a rather acerbic mail pointing out that insulting the person who grades your work probably isn’t the smartest policy if you care about passing, and asking him if he indeed was quitting the course.³ I didn’t expect an answer.

But I got one: “I’m afraid it was a terrible mistake,” and “Rest assured it will not happen again.” The poor sod had sent me a file intended for one of his fellow students (for “reference” purposes, of course…).

The moral? For my students, I’d suggest: don’t send your work around “for reference purposes” (boring, I know). For the rest of the world… When someone calls you a monkey, don’t assume they mean it? The one I’m taking away from this is, always count your monkeys before you hit “Send”.

Notes:

1. Olga suggested that he was simply confused about my species, and that I could help him out by trimming my beard more often. Supporting evidence being that at the Babylon Circus gig I danced “like a monkey” (O. Grigoriadou, p.c.). Against this hypothesis two observations: (1) it fails to explain the comment about finding my own answers, see below, and (2) the homework was delivered before the gig in question. As far as I can recall I have never danced in the classroom, like a monkey or otherwise.
2. In the meantime there were other irritations to deal with: half the class didn’t read the instructions for the homework (“work in pairs”) and there were several folk to hassle about copying.
3. For the record, I also announced the policy that work containing insults would get no grade.

1. Make sure you spell the name of the Rector Magnificus correctly, where it appears prominently on your title page (part of the boilerplate that “So-and-so has been awarded the degree of doctor…”). They’re picky about this: it’s not enough to have all the right letters in there, they have to be in the right order too. Yes, that includes initials.
2. If you plan to defy Rule 1, at least remember to send a copy of your title page, signed by the dean of the faculty, to the office of the pedel.¹ The reason for this requirement is so that someone from the dean’s office can politely point out that you’ve misspelled the name of the Rector Magnificus.
3. If you plan to defy Rule 2, well, you can’t. But what you can do is go ahead and print your dissertation before you’ve had the title page signed by the dean and sent to the pedel. It’s against the rules and I don’t advise it, but all the available evidence shows that this is, in fact, possible.

In other news, my plans for the weekend involve 200 books, a stack of little pieces of paper reading “Prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom”, and a pot of glue. And significant quantities of embarassment.

Notes:

1. In English I believe it’s “beadle”, but that still doesn’t tell me much.

Μια κοπέλα με ρώτησε κάτι που δεν κατάλαβα. Είπα, “Δεν είμαι Έλληνας.” Είπε αυτή, “Δεν είσαι Έλληνας και παίζεις μπαγλαμά;” Εγώ: “Δεν είναι μπαγλαμάς! Τζουράς είναι!” Είπε “Συγνώμη”… και έφυγε.

That is: A girl asked me something which I didn’t understand. I said, “I’m not Greek.” She said, “You’re not Greek and you play baglamas?” Me: “It’s not a bagmalas! It’s a tzouras!” She said “Sorry”… and left.

It’s a conversation, of a sort, right?

[Any correct spelling in the Greek portion of this post was made possible by the kind intervention of Olga.]

Bo, Jack, and the Professor (either Calculus or Branestawm, I forget which one we gave allergies) are characters from examples in a joint paper I wrote with Michael Franke. I used similar examples in my dissertation but changed the names.

And what’s the point of the exercise? Well, perhaps this pdf will make it clearer. It’s a draft of the front cover of my diss. (Text is slightly different, and the colour-scheme is just one of several options I’ve tried; some others are blue and black on white (the first one I posted here), white and medium gray on medium blue, and white and blue on gray.)