The Coroner's Lunch

I read The Coroner’s Lunch with little expectation that I’d enjoy it. So many novels don’t even start off well: there’s no style, little character or interaction, or else the characters are stereotypes found in dozens of other novels, and before you’ve read a chapter you’re yawning with boredom.
But Cotterill has style, he offers a plot, he has oddball characters - as well as ones that might or might not be on the level – and he goes off on some intriguing tangents that don’t necessarily seem connected with the main story.
His gumshoe detective (as someone on Amazon described him) is a 72-year old doctor who’s been thrown into the role of coroner at the end of the Laos war in 1975. He has to learn as he goes, he has as one assistant a smart nurse who turns out to be even smarter than she seems, and as the other, a Downs Syndrome man with a penchant for remembering detail. He has to battle with a mindset that isn’t entirely clued up to the joys of Marxism and still has hangovers from a more primitive time, with lack of facilities and funding, and with bureaucracy of the communist kind that never makes clear whether it’s sinister or sincere.
And then there’s the curious fact that in his dreams he meets up with people he’s known who have died – and they seem alive again. Not just alive as we might remember people in dreams, but literally alive. He finds it all very odd – and even odder is the insistence of a certain tribe of people that he’s actually some incarnation of a 2000-year-old spirit. If it sounds a little crazy it is, but the good thing about it is that in the midst of it all there are friends amongst those who surround Dr Siri, and some of them are very good friends.
The Laos background to the story is related with assurance and the feel of someone who actually knows the place – Cotterill lives in Asia. And the Asian mind, rather like that in Nury Vittachi’s Feng Shui detective series, is played with, and seen not just as mystical, but whimsical.
Lots of fun!

The Skin Game

After the effectiveness of 1946’s Hue and Cry, which I wrote about the other day, coming to Hitchcock’s 1931 movie, The Skin Game is a bit of a shock. Firstly it’s hardly vintage Hitchcock, and appears to have been made not only on a shoestring, but in a hurry. In one scene Jill Esmond jumps another character’s line and then has to repeat her own, and not long after she stumbles over another line. There’s little Hitchcock class here, and if it wasn’t for the intense performance from Edmund Gwenn, one of the few actors who doesn’t look as though he’s just come out of the silent movies, the film would hardly be worth watching at all.
Certainly there are Hitchcock touches: the face of the stranger repeatedly looming as it’s superimposed over a shot of a crowd, or the auctioneer’s persistent cough, or Gwenn and Edward Chapman seen struggling with each other in the background through a window as the other characters lift the lifeless Phyllis Konstam out of the pool. Impersonal things like doors take on significance when seen in shots by themselves, and the camera swings wildly throughout the auction scene, as though it was attempting to grasp every tiny move on the bidders’ faces.
It didn’t help that the DVD version I’ve got has been made on the cheap: the sound quality is appalling, and the film itself appears badly edited – in one shot Konstam comes out of a room, and then because of the angle of the next shot, it appears that the maid comes out of the same room – but in fact she doesn’t. Worst of all the ‘filming’ of the film has been done in such a way that in several medium shots the top of the characters’ heads are cut off.
Still, a Hitchcock is always worth watching: he usually comes up with some surprise. Sometimes the surprise is how awful he can be – in his last movie, Family Plot, at a time when he was considered the master, the ride down the hill in a car without brakes is appallingly done. Well, well, even geniuses have their off days.

A little more on Steve Reich's music

Is it possible that Steve Reich’s music has been covertly used by the CIA in their torture-which-isn’t-torture proceedings? My wife remarked tonight, when a program on Reich was being broadcast, that his music gave her a headache, and was rather like torture. Torture akin to Chinese water torture, I think.

By Corporal ‘G’ – American Expeditionary Force

There’s a certain type of fighter, he’s
A daring, dashing blighter:
He never seems to know the word ‘retreat’;
With a bayonet on his rifle, you can
Bet he’ll never trifle,
As a fighting man he’s got old Jerry beat.

When the British go to battle, with
Their usual flash and rattle,
The man I speak of often does the most.
He’s a great offensive scrapper,
As a soldier, very dapper,
And altho’ he’s talkative you’ll
Seldom hear him boast.

He showed his blooming starch when
He stopped the Huns in March -
They were headed for the port of old Calais.
With shouts of bold defiance, and
Artillery reliance,
He stopped them in his own aggressive way.

When you look back through the ages,
Turning over history’s pages,
You’ll find brave deeds of men in every war.
But no breed of man looms bigger
Than the rough-and-ready Digger –
My hat’s off to the Anzacs – it’s those
Sons I’m speaking for.

Another oddity from my mother's papers

I pray when risen from the dead,
I may in glory stand
Perhaps a crown upon my head -
Four needles in my hand.

I never learnt to sing or play,
So let no harp be mine;
From childhood to my dying day
Knitting’s been my line.

And so, accustomed to the end
In plying useful stitches,
I’ll be content if given to knit
The little angels’ britches.

So You Want To Be An Executive?

I have no idea where this comes from, but I found two copies of it in my mother’s papers. It obviously appealed to her.

As everyone knows, an executive has practically nothing to do except to decide what is to be done; to tell somebody to do it; to listen to reasons why it should not be done; why it should be done by someone else or why it should be done in a different way; to follow up to see if everything has been done; to discover that it has not; to enquire why; to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; to follow up again to see if the thing has been done; to discover that it has been done incorrectly; to point out how it should have been done; to conclude that as long as it has been done it may as well be left where it is; to wonder if it is not time to get rid of a person who cannot do a thing right; to reflect that he probably has a wife and a large family; and that any successor would be just as bad, and may be worse; to consider how much simpler and better the thing would have been if one had done it oneself in the first place; to reflect sadly that one would have done it right in twenty minutes; and as things turned out one has had to spend two days to find why it has taken so long, and three weeks for somebody else to do it wrong.

27.11.17. Hadn't looked at this post for some time, and checked out if it was floating around the Net. Of course it was; isn't everything? Anyway, one site claims it dates back to 1941. If that's the case, the person who right was right up to the mark: nothing has changed. If this is how executives actually have to act, it's no wonder things never get done properly, if at all. 

Well-used war poem

I came across the following poem written out in my mother’s hand when we were clearing out some of her old papers. I don’t know where she got it from but it turns out to have an interesting history, which was written about in an essay by Les Cleveland in 1986, and is recorded on the Buffalo State University site.
(Incidentally, this isn’t the Les Cleveland who’s well-known to Dunedinites as the man who provides many of the daffodils on Daffodil Day, each year, or as a bass singer who appeared in many of the Dunedin Opera Company’s productions.)

I’m a lonely Kiwi digger and I’m stationed at Matruh;
I’ve got my little dug-out in the sand
Where the fleas play tag around me as they circle round at night,
In my flea-bound bug-bound dug-out in Matruh.

Oh the walls are made of hessian and the windows four by two,
And the doorway lets the howling sandstorm thru’.
You can hear those blinkin’ Ities as they circle round at night,
In my flea-bound bug-bound dug-out in Matruh.

Now the place is strewn all round with bully and meat loaf –
Of bread and marmalade there’s blinkin’ few.
I’m as happy as a clown in his land of heat and sand
In my flea-bound bug-bound dug-out in Matruh.

Oh take me back, oh take me back
To my flea-bound bug-bound dug-out in Matruh.
Where you can hear those blinkin’ Ities as they circle round at night,
In my flea-bound bug-bound dug-out in Matruh.

According to Cleveland, ‘Matruh is an attenuation of Mersah Matruh, a seaside village near the border of Egypt and Libya. It was used as supply base for desert operations by the Allied Eighth Army in the North African theatre in World War 2. To most soldiers who were involved in these operations, Mersah Matruh is synonymous with heat, monotony, thirst, flies, confusion, military incompetence and bombing raids.’

This picture was probably taken at Mersah Matruh during World War II. It comes from the oswild.org site and has a number of photos of the place, as well as quite a bit of info.

Hue and Cry

When I was young I used to get given books on the latest films – annuals, mostly. I can remember one of these having Hue and Cry in it, though the book isn’t amongst those I’ve still got. So I was delighted to find the DVD of the film in a bargain bin at The Warehouse recently.
It was made way back in 1946, the first comedy produced by Ealing Studios - and it’s a zinger. Yes, it’s dated; yes, the plot’s a little thin; yes, it’s not a film that has made a big impact, even within the range of Ealing comedies, but it’s still worth watching.
Firstly, there are the performances. Alistair Sim has two or three brief scenes in which he does his usual dithery Sim performance with great style; Harry Fowler, who was twenty when the film was made, but is playing someone a bit younger, is excellent: full of energy and zest, and a natural actor. He’d already played a few parts in movies before this, and went on to play big and little parts for the rest of his long career. IMDB lists his latest performance as being in 2004, when he was a mere 78. His parts range from the notable Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers to a host of little parts in films and on tv - including a stint in Doctor Who. Never a star, but always a reliable player.
The remainder of the boys throw equal enjoyment into their roles; there isn’t a dud amongst them. Not many of them went on to have long careers, but that doesn’t change anything about their performances here.
The second great feature about the movie is that a huge amount of it is filmed on location in London, a very war-torn London, with bombed and broken-down buildings on every hand standing alongside parts of the city that haven’t been touched. The movie stands as a record of a city in recovery.
The third aspect of the movie is the subtle humour: Charles Crichton is the director, and T E B Clarke the scriptwriter. They were a winning combination: Crichton directed several more Ealing comedies, including The Lavender Hill Mob and The Titfield Thunderbolt, while Clarke was also responsible for Passport to Pimlico, another film set in post-war London.
And one last point of interest: the score was written by Georges Auric, one of the original Les Six, if memory serves me right. Apparently he wrote some 130 film scores, something that probably gives him greater fame than his association with the short-lived Les Six ever did.

More on words - and hotels

In the course of writing the previous post I came across the delightful Dr Grammar site – or rather, I should say, the FAQ section of it, which focuses on the mistakes people use in everyday writing, and aims to clarify the problems and assist those who need assistance to get things right. Dr Grammar died in 2003, but his site lives on (only the ‘Ask a Question’ section, not surprisingly, is no longer available). Dr Grammar’s real name was Jim HiDuke (yup) and he took a rather less than obvious course towards a love of language, having grown up in street gangs.
His concern was for the increasing illiteracy of modern students, and he’s quoted as saying: "More and more students arrive at colleges and universities less-than-prepared for the amount and type of writing required, regardless of the courses they take. This led to many questions about language, usage, and proper attribution of sources from the World Wide Web."
There are a heap of resources on the site, and links to all sorts of other word-interest places. You could spend several days exploring this one, and you can even hear the redoubtable Dr Grammar introduce himself, albeit briefly.
The Bill Walsh he quotes is the author of Lapsing into a Comma, a curmudgeon’s guide to the many things that can go wrong in print – and how to avoid them. Bill has his own blog, of course – who of any importance doesn’t? – and it focuses on copy editors and their needs.
BTW, I mentioned two hotels in my last post. You can find more information on them, too. Corstorphine House, and Claremont House.

Going Places?

The criteria for any site on the Net these days, I feel, is that it should be inclusive. I don’t mean by that, that it should have anything to do with including minorities, or women, or all those people who feel hard done by because they haven’t been included in the past (sorry to be so un-PC), but inclusive in the sense that the site goes beyond the coastline of the US of A.

So when I came across the Hotel Reservations site, I immediately checked to see if it included anything from Dunedin. It first gave me a choice of two places called Dunedin, the one I live in, and Dunedin in Florida, a place which I’ve come across before in my Net travels (see more about that in the next post). I clicked on Dunedin, NZ, (obviously) and found that it has two choices of places to stay: Corstorphine House, and Claremont House. Corstorphine House, rather curiously, has University of Otago printed alongside it, although to my understanding, Corstorphine House is quite some way from the University. But once you click on CH you find a considerable amount of detail – far more than you’d expect really. And excellent photographs.

Slightly annoyingly, you don’t always seem to be able to use your back and forwards buttons in relation to this site, which is why I had to start all over again to check out Claremont House. (A message keeps coming up that the page has expired.). Nevertheless when you do access Claremont House, the photography is good (lots of pictures in fact) and the information is more than adequate. Both pages included information about tourist spots, although a local might puzzle as to why Baldwin St is linked to Claremont House, when they’re not exactly in close proximity.

Irritatingly the Claremont House ad has the overused grammatical error: "comprises of." As Dr Grammar notes (more about him in another post): "Bill Walsh, author of Lapsing Into a Comma, says, "Nothing is ever 'comprised of' something.' To comprise means to 'contain or to embrace': The jury comprises seven women and five men.... Even when used correctly, in my humble opinion, comprise and constitute tend to sound stilted. Some form of is made up of sounds better in most cases" (123)

Apart from my grizzles – which aren’t really about the site itself – there are plenty of good answers to typical questions included, information about Road Trips, Cruises, ways to plan a trip, and the ability to read it all in Spanish (now one of the top languages of the world, apparently). Not everything translates, and strangely, in the Spanish version, Dunedin, NZ, throws up seven different hotels altogether to the English edition!

By the way, shouldn’t it be ‘Advanced Search’ throughout, rather than ‘Advance Search?’
Disclosure statement

A little out of kilter

I keep meaning to make a note in here about my theory that the world has shifted its axis just a fraction, or maybe changed its orbit round the Sun infinitesimally, and that that’s the real reason behind all our weather peculiarities. There’s no doubt, in my mind, that the seasons are a good month behind their normal selves. We’ve had two brilliant sunny days over the last three, the sort of weather you get in normal summer. But it’s part way through February. And this has been happening increasingly over the last few years. If I recall, we were still getting very hot weather through to May last year. I doubt if it’s a real explanation, or a particularly scientific one, but I have a sense that it’s more than just our ‘global warming’ theory that seems attractive in some respects but insufficient in others.

Go sing Gao Ping

After my complaints about gutteralising tennis players yesterday, now we have classical (fine/modern/serious) pianists who sing along with their own compositions - intentionally.

I've just been listening - half-heartedly - to Gao Ping, who writes his own music, and writes it for a 'vocalising pianist.' Oh, dear. Of course the audience raved at him (well, there was one bloke going 'Yahoo' above the polite clapping), and of course the man can actually play. But his idea that it's not unusual for pianists to sing along to their playing is okay, except where it detracts from the composer's music. I suppose you could say it isn't detracting in this case, but that's a moot point. I kept thinking my wife was calling me from upstairs.

For the record, he was playing: Concealed Kisses; Lightspeed Worlds; Prayers Mask; Two Soviet Love Songs for Vocalizing Pianist. There were bits of Shostakovich thrown into the last one, and some popular melody by Gershwin, or Irving Berlin, or Cole Porter, or somesuch. And then it ended with a great crash, and a fall down the keyboard...and surprise! that was it. (The yahooer then yahooed.)

Ping's site tells us: "A New Zealand critic described Gao Ping's performances as "spellbinding" and "magical." Jack Body has said that Gao Ping is a "total musician, a pianist of great intelligence and sensitivity, an astounding improviser, and a composer whose effortless fluency I envy deeply." The People's Music has called Gao's recitals "sensational" and the Cincinnati Enquirer praised Gao's technique as "fleet and facile".

I'm afraid Jack Body's opinion of what is new and what is worthwhile - and mine - don't often coincide. Occasionally Body will produce something that could conceivably be called music, but in general he's made his name doing things that nobody calls music except those who want to be on the bandwagon looking for the Emperor's new clothes.

Mrs Malaprop Reigns

With some people you're never quite sure whether they're making an intentional pun or whether the malapropisms that spring from their mouths are unconsciously loosed.

Here's a couple, from two different women in the office I'm temporarily working in:
one, when she was talking about something medical, said, 'It would probably be scourged from my system.' Ouch.

The other, when knowing something she wouldn't normally be expected to know, has said, more than once, 'I must be psychiatric.'

The Tennis Player's Grunt

Does anyone else wonder at the sound top tennis players make when they're hitting the ball these days? My wife says it's always happened and we can only hear it now because the players are miked, but I have my doubts. I think it's become a faddy thing to make a great grunt that sounds like a diaphragmic expletive every time you hit the ball. To me, adding that extra noise must add to the energy involved in hitting the thing. Why not just shut up and get on with the job?
I also wonder if there isn't a sexual element in this: tennis stars are so full of their own status and glory that many fans 'adore' them. You wonder if the noise isn't a hint of the sound the fans would hear in the bedroom if they were lucky enough to be there. Or am I going over the top here?
It might be something you'd accept from men - a great heaving grunt. But when the women do it as well, it makes me want to switch off the sound and watch them hit the ball in silence.

General Hospital

I'd thought David Hasselhoff started life as Knight Rider, but of course, I should have known better. Nobody starts at the ‘top’ not even if you class Knight Rider as the top. Go back further in time and you find he was in the soap opera, The Young and the Restless – for several years - before Knight Rider came along. I’d thought it was General Hospital, but nope.
It was, to my surprise, Richard Dean Anderson, later known best for MacGyver, who appeared in General Hospital, from 1976 to 1981. Strange the things you find out when you go looking for something else. It’s hard to imagine Anderson in a soap, but everyone’s got to start somewhere. Sometimes I think Anderson feels he’s back in a soap, when you see him in Stargate, a series he’s looked infinitely bored with since the beginning. Bring back MacGyer, I say, even if he’s aged twenty years. He must still have a few tricks up his sleeve.
Curiously, when you look up Richard Dean Anderson on the General Hospital site, there’s nothing showing up about him. Maybe he was in it too long ago – and of course, so many things happen in soaps, and so many people come and go. Soaps never stand still, not for a moment. I remember Adrian Plass writing a wonderful piece about the sorts of things that happen to characters in soaps, how they can change from being heterosexual to homosexual overnight (it’s happened more than once on Shortland St, for starters), and how even the dead return to life – that’s happened on Shortland St as well! It’s a world where anything goes. If you want to find out the extent of how much anything goes, everything you ever wanted to know – practically – is on the General Hospital page, part of the soaps.com group of pages.

One last thing: I found this quote from General Hospital while I was checking out some of the above:
Skye Quartermaine Jacks: Since I have known you, I have been trapped in a burning building, stalked, kidnapped, and left to die in Wyndemere. I woke up next to a dead man, been convicted of murder, and spent time in a state penitentiary! But I will not have cockroaches crawling on me! That is where I draw the line!

Luke Spencer: They won't, no more. I promise you. Trust me. I'll just fumigate the cardboard condo and you can get back to your beauty sleep.

Say no more!

Cold, calculating and confusing

This post contains some spoilers.
The latest James Bond - Casino Royale - is a superbly made movie in every respect: extreme stunts, exhausting chases (the one on foot near the opening is phenomenal and then is followed not long after by one that demolishes vehicles left right and centre), excellent photography with depth and colour and style, great art design and detail, fabulous locations – what more could you want?
Yet, it’s cold at heart. Okay, this suits the plot which is about a man who is emotionally detached and must remain cold in order to do his job. For a brief time he melts, but it’s only to lose the warmth he’s gained a few scenes later. Daniel Craig does a superb job as a cold-hearted character, but the problem is it’s hard to warm to him in any way. And his lady friend, Eva Green, though she’s beautiful, is seldom without suspicion about Bond. M is tougher than ever, and frustrated by her newest 007.
Which is another point: this is supposed to be when Bond earns his 007 status, but it’s rather confusing: here is an M who is older than ever, and of a different sex to the M of the early movies; here is a Bond who isn’t any chicken – he’s nearly 40 – and yet he’s playing a man who’s at the beginning of his career. Of course such niceties don’t concern us in general – we’re now used to having a different face for Bond on different occasions (he’s rather like Dr Who in this respect) – but it makes for an odd storyline somehow.
There’s virtually no humour in it – Bond makes a rather weak joke while being tortured, but the expression on the villain’s face is rather the same as that on the audience’s: how strange to make such a joke at such a time, particularly when this Bond doesn’t seem to be into humour at all. And he himself laughs at it. Hmm.
There’s an intriguing take-off scene towards the end when Eva Green, dressed thoroughly in bright red, flits through dark corridors on the edges of the canals in Venice. It’s intended, I suspect, to be reminiscent of Don’t Look Now, where a small woman in red kept turning up in a similar fashion and was pursued by Donald Sutherland as a distraught father.
I said this film was confusing: I must be getting old, but I found the last stages of the movie very odd. By the time it had finished, some ten minutes after it seemed about to finish, I wasn’t sure whether the woman was true or false, I hadn’t realised that the guy with the patch over his eye was the same one who’d been shot in the head in an earlier scene, nor that Mr White was the man who’d supposedly shot him. Quite honestly, in spite of M’s carefully enunciated explanation, I wasn’t any the wiser. Oh, well.

Thus Saith The Queen

We went to see The Queen tonight – not herself in person, quite, but a remarkably good imitation of her by Helen Mirren. In fact, without Mirren, the film would have stood little chance of success, I suspect. The script is moderately good, the camerawork okay, but the colour is rather washed out at times and there is little depth to the focus. The other actors, for the most part, look only a little like their counterparts. Sylvia Sims as the Queen Mother has none of the warmth that woman exuded in public, and James Cromwell brings all the nastiness he usually commands in villainous roles to that of the Duke of Edinburgh, turning that mildly unpleasant man into an impatient, single-minded character who has no warmth at all. That may be the some people see him, but it seems a little one-sided.
Michael Sheen makes a good fist of Tony Blair, producing a warm smile with frequency (a smile not often responded to by The Queen, or responded to with frostiness), but seems a little thin for the part or lacking in physical stature. I don’t know how big Blair is, but he comes across as seeming to have more presence and weight than Sheen can give him.
Diana, of course, plays herself, as only she could, through a barrage of news clips and still shots, and dozens of other clips and shots are integrated seamlessly into the movie. Only at the end, when the Royal Family attend the funeral at the Abbey, does there seem a curious distance between the real life arrivals of celebrities, and the actors posed in chairs with seemingly very few extras in the background.
That wonderful actress, Helen McCrory, who brings both a kind of seediness and some underlying grittiness to her roles (she always seems to play people who are rather too selfish for words), here plays Cherie Blair as a warm character, but one with quite a deal of bitchiness about her – especially in regard to the Monarchy. She’s been woefully underused in movies – it always seems as if the editors cut her parts down in preference to others – but she was unforgettable in a tv mini series called, The Fragile Heart, in which she played the daughter of a doctor who was himself all selfishness, and had to unlearn a lifetime of thinking of himself first. She followed in her father’s footsteps, in contrast to her brother, who, also a doctor, had gone along a more generous line. Nigel Hawthorne was the father, in one of his many great roles.
Overall The Queen is entertaining, moving, cringe-making in its presentation of the Royal Family, and a star vehicle for Mirren, who can pretty well never put a foot wrong in whatever she does. She has the Queen down pat, her speech inflections, her tone, her body language…you name it. The film is undeniably worth seeing for this performance alone.
At the same screening the theatre presented a trailer of Judi Dench’s latest movie, Notes on a Scandal. It looks like a marvellous film – anything Dench is in will have at least one great performance in it – but the trailer virtually showed the entire story, leaving out only the ending. You’d go to it now knowing almost everything that was going to happen. Why do they do that?

Peering through the Market

Came across an unusual site called Corporate Gifts. This site presents article length pieces (that is, internet article length) on all sorts of things, mainly with an advertising component built in – rather like this post. But the variety is huge, and the site has been functioning since back in 2002 without ever having come to my attention. (But then, no doubt, two of my sites have been functioning for just as long – one longer – without coming to the attention of a host of people). I’m not quite sure how this site functions: you can submit ‘articles’ but not all of them relate back to a company trying to sell something. Some of them are just articles on a subject, and they have a Wikipedia link, which, when you get there, isn’t the same article – so obviously the anonymous writer has just given Wikipedia as a further site for exploration.
Encylocentral.com is obviously busy: in the last quarter of an hour three or four more pieces have appeared.
I checked out an article on ‘peepers’. I was intrigued by their use of words describing what I’d normally call sunglasses; glares, peepers, goggles. I guess our equivalent word for ‘glares’ is ‘shades.’ You could be quite ambiguously received if you said to someone, ‘I’ve got my glares on.’ They might agree. And goggles are usually associated in this country with the things we wear in water when swimming. Or when you’re going skiing.
The person who wrote the piece for peepers.com has an interesting use of the language: ‘People mostly bothered about sunglasses chiefly, if performance or designer eyewear is what one seeks. One surely gets the level of protection one needs as they feel and at prices that they can afford,’ as an example. It’s English, but not necessarily as she is always writ.
Disclosure statement

Les Miserables

Babet was transparent, but impenetrable. You could see the light through his bones, but nothing through his eye. He was an affected man, a great talker, who italicized his smiles, and quoted his gestures. What had become of his wife and children, he did not know. He had lost them as one loses a pocket handkerchief.

Marius, Book 7 chapter 3 of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.

An Overgrowth of Words

I had a thought to go through this blog and check out how many words are new – or new in their current usage - and wouldn’t have been around three decades ago. Obviously the Internet is one, and email, but how many other words have arrived on the scene recently? Cellphone, the current use of ‘avatar’, the already-acceptable ‘phishing’, as well as vishing, fuzzing and a new use of zombies.
DVD is another, forum in its current use as a place for people to write on the Net. Blogs and bloggers, links, web development, and a host of other web add-ons (and add-ons itself), Wiki and Wikipedia, .com, online, video, download, software, ecommerce, connectivity, handsfree… the list goes on and on. And that’s just from a quick flick through my recent posts.