lexical or i will not buy this record, it is scratched

One of my favourite passages from the helpful and earnest 1884 Portuguese authors’ phrase book “English as she is Spoke” is on Trades, which presents the career possibilities of “starch-maker, porter, barber, Chinaman, coffeeman, Founder, Porkshop keeper, gravedigger, Cartwright, Tradesman, Tinker (a brasier), Stockingmender, Nailer, and Lochmaker.” Another is a bestiary of quadruped’s including Lamb, Roebuck, Ass, Dragon, Shi Ass, wild sow, Ass-colt, Lioness, Ram (Aries) and Dormouse. Of course, there’s small talk, like For to wish the good-morning—How does your father do? He is very well. I am very delight of it. Were is it? I shall come back soon, I was no came to know that to know how you are. Willingly good by.

type o-negative or captain caveman

Quite a bit of fad diets and spindled advice come and go, and while the best home-spun recommendation usually run don’t skimp on food and know one’s constitution, some candidates, I think, remain enticing and sensible, and without disparaging the strength of motivation and paying attention to one’s body, one’s habits, earn more credit than is due. It’s no Jedi mind-trick to present any comer with an array of caveats where one is bound to find enthusiasm, either for or against. Validation and challenge to one’s palette or approach is equally fixing and offer the same such bait for consideration.
Seeking out a healthy mix of second-opinions can raise a lot of incompatible ideas and contradicting advice. Reinforcement with chiding is a situation that one is more accustomed to than even pure success of failure, regardless of the estimation. Some dispensaries are more effective than others, and if not loyalists, franchises like eating for one’s rH factor, like one’s great grandparents, or like a Neanderthal have garnered much interest, which is a quality as compelling as any visceral emotion—just so with homeopathy and training to become a confirmed optimist. To have a kernel of truth, a bit of solace is a hook, enough and enduring when there’s a bald hint of reaffirming rightness and knowing one’s misguidance was common enough to merit correction. Maybe the new packaging has more to do with processes than any inherent weakness, without condemning the bulk and body of the industry to willing prospecting, maybe the explosion of allergies and sensitivities is more attributable to lifestyle and shortcuts in production. It is immature cheese that has the highest lactose content, and maybe the vogue of intolerance is more because of how it’s cut, even in polite company, than any new epidemic or any revelatory remediation.

trance or quantum-leap

The science desk of BBC has a fascinating article that opens up the disciplined world of knowable physical phenomena to the confounding confines of quantum mechanics, which normally escape experience and expectation in tiny, evanescent spaces, through the aspirations of Nature, a force which works within an established framework, surely, but is known and distinguished by its ingenuity, regardless of what invisible hand might guide it.

Abiding biological mysteries, like the sense of smell, certain migratory instincts, and the processes of photosynthesis, may elude definitive explanation because their mechanisms have shoe-horned bizarre physics, which may as inventive and opportunistic as life itself. Maybe an inter-disciplinary approach will lead to answers and discovery of more novelties. Organisms have an embarrassment of choices, without having to commit to one paradigm over another, and perhaps in a narrow sense the pantheon of the sciences admits the same.

gumshoe

A very common and ancient motif for guesthouse signage frames figures in a pentagram, usually comprised of intersecting triangles, like so generally but not always

Despite its ubiquity, I never bothered to find out what meaning there was behind it, since unnoticed symbolism governs all such establishments and I was content in guessing the common emblem was the Star of David or some time-out-of-mind male-female duality cipher, which carry enough hidden meaning and glosses of interpretation already. It turn out, however, that there is a quite but not necessarily separate legacy to this design. The society of Pythagoras associated the sign with hospitality since antiquity—imparting protection for travelers. Germanic lore understood the symbol as the footprint of a circumspect swan, stepping ahead and back again and would insure guests a good night’s sleep, warding away sprites and nixies that stir nightmares for those away from hearth and home. They called it the Drudenfuβ, resembling the footfall of its nemesis, and it kept noisome spirits from crossing the threshold by encouraging them to turn right around.

rebus

The borough of old London town have some quite fanciful street names, with some equally fanciful but probably incorrect folk-etymologies.

The thoroughfare and surrounding neighbourhood of Elephant and Castle, named for the tavern, and the public house Goats and Compasses seem more sensible one is told they are respectively corruptions of the exotic sounding “Infanta de Castile” (presumably in honour of the wife of King Edward I, Eleanor of Castile) and a mishearing of “God encompass us.” The accounts are tantalizing, in fact, except that an infanta is a princess not in the line of succession, which Eleanor was not (the notion and controversy of Spanish princesses would not become a topic of the English public until the fiancée of Charles I, some three centuries on), and pubs generally were not named after such lofty invocations. There are numerous cases of place-names being transformed to make sense in the vernacular, especially on the Roman side of the Limes (the furthest reaches of the empire into the territory of Germanica) like the city of Koblenz, from the Latin for confluence (die Zusammenfluß), positioned where the Rhine and Moselle rivers come together or Mainz, original named for the fort Mogontiacum, in deference to (or perhaps disdain for) a Gaulish god.

Schweinfurt, whose deep harbour presents an impossible challenge for swine to ford the Main river but rather came from an old Gothic designation Suinuurde, meaning the exact opposite, something akin to quicksand. The names of the British guesthouses likely naming is direct and intentional, relating to symbols adopted by venerable guilds that set up shop in these areas. It was more interesting to be disabused and learn that the Worshipful Company of Cutlers used as their logo an elephant (carrying a howdah on its back, a fancy carriage for the raj of India, named for its resemblance to the chess piece) for its ivory tusks, used for fashioning knife handles. Goats and compasses probably should be taken literally and could refer to a variety of trades, from people who actually cobbled shoes from goat skin to the enclave of Rheinish barrel-makers (coopers), whose craft was hallmarked by mathematical precision (a drafting compass) and a chevron (^) that stands for a fret, frieze or frontier for crossing obstacles reliably, much like a sure-footed goat, which has the same Latinate root.