Author Archives: klai

Lady Day (and the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents)

I just realized that today is Lady Day – that is, Annunciation. Once upon a time, this was New Year’s Day. It probably derives from the date being originally set on the Spring equinox, which makes a pretty sensible first day of the year if your concept of the world derives from observations of the sun. […]

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?

To be honest, I’m really quite proud of my newest publication, “Early East India Company merchants and a rare word for sex” (forthcoming June 2011 in Words in Dictionaries and History. Essays in honour of R.W. McConchie). It’s an investigation of cultural history through looking at a bawdy word that comes up a single time […]

Demonstration sign palaeography

I’ve been focussing on palaeography quite heavily recently, so naturally that was what attracted me in this image: “Egyptian protesters gather for a demonstration at Tahrir Square in Cairo on the sixth day of angry revolt [AFP]” (Taken from Al Jazeera, © AFP I guess..) Anyway, so questions that interest me are things like “what […]

pig calligraphy

Not depicting pigs, I should say. Look at this example from a calligraphy manual from 1597: Looks like gibberish or code, but then your eye gets accustomed to the nudge in the middle of each letter, and it becomes readable. Voila, ig-pay alligraphy-cay. (The above image was copied from the Digital Scriptorium of Columbia University […]

Rant about code (“MS Office uses XML”)

The new .docx etc formats of the newer versions of Microsoft Office are done in XML. Hence the -x in the extension. The problem with this, however, is something we all know: all MS programs are bloated pieces of shit. Those of you who occasionally fiddle with HTML will probably have experimented with the oh-this-is-convenient […]