A note on terminology, and an addendum (and correction) to my PhD thesis 1. How did I miss that? Doing research, it’s easy to find yourself going down rabbit holes, chasing answers that seem to always elude your grasp. You do your best, but still have to resign yourself to unsatisfactory results. In my case, […]
Category Archives: EIC
An addendum on the history of the word “linguist” in the sense ‘interpreter’
One of my first publications was an article titled “Jurebassos and Linguists: The East India Company and Early Modern English words for ‘interpreter’” (abstract; full paper as a pdf). The article is a fairly straightforward and I admit rather light-weight investigation of the Early Modern English semantic field of ‘interpreter’, in which I note that […]
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 […]
“Copious but not compendious”?
I just realised that I haven’t mentioned where the title of my blog comes from. It’s from a letter from George Ball to Richard Cocks in 1617. At the time, Ball was the head (called the “president”) of the East India Company (EIC) merchants in the East Indies, and resided in Bantam (map), where the […]