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 […]
Tag Archives: ramblings
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 […]
“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 […]
“To my unknown friends and countrymen”
I’ve quite run out of the habit of keeping a RL, pen-on-paper journal. When I was working on my MA thesis, I had two – one for personal whatsits, and another exclusively for jotting down thoughts and ideas and reflections and screams of despair raised by my thesis. For the past several years, I’ve had […]