Saturday 22 January 2022

Indecent words...

After some repairs the Romahome is back on the road. I could have gone anywhere today, so, naturally, I drove into Goole. With new factories and houses going up on a huge site between the town and the M62, Goole’s renaissance surely can’t be far away. In the meantime, the main shopping street looks as dismal as any of the ‘left behind’ communities I saw on my travels.

I bought a couple of CDs in a charity shop, and a huge thesaurus published by the Oxford University Press. As a cornucopia (accumulation, aggregation, assemblage, collection, compendium, compilation, selection) of weird and wonderful words, it reminds me of a story related by Christopher Hitchens…

Dr Samuel Johnson was the author of the first great dictionary of English language. When it was complete he was visited by a delegation of respectable ladies. “Dr Johnson”, they said, “we congratulate you on your decision to exclude all indecent words from your dictionary.” “Ladies”, said Dr Johnson, “I congratulate you on your persistence in looking them up.”

Licenced today: another illustration of rural broadband...

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