Reconnected with Susan Hill

There was me thinking that Susan Hill had stoppped blogging. I have refound her blogging at The Spectator - hurrah! I really enjoy her blog.

New words to learn

Thanks to Harry for his interesting comments. I am going to go with his Proto-Indo-European view of language as he went from siege to Upanishad and the Upanishads are part of the yoga tradition.

The new words for this week are now up. Formal Italian can be strikingly different to the local dialect. In the dialect of Tremezzina (on Lake Como) una sedia (chair) is una cadrega.

Now, Harry, your challenge is to find out why.

Wherever you leave your bottom

Last week's Italian words featured sedersi (to sit). It comes directly from Latin and if you look at English you can see how it has become seated in the language. Here are a few examples and thanks to the Online Etymology Dictionary which provided the examples. Take my descriptions with a pinch of salt:

saddle - seat for a rider.
sediment - what you find at the bottom of a bottle of wine or a pond/river to describe the stuff that has settled on the bottom.
residence - where your bottom keeps returning to, your home.
sedentary - remaining on your bottom in one place.
obsess - literally 'to sit opposite to'. In other words never moving the bottom of your mind from one fixed spot.
Eisteddfod - 'annual assembly of Welsh bards'. They obviously sat together on their bahookeys.

Cynthia Harnett - an author to be revisited

I have just come back from a few days in Italy where I read The Load of Unicorn as recommended by Catdownunder. It is a story about William Caxton and his attempts to print books and the scriveners attempts to block him doing so.

It was brilliantay. It even had line drawings by the author, Cynthia Harnett. It was a great insight into the beginnings of printing. It also reminded me of another of her books that I had read as a child and which left a distinct bookmark in my mind. It is The Wool Pack. I am now going to order it and re-read it.

Many thanks, Catdownunder, for leading me back to it.

An interesting observation

In the quest for the holy grail of where publishing needs to be, there was this interesting comment on the Bookseller website.

By Mary Tod

As you point out, the publishing industry is undergoing severe trauma. I remember my father daying to me many years ago that the telephone industry needed to stop thinking of themselves as in the telephone business and start thinking of themselves as being in the communication business, a comment that seems obvious now but wasn't thirty or more years ago. A possible parallel for publishing is to think of themselves in (a) the content business, (b) the entertainment business, (c) the reading business, (d) the writing business. I'm sure there are more alternatives. Nothing less than a total change of perspective will do. My humble opinion :)