For The Record

Earlier this week I received the latest copy ('latest' being the 2023-24 edition, celebrating 40 years of 'women at Corpus') of my college's annual  magazine, The Record. I did a quick sum and realized that this meant '40 years of women resident at Corpus'.  

<autobiographical-note>

The reason for my temporary confusion was that when I first dined in Corpus, having arrived in late September 1971 (just before my first term – the Oral exam for foreign languages being held before we'd been exposed to anything like tuition) women were admitted to dine at High Table. (This barefaced assault on the patriarchy was greeted by what Nigel Starmer-Smith might have called 'some ill-mannered hissing'). To mark the occasion there were four courses, and as this was my first experience of Formal Hall, my expectations of my second Hall were rudely dashed.  

I wrote about this (with a paranoid self-justificatory note about the timing of Cambridge terms) here.
</autobiographical-note>

Having skimmed through The Record I was about to put it out of my mind ...

<tangent>
(the role of recycling in this process is a matter for ongoing debate with MrsK)
</tangent>

...when I took a last look at the Old Members section, which passes on bits of information about alumni/-ae, listed by year of matriculation and found that I had nearly missed this:

Excerpt from 'Old Members' section of The Record

The text was vaguely familiar, but in this wordy (linkless) form almost entirely useless. Guiltily I remembered a note I had written two or three years ago, with links to posts with 'Corpus-related content'. I had looked in the 2022-23 edition to see whether my attempt at publicity had borne fruit, and then forgotten it.

But in a blog with well over 500 entries, posted over a dozen years, it would be ridiculous to draw from that entry in The Record the conclusion that the content was always related to Corpus. My subjects are many and various, often relating to language and music. I append an example  by way of a PS (or makeweight) that can safely be ignored by the non Corpuscular.

Anyway I hope Blogger's servers can handle the surge in traffic now that I've included these links:

• Chris Andrew's book (not books)
• Augustine Gospels
• Singing in Chapel
• Marlowe portrait
• Chronopage also here and here
• Wilkins (New Court architect)
• DNA Origami/Rutherford

b

PS

On BBC Radio 4 the other  day...

<correction>
This was in fact more than a year ago. I just left it unfinished and unpublished.
</correction>

 ...in a programme I didn't have time to digest, but will revisit..

<parenthesis>
(I did, but found I had no more to add)
</parenthesis>

...a Spanish-speaking vulcanologist...

 <parenthesis>
(I think they used the Globish volcanologist, but I'm a fan of Latinate derivations...

<glossary>
[volcanoes got their name from Vulcan, and those ignorant Romans didn't know squat about seismology and stuff ]
</glossary>

...at the possible expense of international understanding.)
 </parenthesis>

... talking about an eruption he had seen. And he said 'I couldn't stop to watch [the eruption]'.

His English was good enough for him to use "couldn't", but not good enough to stretch to 'couldn't stop watching' (let alone the idiomatic 'couldn't take my eyes off it').

This reminded me of a picture shared in an ESOL teachers' group on Facebook...

<autobiographical-note>
My biography in The Record doesn't mention the fact that, after the skinflints at HP laid me off a few months short of my 20th year (when they'd have had to fork out for an award), I became a language tacher.
</autobiographical-note>

...discussed here

<pre_script>

[This] recalled for me a diagram (I won't say picture) that I used to use to show the difference between "stop + infinitive' (the right-thinking word in the ESOL world is "to-infinitive")... and "stop + gerund*"):

</pre_script>