Cashing in

When I arrived outside Corpus Christi College Cambridge in September 1971...

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(Oh yes. I think I've mentioned before the belief in academic circles that the best time for Part I modern language orals to be held was before we had started the first term. In the days before the year abroad became [rightly] compulsory, this meant that the only proof that an examinee could talk a foreign language was gathered before the course started.)
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...'my suitcase and guitar in hand'  à la Paul Simon ...

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(and if  you would have preferred "au Paul Simon",  read more about à la

here)
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...(except that he didn't have a third bit of baggage for his rugby kit) I was struck by the unevenness of the pavement outside the main gate:

But there were other things on my mind at the time (quite a few, come to think of it) and I put it out of my mind, until in due course it just became one of many Cantabrigian oddities.

Nearly fifty years later, all became clear. A 'Cantabrigian oddity' was indeed involved, but it was in the mind of the architect of Corpus's New Court, William Wilkins. The design and building of New Court (inter alia) is discussed in The Courts of Corpus Christi – not a must-read, I grant, but with a certain interest.

Wilkins graduated from Gonville and Caius College in 1800, with a strange interest in King's – particularly the chapel, which he measured and drew as an undergraduate (the drawing is in a libray in New York...

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"A volume of engravings based on the survey is held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York." 

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...).

This bee stayed  buzzing around in his bonnet for  years. To quote The Courts of Corpus Christi:

New Court’s Trumpington Street facade is aligned exactly with the southern of the Chapel’s two eastern towers .... Is this alignment a coincidence or intentional? No drawing survives of the setting-out of New Court and its relation to the street and neither has any written explanation by Wilkins of the building. However, the plinth along the street frontage may offer a clue. The edge of the plinth marks the boundary between the street and the College. The generous space between that edge and the façade suggests that the façade was moved back in order to ensure the alignment with King’s Chapel...– Wilkins’s private link between the site of his first architectural endeavour and, later, his favourite building and final resting place.

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Wilkins is buried in Corpus Chapel. 
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Corpus, on a line between
King's College Chapel ² and St Botolph's ³
(so not quite aligned with Trumpington Street)

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St Benet's ¹ adds to the arcanity. If you want the full story, you know where to look: The Courts of Corpus Christi.
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 L'Envoi

When I was first introduced to the Worldwide Web in the late 1980s or early 1990s the distant graphically rich site that everyone gave as an example of this brave new world of sharing and altruism was the Vatican Library.  Another such site that I have recently been drawn to is the Parker Library on the Web. But such sites are few and far between. The need to make money out of web-sites has called for a new word – well an extension of an old one. The word "monetize" has existed for centuries – ever since kings (or whoever) felt the need to turn stuff into cash.

The word was first recorded in the nineteenth century, and the Collins English Dictionary gives these definitions:

But the third of these definitions seems to have been waiting for Tim Berners-Lee to come along. The Collins page, if you scroll down far enough, shows this trend:

So the word spent its early years doing a workmanlike but not very interesting job, and then took on a new meaning in the early 1980s; if only the Collins data went beyond 2008 we could no doubt see the full 'hockey-stick' curve.

Enough for today.

b

Update 2023.06.20.15:15 – Not quite enough; added <inline-ps />

Update 2023.06.22.19:50 – Added <inline-pps />