h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"We are not a "

The pingo that I discussed with my grandpop was a feature in Ness Gardens on the Wirral, overlooking the River Dee, near Parkhurst where Lady Hamilton (Nelson's bit on the side) was from. UK readers may remember it as the location for a Marmite advert featuring Tom O'Connor: "What's Marmite, Tom?" The preceding will be utterly opaque to Canadian readers.

>> utterly opaque <<

No utters were milked in the making of this Marmite.
As always, I remain trans-lucid.

~jwf~

Getting back to conurbations. Do we (in the more crowded nations) understand a conurbation to be:
a) the large population centre formed by the coalescence of smaller, nearby centres?
b) the large population centre which exists when one relatively large centre expands outwards to engulf smaller centres?
c) either?

We've lots of b's in the UK, but of a's...I can only think of Stoke-on-Trent (aks 'The Five Towns')and arguably the large area commonly called 'Birmingham' but consisting of Birmingham plus Coventry plus Wolverhampton, etc.

Five towns...Stoke, Hanley, Burslem, Newcastle-under-Lyme and..?

>>"Five towns...Stoke, Hanley, Burslem, Newcastle-under-Lyme and..."

...and a lot of road signs pointing to 'City Centre', without saying *which* bleeding city.

Actually, it seems that *five* was possibly a bit of artistic licence.
http://www.thepotteries.org/bennett.html

I'd suggest industrial south Lancashire (Liverpool to Manchester) as a case of similar-sized places spreading out to the point where they meet, with possibly similar things happening in the North East.

And, by the same token, 'The Thames gateway' and west-central Scotland.

But do we call these 'conurbations'? They've yet to develop identities ("Liverchester"?) Aren't they just 'sprawl'?

Local saying: "Manchester - thirty-five miles away from Liverpool, *and always will be*!"

The West Yorkshire conurbation must be as good an example as any. Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield and Wakefield etc are all definite "urbs" with their own identities.

Ditto the Ruhr valley

Looking at some of those maps of light from space, West Yorkshire certainly seems to be one of the brighter extended areas in the UK.

*examines map*
What would be a more modern phrase for "Take me to your leader"?

And large portions of Denmark and The Netherlands.

>>What would be a more modern phrase for "Take me to your leader"?<<

Ayup! Weer's t'gaffer

>> What would be a more modern phrase for "Take me to your leader"? <<

Leadership is a lost art.
Not that one would expect ETs to understand this, but perhaps they'd be better served if they'd ask: Is the owner about?


~jwf~

I get here so infrequently lately, and last time lost a posting when the computer timed out, so I do have a couple of lingering random thoughts I'd like to get off my chest.

Before I had a chance to look it up I spent way to much time considering a connection between 'lust' and 'lustre' There really isn't one. The first is OE, a variant of 'list' and the second is Latin. Ah well.

And in "How Art Made the World" I was surprised to find a quotation from Wittgenstein whose name has appeared here before. It was about art and seemed to make good sense. This surprised me enough to actually see what else he might have said.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/ludwig_wittgenstein.html


~jwf~

"A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion."
Ludwig Wittgenstein


~jwf~

Or, for those people who try and argue using words as if they were Instruments as precise as mathematical symbols...

"Philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language."
Ludwig Wittgenstein

i know i probably won't really care, so i don't know why i bother asking, but who is this dear german sounding fellow: ludwig wittgenstein?

"For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word ''meaning'' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."
Ludwig Wittgenstein

>>who is this dear german sounding fellow: ludwig wittgenstein?

You need to speak to The Blessed Recumbentman. He's Wittgenstein's representative on earth. Or, at least, on h2g2.

Thank you for the drumroll Edward! A1024156 'Ludwig Wittgenstein' is my sincere homage to the saint of the 20th century. An unreligious writer who has influenced theologians, and a teriffic demolisher of the twaddle that philosophers speak.

That is a great collections of quotes, ~j~. Though he wrote in German (being Austrian, and an exact contemporary of Hitler, who was his schoolmate for a year or two! Some people think Hitler's anti-Semitism sprang from the sparkling wit, grace, talents, and all-round superiority of this Jewish boy, or at least was exacerbated by it) he is mainly translated into Oxford English, whose particular quirk is the spelling "shewn" for shown.

However I doubt that "sewn" is the right word for seeds, even in Oxford. Nope. Only sown in Soed.

"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." -- such as The Life of Brian.