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

That's a thought. But we won't reach K for another few years.

My brother reminded me of that teacher over the weekend. I had forgotten the word for cape (cába) and had to look it up. It's mentioned in the 19th-century patriotic song The Wearing of the Green, in its diminutive form:

When laws can stop the blades of grass from growing as they grow
And when the leaves in summertime their verdure dare not show
Then I will change the colour too I wear in my caubeen
But till that day, please God, I'll stick to the wearing of the green.

...which makes me wonder, when did green become the colour of Irish patriotism? But this is not the forum for such questions. Must write a journal entry! Haven't done one of those for ages!

Linguistically, though, we can pose the following questions: is it connected with 40 shades of green, or not being so green as I'm cabbage looking, or the green, green grass of home?
Are all Irishmen green with jealousy or suffering green-sickness or even greenstick fractures?

We can. It's not really a linguistic question though. I put it in a journal entry and got some useful feedback F103872?thread=8308995 (hope that directs).

The song 'Forty Shades of Green' by Johnny Cash is a curious item, not least because of the recurring line "Where the breeze is sweet as Shalimar, and there's forty shades of green".

What is Shalimar? It is (or was?) the flagship fragrance of the perfume house Guerlain.

I assumed it was a river, as in the Indian love song: Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?

I have no idea, but I thought it was a sort of paradisey place. I think it's a perfume, too.

Yes, I thought it was a paradise or a river too, until I googled it. I research everything I put up on the Uke Ireland lyrics-and-chords site http://ukeireland.com/chords-tabs/

http://ukeireland.com/pdf-chords/40-shades.pdf

So, what did you come up with exactly? After wading through all the perfume and Indian restaurant references, I only managed to find the explanation in German:

Das Wort „Shalimar“ kommt aus dem Persischen und bedeutet „Die reinste aller menschlichen Freuden“

The word "Shalimar" comes from the Farsi and means "The most pure of all human pleasures."

Thank you TC! That's more than I found!

Wiki has over a dozen 'disambiguations' for shalimar.

The one they don't have which sprang first to my mind
was the name Shalimar, a female character in one of
them TV SciFi programs - possibly Mutant X or SG1.


~jwf~

Well the one that hadn't sprung to mind and ought to:

A bold hippopotamus was standing one day
By the banks of the cool Shalimar

And there in the Wiki disambiguation list:

Shalimar Fox, a character on the television show Mutant X

--did you just add it in?

Nope. I dont 'do' Wiki.
But I do read it from time to time.
I hadn't noticed her inclusion when I searched there yesterday, and
when she came to mind earlier today I never thought to double-check.

~jwf~

Doing wiki is remarkably easy, and quite satisfying ...

Here's some BBC trivia regarding the folly of spelling
in the US of A and blaming it all on Noah Webster.

http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/05/america-drop-u-british-spellings/

Curiously, as a Canadian the middle way is our standard in almost
every aspect of life - but spelling is skewed toward the British if
only because of official business and political correspondence.

But in conversation and the conversational way I like to write,
I often go beyond the pale, dontcha know, eh.


~jwf~

I read somewhere that a lot of the American spellings are the 18th century English ones: honor and so on. The British introduced the u under French influence. That must have been after they stopped fighting them.

The academic language of Trinity College Dublin still gives Honors degrees.

And Will Shakespeare used to make up new verbs from nouns. Just like George DubYa Bush. Now there's a thought.

If we can push the idea that the man who wrote the works was an American, the Oxfordian societies would lose 95% of their members.

Oxford, eh.

I was thinking about Oxford today and sort of came to
the assumption that it was a place where Oxen could
be safely driven across the river. Which raises yet
another ongoing question I often puzzle about. Can
cattle swim? You always see pictures of drowned cows
floating around when there's floods. And my neighbor
used to laugh about how he lost a small herd to an
incoming tide saying what dumb critters they are.
"They couldn't save themselves from the Tidal Bore of
the Bay of Fundy..."

I don't think I've ever seen pictures of swimming bovines.
All those beasties we see in the far eastern rice fields
seem to be trodding in fairly shallow water, pulling plows.
American buffalo and Texas longhorns all seem to favour the
shallower fording places when crossing rivers.

But, given that a river is not in raging flood mode, would
the average cow be able to swim if the water was deeper
than their legs could reach bottom. Horses can.

M'dear old mom used to tell me that all animals could swim
except pigs. And their problem was not the swimming reflex
but that their legs were short and their hooves very sharp
so they ended up cutting their own throats... I always felt
suspect of many of her Gentrified tales.


~jwf~

I visited an island when I was a child. The local farmers raised cows and when they were ready for the market they swam them out to the ship. The day I was there one cow drowned. Modern farm cows can swim but not well.

AFAIK, pigs can swim. Even some breeds of camel can swim, although I don't see why they'd need to. Primates, other than man, can't swim or don't swim well. It's the distribution of subcutaneous fat that does it.