Great little page with a list of billions (not really billions) of collective nouns. http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml.

Useful if you ever want to look really clever and know what the right word is. Just don’t tell anyone where you found them, and they will think you are a genius.

I’ve just been reading Wikipedia’s article on Bananas. To those who say it is not a fruit, but a herb, I say, “Do your research before correcting people.” Of course bananas are fruits, they are the bits that contain the seeds.

The banana plant is a herb, not a tree — but the bit we eat is the fruit.

Happy Christmas if you already knew that. Not otherwise though. You’ve got to earn your happy Christmas on this site. (You can’t mess around where bananas are concerned.)

Wikipedia is a blessed and holy site. I read its article on pepper and I was fascinated from start to finish. I pepper people’s food all day long. I am in no way exaggerating when I say that I must put grams and grams of the stuff on people’s dinners.

Grams, I tell you. Grams. And as we all know, “a gramme is better than a damn”. *

I had no idea that the bit of pepper that we eat is actually a fruit. I had assumed it was a seed. Well that shows me up, doesn’t it.

Seriously though, guys, I am all about the piperine at the moment. Go piperine.

* I hate all those dystopian novels about the future, I really do.

Apparently in Japan there is, or used to be, some controversy as to whether 12 am referred to noon or midnight. I found the following anecdote on a blog and I think it’s great.

Back in 1972, a K-12 student got confused and asked the teacher which is right. The inquiry was forwarded to the principal, superintendents, all the way up to the Ministry of Education that eventually contacted Japan Clock & Watch Association(JCWA) for an official comment.

All the way up to the Ministry of Education! I love the fact that the system worked so efficiently. In England it would never have left the headteachers desk, and probably wouldn’t have got there in the first place. Read the rest of the post.

Sorry about the no posts, I have been in lovely Devon for the whole week, sunning myself and also being around my excellent friends from Sheffield and having a wonderful time. It was so wonderful, in fact, that it almost constituted a religious experience. At any rate, I can no longer look at milk without wanting to sing “Milsch, milsch, milsch, I’m looking for a good time!”

In-jokes!

Most of my time in Devon was spent concocting blatant lies to make myself sound clever, and then laughing at their ridiculousness and giving the game away. But I also dealt out many useful factoids, such as did you know that Newton once poked a large needle behind his eye, just to see what would happen? Neither did I until I read it in A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Available in all good bookstores, or just Amazon, because frankly who can be bothered with actual shops these days?

Anyway, it was a truly formidable time, I got to sing Happy Birthday in Icelandic, and they let me put two enormous candles on the fire, which burnt so cheerfully it almost brought tears to my eyes. (By the way, in related typo news, I just tried to type “ears” just then, which I think is quite funny.)

We also left the longest entry in the guestbook, out of everybody who had stayed in the cottage! The guestbook was full of really great stuff like phrases such as “thanks for the weather” and misplaced apostrophes. My favourite was the comment that stopped abruptly. It read “Great cottage, but it didn’t have” and someone had written, underneath, “What!? What didn’t it have?”

I, however, would like to propose the idea that the author of the comment was trying to change the way we use the word “have”. From now on, I am going to say that things that are disappointing don’t “have”. As in, “Yeah, it was alright, but it just didn’t have, you know?” Hooray for making transitive verbs intransitive!

Phil wrote the comment in the visitor’s book, and my contribution was, “We are sorry for the things we broke, and the things we burnt,” since I felt a little guilty about burning two perfectly good candles. But they burnt really hotly, and shed loads of light, which in my mind justifies quite a lot of things.

It was a great trip, and it has completely confirmed my idea that moving back to Sheffield this summer is the right thing to do. Photos to follow soon!

Parasites are, generally, hated creatures. They take resources but they never give back. That’s actually the biological definition of a parasite: an animal or plant which takes resources (food, energy, etc) without bringing any benefit to its host.

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I have long wondered whether the word “none” is plural (“None of us are”) or singular (“None of us is”).

Well, it suddenly occurred to me that the Internet might know, so I asked Oxford, and here is what it told me:

Some traditionalists maintain that none can only take a singular verb (as in “none of them is coming tonight” rather than “none of them are coming tonight”). However, none is descended from Old English nan meaning “not one”, and has been used for around a thousand years with either a singular or a plural verb, depending on the context and the emphasis needed.

I love the Internet dearly.