Who? What? Spring?

If anybody wanders into the city between now and January, 2010, you’ll be able to have a special visit with the Dr. Who exhibit, at the Kelvingrove Museum. If you remember watching the show in the dark ages, when it was just some weird SciFi thing on PBS that had a cool theme song, you’ll be amused to note that they have all kinds of props and costumes from the way-back-when to the present. They’re building a whole world on the bottom floor of the museum for this — it’s a Huge Big Deal, and while we probably won’t go to the show’s opening day at the museum — even after it was open for weeks, the Kylie Minogue costume show was wall-to-wall insane people — you can bet we’ll be there with our laser screwdrivers at some point. Probably just in time to foil a Cybermen attack.

On the whiteboard in the kitchen, squeezed in between the grocery list and numbers for the !#$%^ people from British Telecomm (whom we have to call almost daily, since we have a fault in our telephone line and the internet drops out pretty much every other hour), we have a running list of words. The words are heard or overheard, some are understood, but most misunderstood, or utterly bewildering. Every once in awhile we dust off the list and present it to you. And here’s the list from the past couple of weeks or so — or, dare we say, the past fortnight:

Moreish: T. heard this one, and at first she thought she heard Moorish, as in, the northwestern African Berber/Arabic Muslim tribespeople type of Moors. But, no. It just means a food that’s tasty enough to make you want more and more. It’s… moreish. Got it?

Titchie: D. heard from the veg guys, and we guess it to mean small? Wee? We can get a “Titchie bag of fruit” from them, so we figure it’s a little less than small, and a little more than none. Sounds reasonable to us, anyway.

Book: Depending on who says this to you, how fast, and in what context, the word can seriously sound like “nuke.” It tends to confuse things. Seriously.

Poem: This was a funny one — we don’t remember who was saying this one, but we were at the University, and bounced it off of our friend Gem. She immediately blushed and said, “I say it right.” She does, if there actually is a “right” way involved. For some dialects, poem rhymes with goyim (say, poe-i-yem). We’re not sure where the person was from who said this, but it was probably the same place where film has the extra syllable of “filim.”

Incidentally, at a lecture this past week, D. discovered that the word towel is pronounced exactly as the word tau, by their guest speaker, who grew up somewhere in London.

That same lecture informed him of the unique piece of British history that is the …Monkey Hangers — which are pronounced “monkey-ungers” with a hard ‘g’. As the story goes, a village had a scavenging business during the Napoleonic Wars, and once found a shipwreck with only a monkey — in the uniform of a French soldier — on board. The stories differ as to where the tale took place, and the reasons for the next action — discontent about scavenging laws, ignorance, fear — but the upshot of the story is that the monkey was hung as a French spy… apparently this tale is now complimentary to the folks of from Hartlepool (known also as Hartlepudlians) and their football team.

It’s become the classic silly story that seems to go with all sports mascots.

Meanwhile D. next week is giving the final lecture of the year to the Information Management and Preservation masters, who will then go off and vacation and forget everything he’s said by the time they take exams. The class, which one of his PhD advisers teaches, is supposed to get real-world application from this speech, so D. is working very hard to make it “real world.” Maybe he should lay off a few of them, or dock their wages or something.

‘Tis the first day of Spring, and while Glasgow’s actually been dry for the last couple of days we expect that to cease pretty much immediately. No matter, Spring Break has almost sprung, at least, and during the lapse in lectures during break in the next few weeks, we’re hopefully going to take up our boxes once again and — hopefully, please God FOR THE LAST TIME ‘TIL WE LEAVE THIS COUNTRY — walk. Murky plans are afoot to relocate nearer the University, and we may have found something nearer Woodlands — of course, this is after our friend who lives in Woodlands moved to Edinburgh, but c’est la vie. Maybe she’ll visit.

It’s been a tremendously busy, up-and-down sort of week, and the next few will be filled with the same, as we work on packing and cleaning and bemoaning yet again the fact that most of our earthly possessions are books and wondering why that we haven’t given away more of them. We’ll keep you posted.

– D & T

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