TLS

[crowleycrow]

I enjoy the Times Litereary Supplement for a lot of reasons.  It reviews books that wouldn't be noticed in any general weekly.  It reviews books in languages other than English and quotes from them in the original, which even if I can't read is pleasant to encounter.  And it furnishes me every week with examples of how different British and

Comments

[proximoception]

It does seem like local and national pride play more of a role in dialect preservation than we once suspected. Could be a short term phenomenon, though. No one yet knows how much solving/dissolving the internet will end up doing.

Fraser's uncle's days sound fuller than mine.

[anonymous]

My mother contracted polio. Contracting polio leaves you in hospital for almost a year. I would call this a circumlocution. A bran-tub is a half-barrel of water mixed with wheat bran into a squidgy sludge with toys floating in it to be fished out by children and which could be a source of polio but doubtful. The Oxford poor of Cowley is that vague connection between disease and the unwashed poor. Boxes of magazines and old encyclopedias and comics that were given us had to be burned. Of course we hid them and read them. It was clear to us, the children, that polio comes from the rich who have been contaminated by accidental propinquity with the poor.

[crowleycrow]

Thanks for the bran tub, which I sort of understood -- a FB friend suggested it was filled with sawdust, or bran, and the toys buried in it to be felt for -- but what do I know of these odd customs? It's strange about the rich and the diseased poor -- in the case of polio it's well known now that little kids who played in the dirt and the mud and went barefoot etc. were more likely to get polio when very young -- when it had little harmful effects, no worse than a cold and sometimes not noticed at all, but when the well-brought-up rich kids, who were kept at home and not allowed to play with others, got it later in life the effects were usually worse and sometimes devastating -- as for FDR. So much for the "propinquity of the poor" -- which could have done Brother soem good.