Foreign Perspectives

Or is it?

What I’ve to do is to take a dialect word and analyse how it came to be used. So, I’ve to trace the development of the word that I choose as far back as I can. That’s surprisingly easy as it turns out as the Oxford English Dictionary covers a lot of the history of the words within it which, of course, includes the words used in the various dialects.

Anyway, I’m provisionally running with “wee” which is considered very much a Scottish word these days but it turns out that it’s derived from a very, very old Old English word related to our present-day weigh: essentially meaning a small measure. That’s changed somewhat over time and now we have both the word “weigh” for the weight whilst “wee” is very much a synonym for “small” in Scots and several English dialects too. Not only is it not really a Scottish word but in fact it was only really taken up by Scottish writers from the early 1700s.

Now, of course, the question is whether or not I can write enough about it for the assignment.

One of the problems that you have when travelling these days is that every time you go, the airport security seems tighter than it was the time before.

Twice recently I’ve ended up spending almost 30 minutes in security. That’s not 30 minutes queuing to go through mind you, that’s 30 minutes whilst they go through the case after it’s scanned.

How come? Well, if you’ve more than a couple of electronic items in your case the guy looking at the screen doesn’t know what to make of it all so the assumption is that you’re carrying a bomb. Therefore, they go through all the electronic items and swab them, swab the inside of the case then run a little test on the swab they’ve taken to see if it’s picked up any traces of explosives. Then they scan the whole lot again.

Both times, they’ve not allowed for any extra time to do such a thing so even though I went to security when called (and you can’t usually go earlier than that), I just about made it to the gate before the plane left.

Quite what they’d do if, say, I had heart trouble and was carrying some nitroglycerine I don’t know.

We’re in the process of thinking about where we might move after we sell this place and one place that’s come into the frame is Scotland.

Now you might think that moving house in the UK is simple enough but in fact the house buying process in Scotland is so different from that in the rest of the UK, it’s better to think of it just as you would a move to a foreign country. That mindset means that you won’t be taken by surprise by developments in the buying process as you ordinarily would be. For instance, in Scotland there is no gazumping simply because the first contract is binding.

That single difference means that if you’re moving from another country to the UK then it’s considerably easier to time your move. At the most extreme case, in Northern Ireland there’s a considerable amount of bidding that goes on which makes it virtually impossible to time a house move there at the moment.

Of course there are other considerations than the simple legal system. For one thing, if you were thinking of moving to the Hebrides then you’d probably need to learn Gaelic and, of course, throughout much of Scotland it’s Scots that’s spoken which would be hard enough to pick up if you were used to “normal” English.

Wendy’s been busy whilst I was away and we now have a whole bunch of new cities represented on Whole Earth Guide.

There’s several in the UK and Ireland, a first in Hungary, the bigger cities in Italy and a few in Switzerland too now.

As usual, we’re aiming these guides as specifically tourist guides primarily for short break holidays and we’re aiming to cover the top tourist cities in Europe before the summer season if we can manage to keep at it.

Usually when I go off on a short break there are a few new entries on the B&B and self-catering listings sites but this time I returned to something of a bumper crop which took me most of the morning to catch up.

In theory, the process is quite automated but in reality there’s almost always a little work to be done to get the new entries online. Most of the time, it’s a matter of a few minutes but now and again you get someone that just puts “see website” and, of course, their website is rarely in a form that allows a straight copy and paste to get it online. In fact, this time it was worse as they’d their whole website typed in uppercase letters so I’d to retype it all and correct the grammar too for that matter.

That grammar problem is quite strange really. You’d think that people would put the effort into their site to get both the spelling and grammar reasonably correct but now and again you come across a site that you’d think had been written by a small child which surely can’t be an attractive proposition for a potential guest, can it?

Strangely, it’s usually the foreigners who are writing in their second or third language who get both the spelling and grammar correct and this morning was no different: the entry from Italy was perfect apart from one word which only needed to be changed to put a truly English-English spin on the phrase they’d used.