After setting up this blogsite earlier in the week - more by luck than judgement, I must confess - I decided to take it offline again, because I realised that a) I haven't the IT skills to make it behave the way I wanted it to, and b) putting out regular interesting positngs is a huge undertaking. Only guess what? I can't For some reason I can't get back into my website and turn the damned thing off!
So it looks like I'm stuck with it. Especially now that I've just had a mex from a friend of mine to say that another friend of mine has discovered this thing and is actually read it. (Hi, Weff!, Hi Christian!)
Guys, I'm supposed to be writing another novel. And running a long distance-relationship with a very lovely, very talented lady who lives in Athens. (No, I don't intend to discuss my love life here - though I may make the occasional allusion to it, OK?)
I've just spent four uninterupted days working on the novel, and guess what? I'll be glad to get back to work for a rest. Seven hours teaching tomorrow. Indeed, I'll be doing a re-run of my lesson on some of the differences between British and American English. With one small amendment (the which I owe to this amazingly knowledgable guy I met last Sunday - Hi Martin!). Along with the pairs of words I always chunter on about - tarts and hookers, bogs and johns - I'll be mentioning a new pair: full-stops and periods. Why? To highlight the misconception about those cousins of ours across the pond corrupting the language. Because as often as not, it's the British who innovate. In this case, 'period' was the ubiquitous English word for that dot that ends a sentence until the mid-nineteenth century. However, it was Victorian squeamishness over the other 'period', the menstrual one, that encouraged the English to find an alternative name for the punctuation mark and put a stop to the word's traditional use. A full stop.
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