I am so glad I saw the movie before I read it, partly because having an outline helped me when its English was an entirely different version than mine but mostly so that when various terrible things happened, I expected them.
For a while I tried to figure out how Scottish vowels shifted differently than Chaucerian London ones did, but there's not just one Scottish English anyway. It's remarkable that so many accents evolved in such a small geographic space. The island of Britain has about Pennsylvania's area, but do Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Pennsyltucky and the Amish all sound as different as Cockney and Brummie and Liverpudlian and Edinburgh? Amish yes, but the others?
I can understand why to be "Lee Marvin" is to be hungry (starvin', in the rhyming slang), but why does "greet" mean "cry" or "coupon" mean "face"? Some words are onomatopoeic, like "pluke" for "pimple" (the glossary glosses into English English, so "pluke" is given as "spot"); some I can just roll with, like "draftpak" for lowlife or container of alcohol; some I knew, like bairn; but why does "to k.b." mean "to elbow or turn away"?
She maybe was going to call Persuasion "The Elliots"? Ptooey.
Deidre Le Faye brought to my attention a lot of the little homegrown, true-to-life details that I have not given enough attention to. I had never thought why it's okay to call Bingley and Willoughby by the surnames alone but why it's crass for Mrs. Elton to call Mr. Knightley by only by his. I mean, I could tell it was, but I didn't think, beyond that Mrs. Elton is tacky and Jane Bennet is not, why that might be. Le Faye says that the mode of so addressing men had gone out of fashion in the 20 years between the one-time First Impressions and Emma.
I think I feel a rewatch coming on. Except how often do I get five days in a row to indulge in only books? On to The Child that Books Built.
My mother's husband gave her a cellular phone for Christmas. Being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, she is. That's not what I'm proud of.
What I'm proud of is this: a while ago BDL was given a hand-me-down, surely obsolete computer from his school. Its price was right, even if nothing else is. Today she told me that BDL finally set it up on a table in the...work room? My sister's former bedroom has, besides the computer, quite a snazzy sewing machine in it, both machines thus far unused. The room of misfit technology, then. She told me it was just on a table so far, not aerogonomically [sic] correct or anything, and I asked, "So you know that the monitor faces front, right?" and she laughed! She even continued, "Yes, it's all set up, with the keyboard in front of the monitor, hee hee, and everything."
She asked about presents. I told her that, as RDC retreated to the couch after the Great UnMasking with a stack of new books clasped to his bosom, I asked him, "But what will you read tomorrow?" and she understood the implication of far more than a day's new material.
Really, I should have got her remarried off years ago. We'd have an entirely different relationship.
I skimmed People or a similar rag in the grocery line the other day. It said that Brooke Shields has a daughter named Rowan Francis. Eh? I figured People had made an error, so I just looked it up. According to Extra, that's the girl's name. Francis, not Frances.
Looking it up, I see that although Frances was "standardized" as the spelling for females, females have always been named Francis too. Well. Okay then.
A woman I used to work with had a sign hanging in her cube:
"When it comes
To Francis, sir,
It's 'i' as in 'him'
And 'e' as in 'her.'"