Andreas Kluth, the Berlin bureau chief of the British magazine The Economist, wrote an essay called “Being German is No Laughing Matter“. Here is the beginning of that essay: Shortly after moving back to Germany in 2012 after decades of absence, mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries, I took my kids to the Berlin zoo. The children […]
Tag: British
Weight? Wait — don’t tell me in kilos. (BWMA)
The British Weights and Measures Association (BWMA) exists, it says, “to protect and promote British weights and measures, and to oppose compulsory use of the metric system”. Their catchy slogan: “campaigning for inch-pound industries and consumer interests”. They maintain a list of “Corporate Culprits” — people and groups of whom they say: Just who are the […]
“doesn’t know his patronyms from his epithets”
Historians, most of them, agonize over how much to trust the work of earlier historians. The Got Medieval blog writes of one terrible bout of agonizing: … Indeed, a reputation as a bungler who doesn’t know his patronyms (son of the horrible one/Uther) from his epithets (horrible son) is about the best that Geoffrey could […]
Wall on Coots’ Consumption of Gull Droppings
Wall was a master an analyzing British bird droppings, as is evident in this study: “Coots and other birds eating goose- and gull-droppings,” T. Wall, British Birds. Vol. 76, no. 9, 1983, pp. 410-411.