Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Visiting Glasgow
Another substantial delay, sorry about that! Work has been frantic lately: I've been centrally involved in setting up all sorts of new experiments with various different people. I'm feeling quite productive, but little time is left for frippery. Especially since I've also been fighting off a nasty cold/flu sort of thing (my immune system should really get in gear). Anyway.... back to Glasgow.

We took a morning train from London, somewhat loaded down with a bunch of posters/flyers/information sheets for my work presentation. The trip to Glasgow was pretty quick, less than 5 hours up the West Coast Main Line on a Pendolino train. Once we ditched the luggage, we scrambled up the hill for some quick touristic activities before closing time. First stop was Provand's Lordship, Glasgow's only surviving medieval house. But just across the street from Provand's Lordship stands Glasgow Cathedral, so we had to make a quick visit there as well. And of course its surrounding churchyard. We Dunces always seem to find ourselves wandering around churchyards, graveyards, cemeteries, and this was no exception. The graves surrounding the cathedral were quite substantial, and many were surrounded by iron cages (perhaps this was to protect the recently dead from the bodysnatching craze?). One of these cages also contained a Dunce.





But wait, there was more. Up on the hill above the cathedral was a the Glasgow Necropolis! Mrs. Dunce was almost uncontrollable with excitement:


But we were too late to explore the Necropolis (without scaling fences, tunneling or some other similar non-standard means of entrance, so we would have to wait. We took a detour back to the hotel (where I met with my Deaf colleague for a briefing about the next day's event), then made a beeline for the pub. The Babbity Bowster is quite well-regarded (and was quite near the hotel), so we made it our first stop. It's quite small, with fairly minimal decor & lots of hard surfaces which made it noisier than we might have liked. But we managed to get a small table which was no mean feat on a Friday night. Decent ale, and quite good pub food (including vegetarian haggis, neeps and tatties). After that it was a very short wander to another pub, the Blackfriars. This was a much larger place, with quite a mix of people and a larger range of beers (many of which we'd never heard of). There's a smoking ban in Scotland (unlike England, at least for the moment), so the pubs weren't smoky either. Everything was quite pleasant; we didn't see even a hint of trouble, much less the famed Glasgow kiss.

The next day our paths diverged: I spent the day working, and Mrs Dunce hit the museums. Our next joint venture was navigating the complicated and overcrowded Glasgow subway system.


St. Dunce: Patron Saint of the Glasgow Underground:


After a quick drink in a nice enough campus pub, we made our way to dinner. Much to Mrs Dunce's delight we were headed to the Ubiquitous Chip, a very highly-regarded restaurant. Or more accurately, restaurant-bar complex, as it's subdivided into various separate entities, including the Restaurant, the Upstairs, Big Pub, Wee Pub, and Corner Bar. We ate at the upstairs part, which had a sort of fancy gastropub menu, not as expensive (or as unusual) as the restaurant proper. Again vegetarian haggis made an appearance, but the highlight of the meal was probably Mrs. Dunce's smoked haddock salad.

After dinner it was back to the Blackfriar again (told you we liked it). This time we tried some of the unusual bottled beers. Most of them were from the historic ale range by Heather Ale and contained unusual (but historically accurate) ingredients like gooseberry, pine, seaweed, or heather (not all in the same product, thank goodness). We had a good window seat, so we were able to see the Saturday night street traffic. Loads and loads of people out on the town, but we saw nothing even remotely resembling carnage.

The next morning we headed over to the Necropolis, which probably deserves its own entry.

consume | travel
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 2:00:27 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [2]  | 
 Monday, May 14, 2007
Life ain't easy for a boy named Sue

Mrs. Dunce and I spent the past weekend in Glasgow, my first trip to Scotland. I was representing my workplace at a large Deaf event, trying to spread the word about the research we are doing, and to possibly recruit some Scottish BSL signers to participate in some of our studies. It was also a really great opportunity to practice my signing.

But I discovered something rather unfortunate when I started introducing myself to people. In BSL, as in many other sign languages, people often have "sign names", sort of like a signed nickname used in place of fingerspelling someone's actual name. My own sign name was given to me when I first met with a group of deaf researchers, after suffering an unfortunate broken-glasses incident which left me peering through the one remaining lens. It looks exactly like this: LINK.1

In the southeast (including London), this sign also means "to peep" (as in peeping through a keyhole, and maybe something like a peeping Tom). Perhaps with a vaguely naughty connotation, but nothing too extreme (unless everyone has been having a laugh at my expense....). In Scotland, however, this sign means "pervert", and not a nice, amusing sort of pervert either. When I introduced myself to a Scottish signer for the first time, I got a classic double-take. He asked me if that was really my sign name. When I told him that indeed it was, he proceeded to explain that I should really think about changing my name (maybe something more like "tea", a similarly shaped sign, but at the corner of the mouth. Or maybe something more like "monocle", which is in front of the eye, but with a more open hand). The Deaf equivalent of "Bill, or George, or anything but Sue", I suppose.

Other than the embarrassment of introducing myself "Hi, my name is Pervert", things seemed to go quite well. I chatted to lots of different people about our research and the different things people here are working on, maybe 3/4 of the time in sign language, and only 1/4 of the time in English. I'd rehearsed quite a bit of my patter about the research, but was most worried about not being able to understand people (especially unfamiliar people, in an unfamiliar setting). But as my co-workers predicted, it was no trouble at all.

Next time I'll write about Glasgow itself; we thoroughly enjoyed our long weekend there.


1A curious coincidence: this same handshape positioned on the forehead means "know-nothing" or "dunce". But I got this sign name before I chose the name of "Dunce" (that only happened when I started up this blog, and found myself faced with the difficult challenge of coming up with a title which, I felt, had to fulfill certain characteristics).
language | travel
Monday, May 14, 2007 3:09:58 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  | 
 Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Pot plants or plants in pots
This week is another hectic one at work, as we're being moved into a new lab/office zone on Friday. So we've been scrambling around packing and labeling years' worth of important items. And noticing that the important:junk ratio is impressively low. But because we didn't have much notice of the moving date, it's much more a matter of throwing everything into cartons, and sorting out the junk later. At least we have professional movers to actually sling the cartons around, so it's not as bad as if we'd been moving things ourselves (in our recent house move, there was some discussion of the merits of moving versus leaving things like dirt [or "compost" if you like. We should have moved the compost {dirt} after all....]).

During the preparation for moving, an interesting difference between British and American English surfaced. One of the PhD students asked whether the movers would take care of our pot plants, or if we should move them ourselves. In US English, this question has a very different meaning, which might not be so appropriate to bring up so boldly in a workplace discussion (I know, this is academia. But still!!!!). You see, pot plants look like this in Britain:


But American pot plants are a little bit different:


In Britain, the term "pot plants" simply means "plants in pots" (unfortunately I don't discuss gardening enough to know what sort of plants can be considered "pot plants" if they're placed in the appropriate receptacles, nor which sorts of receptacles "pot plants" are allowed to be in). But in US English the term is dominated by "pot", an especially common American slang term for marijuana1 (more often called "cannabis" in British English, and let's not get into the minefield of slang terms [I think you could probably select just about any word and claim it's a slang term for cannabis]). So if an American hears that a grad student is wondering about moving pot plants around, they sure won't be surprised. But if that student is talking about it at a lab meeting, they must be high.


1Etymology of "pot" in this sense is unknown, according to the OED: Origin uncertain and disputed. The most popular theory explains the word as being derived from the supposed Mexican Spanish words *potiguaya or *potaguaya (cannabis leaves), or *potación de guaya, (literally ‘drink of grief’), supposedly denoting a drink of wine or brandy in which marijuana buds were steeped; however, no corroborating evidence has been found to support the use of any of these terms in Spanish (although *potiguaya is recorded in an English glossary of drug terminology slightly earlier than the earliest example of the present word.
The US-favored term "marijuana" also has rather murky origins once you cross the border: From Mexican Spanish "mariguana", "marihuana", of uncertain origin. It has been suggested that the Spanish word is from Nahuatl "mallihuan" prisoner. Forms [containing] "j" appear to be an English innovation (attested later also in French): occasional recent examples in Spanish prob. show English influence. Influence of a folk etymology from the Spanish personal name "María-Juana" or its familiar form "Mari-Juana" has frequently been suggested; if so this would appear to have occurred within English.
Good ol' British "cannabis" comes straight on from Latin or Greek.

language
Wednesday, May 02, 2007 3:13:58 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  |