We spent a fair amount of time in lab this afternoon pondering the meaning of "module timetable," which a fellow student headed for study abroad in the UK later this year had to provide to some bureaucracy or other, until we magically thought to Google the term and found that it meant "class schedule".
How we all speak the same language yet still manage to confuse ourselves utterly bamboozles me.
I like the extra vocabulary, though.
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We also spent ten minutes discussing the definition of Biophysics ("calculating the force and angle with which you have to chuck a cow to get it to land on the X"), so I'm not actually sure how productive the literary excursion was.
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I'm unusually exhausted this week due to very long hours in the lab (but at least they're not wasted! It's working!), it's off to bed for me. Good night everyone!
How we all speak the same language yet still manage to confuse ourselves utterly bamboozles me.
I like the extra vocabulary, though.
***
We also spent ten minutes discussing the definition of Biophysics ("calculating the force and angle with which you have to chuck a cow to get it to land on the X"), so I'm not actually sure how productive the literary excursion was.
***
I'm unusually exhausted this week due to very long hours in the lab (but at least they're not wasted! It's working!), it's off to bed for me. Good night everyone!
2 comments:
'Twas ever thus:
(Of England and America) ‘Two nations separated by a common language.’
Sometimes the inquirer asks, ‘Was it Wilde or Shaw?’ The answer appears to be: both. In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’. However, the 1951 Treasury of Humorous Quotations (Esar & Bentley) quotes Shaw as saying: ‘England and America are two countries separated by the same language’, but without giving a source. The quote had earlier been attributed to Shaw in Reader’s Digest (November 1942).
Much the same idea occurred to Bertrand Russell (Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1944): ‘It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language’, and in a radio talk prepared by Dylan Thomas shortly before his death (and published after it in The Listener, April 1954) - European writers and scholars in America were, he said, ‘up against the barrier of a common language’.
Inevitably this sort of dubious attribution has also been seen: ‘Winston Churchill said our two countries were divided by a common language’ (The Times, 26 January 1987; The European, 22 November 1991.)
It seems to me the quote should now be attributed to GB since he's done so much research on it!
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