Taking a short blogging break this week. Hope all is well with you all. Stay safe.
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Monday, 22 February 2021
Tuesday, 16 February 2021
Happy Chinese New Year - gong hei fat choy
Gong hei fat choy as they say in Cantonese
or in Mandarin, xin nian kuai le (pronounced shin nee-an kwai le)
2021 is the Chinese Year of the Ox - In Chinese culture the ox is a valued animal. Because of its role in agriculture, positive characteristics, such as being hardworking and honest, are attributed to it.
Chinese New Year 2021 falls on Friday, February 12th, 2021, and celebrations culminate with the Lantern Festival on February 26th, 2021
Began over 2000 years ago, the lantern festival has developed many meanings. It celebrates family reunions and society. It features ancient spiritual traditions.
In our city on the weekend of 13-14 February the Chinese New Year Festival committee set up an amazing lantern display in the International Friendship Gardens. Many of the lanterns were made by local school children and powered by little battery candles. It must have taken hours and hours of work to set up and turn on all those lights and it looked truly amazing. Here are some pics
This is the entrance to the labyrinth in the gardens, where lanterns were placed around the pathway to follow.
You can find out more about Chinese New Year here - Chinese New Year
What Chinese zodiac year were you born in? I was born in the Year of the Goat.
You can find out your year here - Chinese Zodiac
Strangely, just after I finished this post, my Chinese picture which I bought in Singapore several years ago, threw itself off the wall, breaking the glass. I wonder what that means???
You might also like:
You can also visit this Facebook page to see more images from our local festival - Bunbury Chinese New Year Festival
Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you and yours are doing well. And that we will soon see a slowing down of Covid cases around the world.
I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week.
I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!
Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.
I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!
Image-in-ing
My corner of the world through my camera
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global hosted by Randomosity.
My corner of the world through my camera
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global hosted by Randomosity.
and Little bird - Pienilintu
Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.
Sunday, 7 February 2021
The Dictionary of Lost Words and the Oxford English Dictionary
I have just finished reading The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. Have you read it?
This is a fascinating history about the production of the first Oxford Dictionary by Dr Murray and his lexicographers in a corrugated iron shed, the Scriptorium, in Dr Murray's garden in Oxford. Published in separate parts, fascicles, A-Ant was published in 1884, with the last section V-Z published in 1928. The dictionary eventually contained around 400,000 words, definitions and phrases demonstrating their usage.
Into her book, Pip has skilfully woven real and fictional characters with a background of historical fact like the Women's Suffrage Movement in England and the onset of World War 1.
I was interested to learn that women in South Australia were granted the right to vote in 1884 and could be elected to Parliament, although it wasn't until 1902 when white women were given the right to vote in Australian Federal elections.
Postscript.... I have just been alerted to the fact that... on 9th September 1893 New Zealand became the first self governing country in the world to give women the right to vote.
Whereas women were not granted voting rights in the UK until 1928. White women in the USA were given the right to vote in 1920. In all cases, for people of colour and ethic background, the right to vote was granted much later than this.
The book's blurb says - In 1901 the word bondmaid was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary.
This is the story of the girl who stole it.
Who was this girl? She is Esme and her father, who she refers to as Da, is one of the lexicographers. Esme's mother has died, and Dr Murray's housemaid and Esme's minder Lizzie, and her aunt, "Ditte" (Edith Thompson) are major characters in Esme's life.
As a young child Esme sat under the sorting table at the Scriptorium to keep out of the way while her father worked. Esme steals a discarded word that has fallen to the floor. The word is Bondmaid. She hides the word in a trunk underneath Lizzie's bed. Many more words are added to the trunk over the years and Esme eventually becomes a lexicographer - a person who compiles dictionaries.
Edith Thompson actually wrote the History of England for schools in 1881. Edith and her sister Elizabeth Thompson provided 15,000 quotations for A & B, and continued to provided quotations and editorial assistance until the last word was published.
Pip says that The Dictionary of Lost Words was her attempt to understand how the way we define language might define us. Pip asks Do words mean different things to men and women?
The first dictionary was defined by men, ....older, white, Victorian-era men....with women cast in minor or supporting roles. In addition to Edith & Elizabeth Thompson, there was also Hilda, Elsie and Rosfrith Murray who worked in the Scriptorium to support their father. Eleanor Bradley worked at the Old Ashmolean as part of her father's team of assistants. Countless women sent in quotations for words. The women who wrote novels, biographies and poetry that were considered as evidence for the use of particular words.
The Scriptorium stored the words - written on a slip of paper the size of a postcard. Volunteers mailed them from all over the world. They were kept in bundles in hundreds of pigeon holes that lined the shed walls, with examples of their usage attached as proof.
The word Bondmaid was discovered missing from the dictionary in 1901 following a letter from the member of the public.
Bondmaid is not the kind of word people drop during conversation anymore, and that’s for the best: It means “a slave girl.” The word was most popular in the 16th century. Murray’s file for bondmaid, however, reached back even further: It included quotations as old as William Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the Bible....
However all was not lost for the lost word.....In 1933, bondmaid made its Oxford dictionary debut. It had taken nearly five decades to make the correction. The Time the Oxford Dictionary Forgot a Word
Today the dictionary archives, original slips and proofs are held at the Oxford University Press in Oxford.
Below you can see Dr Murray in the Scriptorium, and in the group photo, Dr Murray with some of the staff, including his two daughters Elsie and Rosfrith.
At over $1000 Australian Dollars obviously a local library is not going to house all these volumes! I wonder if our State Library might. The Dictionary of Lost Words has really sparked my interest in the Oxford Dictionary and the origin of words.
In 2020 the Oxford's Word of the Year encompassed several "Words of an Unprecedented Year". Unfortunately you have to subscribe to find out what they are. I think you might be able to guess what they might be.
Mental Floss has a list of 13 Facts about the Oxford English Dictionary. It makes amusing reading.
The most complicated word in the Oxford English Dictionary? Set. In the dictionary’s 1989 edition, the three-letter word contains 430 senses (that is, shades of meaning) and requires a 60,000-word definition. Other short words with endless definitions? Run (396 senses), go (368 senses), and take (343 senses).
Have you been to Oxford? We visited briefly on a bus tour in 2005. I now wish I had gone to Oxford University Press archives. But we did visit The Eagle and Child pub, made famous as a meeting place for fantasy authors CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. You can see it below here.
Thank you to the sites from where I have borrowed photos and information.
For more information and your own research:
Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you and yours are doing well.
Lynda Mugglestone - Lost for Words
Peter Gilliver - The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionery on line
History of the Oxford English Dictionery
Oxford English Dictionary blog
wikiwand.com/en/Oxford_English_Dictionary
Book review - Publishing Arts Hub
Mental Floss.com - The Time the Oxford Dictionary Forgot a Word
and 13 Facts about the Oxford English Dictionary
Wikipedia.org - Oxford_English_Dictionary
I hope you have enjoyed my look at the Oxford English Dictionary. The more I research the more interesting it becomes.
I love curling up with a good book. Don't you? What have you been reading lately? Perhaps you would like to tell us in your comments.
Below is a pic of my old school dictionary. I just noticed it was published in 1941! No I am not that old! It actually belonged to my sister originally and then passed to me. It still has her name in it. Perhaps I should give it back to her.
Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you and yours are doing well.
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| My old school dictionary |
I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!
All Seasons
Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.
Tuesday, 2 February 2021
January 2021 - Covid photo a day project
Hi everyone, I can hardly believe it is February already. Where has the first month of the year gone? I really didn't think back in March 2020 when I started this project that I would still be doing by Covid photo a day project, but as you know Covid is still alive and well and continuing spreading around the world, now with new strains, making it even harder to control. A friend recently lost her mother in Spain to Covid. It was so incredibly difficult for her not to be able to go to Spain to be with her mother and family. Her brother and niece are also infected, and another friends family in South America. My heart goes out to them, and to all those around the world who have lost loved ones.
Here in Australia we have still continued to do very well, with people returning from overseas having to go into mandatory 14 day hotel quarantine, and mini total lockdowns when there has been community outbreaks.
It has been 8 months since there was a community spread case in Western Australia, until this last weekend. As of 6pm Sunday we are now in total lockdown for 5 days, in an effort to contain the spread. I am hoping that it will only be 5 days. I cannot imagine what people in other places of the world have been going through in lockdown for weeks or months this past year. I think over the last 8 months we have become complacent, at least here in Western Australia. This lockdown will jolt us back to reality. Facemasks are now mandatory when outside. Another first for us.
So here is my January photo a day project.....
1 January 2021 - Friday - Xylomelum pyriforme, commonly known as the woody pear
2 January 2021 - Saturday - our little birds are doing a good job of raising their second batch of young - just about ready to fly the nest
3 January 2021 - Sunday - my nephew enjoying nature play
4 January 2021 - Monday - my first attempt at making paper
5 January 2021 - Tuesday - out in the boat with young family members to see the dolphins in Koombana Bay. Some of them have calves and came right up to our boat. So beautiful.
6 January 2021 - Wednesday - another beautiful sunset along the Leschenault Inlet
5 January, 2021 - Tuesday - bonus shot - drying roses
7 January 2021 - Thursday - having fun being towed behind on boat on the new biscuit
8 January 2021 - Friday - drying lavender for my paper making experiments
9 January 2021 - Saturday - paper making with roses
9 January 2021 - Saturday - bonus shot - Indian Ocean sunset at the basalt rocks in Bunbury
10 January 2021 - Sunday - Corymbia ficifolia, Red flowering gum
11 January 2021 - Monday - paper making experiments with statice flowers highlights. A lot to learn.
12 January 2021 - Tuesday - golden kangaroo paws in my front garden
13 January 2021 - Wednesday - sometimes you just have to force your grandkids away from their computers and out into the fresh air
14 January 2021 - Thursday - another glorious Leshenault Inlet sunset
15 January 2021 - Friday - netting our grapes - birds not welcome!
16 January 2021 - Saturday - introduction to watercolour painting workshop with my sister at the Bunbury summer school at the Stirling Street Arts centre with Kellee Merritt. Excellent 2 days!
17 January 2021 - Sunday - mosaic at the Stirling Street Arts Centre.
18 January 2021 - Monday - Marri flowers along the Millers Creek walk
19 January 2021 - Tuesday - proud of my watercolour painting tutored during the Kelly Merritt watercolour class at Summer School at the Stirling Street Art Centre. It was a set piece so I won't take credit for the subject.
20 January 2021 - Wednesday - The Bunbury Art Gallery side door lit by my car lights after Spanish dance class. I rather liked the effect.
21 January 2021 - Thursday - summer at Koombana Bay, Bunbury
22 January 2021 - Friday - macro of chewed eucalypt leaf
23 January 2021 - Saturday - South West Opera Company - Opera on the Move - for Fringe Festival in Stirling Gardens. A very enjoyable event.
24 January 2021 - Sunday - drying more flowers
25 January 2021 - Monday - we bought a box of tomatoes in Donnybrook. Now we have to do something with them. Today Rod made tomato soup to put in the freezer for winter as a base for Minestrone.
26 January 2021 - Tuesday - Australia Day - and going out in the boat
26 January 2021 - Tuesday - bonus shot - Australia Day crab catch for lunch
27 January 2021 - Wednesday - very happy with my latest batch of botanical eco-printing on upcycled cotton
27 January 2021 - Wednesday - bonus shot - rather liked this moon resting on the power lines
28 January 2021 - Thursday - today I made Grape and tomato chutney
29 January 2021 - Friday - we were given a voucher for Corners on the Bay, so we went there for breakfast. Thanks Julie.
29 January 2021 - Friday - bonus shot - getting ready for Sol y Sombra's flash mob in the Fringe hub at the Stirling Street Arts Centre
30 January 2021 - Saturday - Forza dragon boat regatta match racing in the Leschenault Inlet on Saturday afternoon. I was in the on-water race control boat, so was able to snap some good pics.
31 January 2021 - Sunday - unexpected emergency lockdown for Perth, Peel & South West for Covid from 6pm tonight. Masks are mandatory, so I started making some this afternoon.
That's January done and dusted. I hope you and yours are safe and doing well. Thank you so much for stopping by. I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week.
I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!
Image-in-ing
My corner of the world through my camera
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global hosted by Randomosity. and Little bird - Pienilintu
My corner of the world through my camera
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global hosted by Randomosity. and Little bird - Pienilintu
Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.
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