Category: English language

Sir V.S. Naipaul

The writer Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (“V.S.”) Naipaul died in August 2018, just short of his 86th birthday. He was born in Trinidad […]

The writer Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (“V.S.”) Naipaul died in August 2018, just short of his 86th birthday. He was born in Trinidad in 1932 but studied in England at Oxford University as a young man and became a British citizen. He wrote more than thirty books, including ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ (1961) and ‘In a Free State’ (1971) for which he won that year’s Booker Prize.

He wrote both fiction and non-fiction and in various styles, from comic to bleak.

The video below is of a short speech he gave in 2001 during the Nobel Prize awards event, at which he was honoured with the Prize in Literature.

(Top image of Naipaul in 2016: Faizul Latif Chowdhury at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

18/10/2018
2 min
7 years
119 words

“It’s just not cricket”

Cricket has been played in England as far back as the 1500s, but it was in the 1700s that it became established […]

Cricket has been played in England as far back as the 1500s, but it was in the 1700s that it became established as a sport with its own rules and etiquette, much of which depends on the honesty of individual players even if means their team lose a wicket. “It’s just not cricket” is therefore a way of criticising someone for some sort of bad behaviour out of line with the rules of polite society.

Another phrase of cricketing origin is to “play a straight bat”, meaning to speak or behave in a simple, correct manner without elaboration. The straight bat was introduced into the game as a response to the innovation of over-arm bowling in the late 1700s, bats having previously been more like hockey sticks. Playing a ‘straight bat’ is to plant your bat vertically and just defend.

Despite its later reputation as a courteous game, cricket suffered the usual attempts at cheating, including making bats the width of the stumps (imagine that!) until Hambledon Cricket Club in Hampshire laid down a set of rules in the mid-1700s. Marylebone Cricket Club in London then took over administration of the rules in 1788 and has been their custodian ever since.

(Image: pxhere.com)

17/10/2018
3 min
7 years
205 words

English language / Geography & Environment

Land’s End

Land’s End is on the south-western tip of mainland England in the county of Cornwall and the signpost featured above left will […]

Land’s End is on the south-western tip of mainland England in the county of Cornwall and the signpost featured above left will have been photographed by tourists thousands of times over the years, many not paying attention to the lack of an apostrophe! The end of the land makes it Land’s End, not Lands End, which implies the action of multiple lands ending there. Some even put the apostrophe after the wrong letter, i.e. Lands’ End, meaning the end of multiple lands. There is only one England, of course, and thankfully in 2018 Cornwall Council voted to finally remedy the confusion and the apostrophe now takes its rightful place!

Land’s End has spectacular views from its cliff-tops. The cliffs are granite and their steepness attracts many rock-climbers. There is a hotel and a theme park in the vicinity and the landmark is so popular with tourists that they are advised to pre-book their car parking spaces. The nearest town is Penzance, 9 miles away, and the nearest village is Sennen. The A30 road from London finishes at Land’s End, as do many charity runs, walks and drives, having started at John O’Groats, or vice-versa, a distance of 874 miles (according to the signpost).

(Top images LtoR: Lewis Clarke & Rod Allday, both at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

15/10/2018
3 min
7 years
220 words

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Quoting Neil Oliver...

I love Britain more than anywhere else in the world. With all my heart I declare that those of us born here, or who have made a home here by choice, are the luckiest, most blessed of all people. I am British. I will always be British.