The Odyssey - Homer

Source

Another month, another Classics Club book crossed off the list! I stumbled into this one by virtue of a trip to collect Ness from hospital. It was meant to just be a quick grab-her-stuff-and-go trip, so I didn't take my Kindle with me. But then two of her doctors decided that a third doctor needed to give the okay before she could leave, which meant that we ended up sitting around waiting from about 11am until around 4.45pm for said doctor to turn up. (Which he still didn't do - Ness ended up circumventing the system and phoning his secretary, who phoned said doctor in surgery, who phoned the nurses' station and said that Ness could go)

Anyway, Ness happened to have The Odyssey in her bag, so when I came back from grabbing some lunch and she was taking a nap, I figured I may as well do some reading. And somehow, "some reading" turned into 250 pages. And obviously, I ended up pilfering it from her so that I could finish it.

It wasn't what I was expecting. For some reason, I'd always thought that The Iliad was the story of the Trojan War and The Odyssey was the story of Odysseus getting home from Troy. But it was more like equal parts what happened in Ithaca while he was away, what happened on his journey home, and what happened when he REACHED home. I had to translate small, basic chunks of it when I did Ancient Greek in first year uni and it always struck me as enormously dull. But I ended up really enjoying it.

I struggled a little at first because the edition I was reading used direct translations of the Greek names, rather than the Anglicised spellings I expected, so it took me a little while to get used to seeing Circe written as Kirke, or Klytemnaistra instead of Clytemnestra, or Akhilleus instead of Achilles. But once I got used to that, it flowed nicely and was pretty easy reading.

The biggest problem for me is that Odysseus is kind of a douchebag a lot of the time. I mean, the guy comes home after 20 years away, and then spends a bunch of time lurking around in disguise to ascertain whether his wife has been faithful to him. Which, gross. And it's not just his wife. He lurks around in disguise to establish how his son feels, how his father feels, how his servants feel. And then he's all "SURPRISE, IT'S ME!!!". Dick move, Odysseus. Dick move.

BUT. Despite Odysseus' asshattery and some "Wait, is this person who I think they are?" issues over spellings and a few repetitive phrases (I swear, if I read about Dawn's rosy fingers stretching over the horizon one more time, I was going to scream), I found myself really enjoying it. There are stories in there that everyone knows in some form or another - the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe turning Odysseus' men into pigs. Stories that remain compelling and fascinating thousands of years after they were first told. There's a reason these stories are classics, there really is.

Have you read The Odyssey? What did you think?

K xx

#stupidbookisstupid

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably will have seen me using the above hashtag a lot in recent months. Because when you borrow books from the library, you have a tendency to pick up pretty much anything on the basis that the blurb sounds half way decent and it's not as if you're paying money for it anyway. And yet, once I'm 250 pages in, I feel the need to finish the remaining 100 pages even though it sucks. Other times, I've bought a book on Amazon for $0.99 and feel the need to finish it because I PAID $0.99 FOR IT, DAMMIT.

The book that I'm currently #stupidbookisstupid-ing is the former. It's a Pride & Prejudice sequel, which is one of my guilty pleasures. The blurb sounded interesting, and like it filled in the gap between Rosings Park and Pemberley from Darcy's perspective. BUT NO. Instead, it has delivered me with a Caroline Bingley who's apparently shagged half the ton, a Mr. Darcy who's possessive and jealous and emotionally abusive, a Lizzy who throws things and screams and stamps her foot, and is mostly focused on Colonel Fitzwilliam falling instantly for some random American woman.

So obviously, the plot is pretty terrible, and the author has more or less ignored everything Austen told us about her characters. But I think a big part of why it's making me headdesk as much as it is has to do with the writing. And not just the plot or the way the characters are portrayed, but the choice of words.

The author is American, which I have no problem with. Many wonderful authors are. But if you're writing a book set in Regency England - or England in general, for that reason - you should REALLY have a) a deep understanding of the language of the time, or b) an English person read it and check the language for you.

My high school French teacher once told our class that "You should never swear in another language, because you'll never quite get it right. Just ask the French tourist I saw recently who dropped her coffee in the middle of the street, and went 'Oh, sheeeeeeeeeeet'. It just doesn't work." Admittedly, Mrs. R was probably trying to ensure that we made a good impression with our host families on the French Study Tour. But her point remains valid here - there will always be words that have different meanings depending on where you are, even if both places in question are English-speaking.

This book has included a range of these. One of the first to stick out was "trash", which is rarely used outside North America. This was closely followed by one character asking another if they want cream in their coffee, which is not only uncommon in Commonwealth countries, but which would have been very unlikely at the time, especially in London where milk was apparently so expensive that many people used only a few drops in their tea or coffee. Given this, the use of cream in coffee seems enormously unlikely.

And then we had my personal favourite - the use of the word "fanny". There have been two occurrences of this to date - one in which Colonel Fitzwilliam is telling a story about his friend Patrick, who got shot in the fanny during a battle, and one during sexytimes in which we are told that Colonel Fitzwilliam "kneaded" his love interest's fanny. The former made me laugh so hard that I nearly fell out of bed. The latter? That just made me cringe, because NO and OHGODWHY and OW.

And to think, it all could have been easily avoided simply by asking an English person to peruse the text prior to publication...

Still, I suppose then I would have been deprived of the entertainment factor, so I suppose after all that, #stupidbookisstupid was good for something...

Have you come across any awkward terminology in books that means something totally different to what the author intended?

K xx

Ancient History Volume III

This isn't so much a story about travelling. Okay, so there's travel INVOLVED. But it's more a (long winded) story about doing study abroad and meeting one of my BFFs. </disclaimer> 

A millionty Ten (argh!) years ago, I won a scholarship to do a semester's study abroad. Which is how I ended up in the UK, living in halls of residence with 43 total strangers and sharing a grand total of four showers between 22 girls. The very first night there, our whole block had a shindig on the stairs that separated the girls' rooms from the boys' rooms. And I ended up chatting to a ginger American girl (the very same whose wedding I went to in Colorado last year) for most of the evening. We bonded over movies and books, and not understanding what the crazy British people were saying, and the rest is history! (HI MEGAN!!! xx)

Oh my God, I can't believe this was taken nearly 10 years ago. ARGH.

From that first evening, Block 6 went on to have many adventures. A bunch of us spent Megan's 21st birthday at Alton Towers, and got completely drenched. I'd order alcohol for the Americans in the dorm because when they asked for Archers and lemonade, the bar staff got confused by their accents and served them orange juice and lemonade.

Hanging out at the local pub

We discovered that the Chinese mushroom noodles from the pasta place on campus looked like they had slugs mixed through them. We went to Stratford-on-Avon to see a weird samurai version of Coriolanus that included an actual heart. And we discovered the special knack the paternoster had for breaking down when we had to hand assignments in on the 16th floor.

A lot of the other international students took advantage of cheap flights to Europe and regularly jetted off to France, Italy and Spain. I, on the other hand, was at the mercy of the Australian dollar, which spent most of my stay hovering somewhere around the 32p mark. So when the American students said "Oh, but the tickets are only £50!", I would sit quietly in the corner, cursing the fact that I didn't HAVE a spare $150 to fly to Italy. I did, however, go on an archaeology fieldtrip to I have no idea where. But it was pretty!

From memory, that picturesque steam was actually
the toilet drain...........

One of the first weekends we were there, a few of us went to a barbeque at one of the other halls of residence. That hall was a guys only hall, and so the barbeque consisted entirely of meat. And a bag of lettuce, in case there were any vegetarians. A random Welsh guy got drunk, climbed on the roof and started yelling "I'm a loooooonely shepherd!" over and over again. The following week, Megan and I were sitting around trying to remember the lyrics to We Didn't Start the Fire being cool when her phone rang. It was T, one of the other American exchange students. The block he lived in had no other exchange students, and it was doing his head in.
T: *whispering* I need a British break
Megan: Who is this?
T: It's T-! I need. A British. BREAK. Please. Save me from all the British people?

And that's how we ended up going to see Van Wilder. Obviously.

A few weeks later, one of the guys in our dorm was involved in a play. He got back from the after party at stupid o'clock in the morning, completely plastered, and proceeded to attempt to cook a pie. He failed miserably, which is how the entire dorm ended up having to evacuate into the drizzle at 4.30am. And for some reason, he was dressed solely in his underpants. As there were emergency exits at each end of the building, half the dorm ended up at one end of a lawn and half at the other. Underpants Guy decided that he needed to run between the two groups apologising profusely. Obviously, we all stood there yelling "PLEASE STOP RUNNING OH MY GOD STOP RUNNING!!!!!" over the noise of the fire alarm.

Eventually, at about 5.30am, we got back into the building. And Underpants Boy decided he needed to knock on each person's door to apologise again. He was still in his underpants. Scarily, this guy is now a medical doctor...

The last weekend in November, Megan and I made the brilliant decision to go to Edinburgh. Turns out, Edinburgh in early December is COLD. #whoknew We stayed in a youth hostel that had Mr Men on the walls, and did all manner of touristy things. Well. Mostly we went to the castle and wandered around the Royal Mile because everything else was closed and we were poor. Oh, and ate gummi bears for breakfast.

On the Saturday, we decided to head out to Stirling and visit the William Wallace memorial. Except that the woman at the tourist office who gave us instructions had a really strong Glasgow accent and neither of us understood a word she said. Which is how we ended up getting off the bus in downtown Stirling, and having to walk three miles through the drizzle to get the Wallace Monument.

That spiral-y thing on the left side is the stairs to the top.

It was kind of worth it. The view from the top was pretty awesome, although it was blowing a gale and positively arctic.

Hey look! I'm so pasty that my face matches the sky!

But mostly it was worth it for the HILARIOUS statue of Mel Gibson a la Braveheart that they had to lock up every night because people kept painting its face blue. Of course when we were finished laughing hysterically, we had to walk the three miles BACK through the drizzle to get to the bus stop, because we didn't know where the bus stop near the monument was. Good times!!

And now because I have absolutely NO idea how to finish this post, here's a picture of a postcard my brother sent me while I was there. He was on the school Latin (!!) study tour, in which they swanned around Italy for a week and a half and then swanned around England and Scotland for a week and a half #totallynotjealousinanyway

Yup. It's a statue of a man with a penis attached to his forehead. YOU'RE WELCOME. Apparently there's an entire ROOM of stuff like this at the Naples Museum and you have to prove you're over 16 to go in there.

Did anyone else do study abroad? If so, where did you go??

K xx

Washington - the "say cheese, weirdo!" edition

Our second full day in Washington started with the National Museum of American History. Well, technically it started with a bowl of the most flavourless cereal ever, a bagel, and mocking Fox News, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish. 

So, the NMAH. Their collection of pop culture-y stuff was much smaller than we'd anticipated. But their collection of stuff relating to the presidents was kind of nifty. Here's me standing in for...someone famous and presidential. FDR, maybe? I honestly can't remember...

And here's a terrible photo of Abraham Lincoln's iconic hat:

Some of the stuff was kind of creepy. Here's a board filled with bits of hair from each of the first thirteen presidents, apparently so that future generations could learn about them. I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't want to learn about the presidents by staring at chunks of their hair #gross

Once we'd finished looking at creepy chunks of dead people, we headed over to the gallery about America and war. The stuff on the American Revolution was pretty interesting - lots of swords and guns and slightly ridiculous outfits:

Some outfit or other of George Washington's. With
bonus Kat in the background playing with interactives.

The section on the Civil War was interesting too, although there was barely any mention of the causes behind the war. From memory, there was a taxidermied horse there. And we learnt that women who enlisted as nurses had to be "plain and dress simply". Then...THEN. We reached the World War II gallery. There, we were greeted by this sign. 

Um, WHAT??? I understand that 1941 marks America's official entry into the war, as evidenced by the "joining the Allies" statement, but surely there should have been SOME acknowledgement of the fact that the war had actually started two years earlier? It's the SMITHSONIAN, for crying out loud. People are going to take what they read there as cold, hard fact. I would have settled for a story panel that said "Yeah, we KNOW the war started in 1939. But America didn't have a lot of involvement prior to Pearl Harbour, so that's where we'll start the story.". But there wasn't even that. 

After ranting repeatedly having a lively discussion about that sign throughout the rest of the war galleries, we decided that we should stop for lunch. The range of food was impressive. The prices were astronomical, even by museum standards. I guess that's the catch when entry is free...

After lunch, we discovered an exhibit about pirates, which made us both much happier. This was followed by a trip to the transportation gallery, but I think by that point we were both experiencing museum fatigue. So pretty much all I remember about it is that there was a giant train, and a dog wearing goggles (Work Wife - this one's especially for you):

From there, we wandered over to the National Portrait Gallery. On the way, we went past the Archives:

The inscription along the top reads as follows:

"The glory and romance of our history are here preserved in the chronicles of those who conceived and builded the structure of our nation." 

Really, America? BUILDED?????? *cringe*

We also walked past the FBI Building. Sadly, Seeley Booth wasn't there (sorry, Sara!)... Neither was Fox Mulder. 28 year old Kirsti wasn't as disappointed about that as 14 year old Kirsti would have been. Eventually we made it to the Portrait Gallery. I was rather taken with this bust of Andrew Jackson. He's Kat's favourite president because he was basically batshit crazy, and still wound up with his face on the $20 bill. 

I also liked this bust. I can't remember who it's of, but he seems rather surprised that he had a bust made of him!

Eventually, we exhausted the possibilities in the early American section, and moved on to the portraits of presidents. On the way up the stairs, a slightly crazy man accosted us:

Slightly crazy man: Is this the way to the presidential portraits??

Kat: That's what the sign says...

Slightly crazy man: Oh, I'm just so excited! I'm like a kid in a candy shop!! [runs off]

Me: O...kay then...

We hung back to avoid the crazy look at some kind of dollhouse thing. By the time we got into the gallery, he was snapping photos of one of Washington's portraits from every angle. When I next saw him, he was taking a self portrait in front of this painting of Lincoln. 

Sadly, he wasn't doing the same pose. Because that would have been awesome. We spent a large chunk of time being on the opposite side of the gallery from him, just in case he asked us to take his picture in front of a presidential portrait. The last we saw of him, he set his camera on top of a showcase on auto-timer, ran across the gallery to  stand in front of a portrait of...I can't remember who, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the random presidents from the 70s. Gerald Ford, maybe...and then got yelled at by a security guard for leaving his property unattended AND on top of a showcase. 

After the self portrait taking weirdo had gone, we quickly tired of the presidents and headed over to the 20th century section, figuring we stood a chance of actually knowing who some of the people were there. Sadly, I neglected to take a photo of the portrait of that most American of 20th century figures - WINSTON CHURCHILL. Okay, so it was only there because it was a study for a painting of FDR, Churchill and Stalin signing the something-or-other treaty (I think. Possibly something to do with the Yalta Conference...). But they still have a portrait of Churchill in the section of famous 20th century Americans... #weird

Shortly thereafter, we got bored of mocking the art and figured it was time for happy hour. We headed to Chinatown in the hopes of finding a bar and then somewhere for dinner later on. Instead, we wound up at an Irish pub. In Chinatown. Because we're spontaneous and non-conformist like that! When they brought us a menu, we decided that it couldn't hurt to have a pre-dinner snack, which somehow turned into us being too lazy to find anywhere else to eat and ordering like three different entrees (in the normal context, not the bizarre American context). They were delicious. 

Next up, a millionty monuments, the non-Reflecting Pool, and we discover that walking around in the sun all day is a very warm experience. Oh, and cocktails.

K xx

Colorado - the "apparently banana is a confusing word" edition

I'm currently sitting in a Starbucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had grand plans for doing SOMETHING of interest (even if it was just checking out the TJ Maxx next door to my hotel) with my last day on the east coast, but it's pissing with rain and I don't wanna. Plus, the Starbucks is *attached* to my hotel, so I didn't even have to go outside to get here #lazinessFTW Anyway, due to the rather inclement weather and my epic laziness, I figured I'd kill the two hours until I have to leave for the airport with some kind of blogging activity!

When I last left you, I was embarrassing myself at the baseball in Denver. My trip to Colorado Springs involved me getting free food for being foreign, snow, feeding a giraffe, and Bigfoot. (Let us all pause for a moment to think about just how different that sentence could appear without the use of the Oxford comma. Thank you. #grammarnerd) 

My adventures in the Springs started with a day trip about a week after I arrived in Colorado. We got down there just in time to pick up Megan and head out for lunch to a new restaurant/cafe/thing that sold pretty much nothing but peanut butter and jam sandwiches. #onlyinAmerica I honestly don't think I'd had a peanut butter and jam sandwich since I was at primary school (HI LOR!) in Toronto a millionty years ago. So I was slightly apprehensive about the whole thing, because if I put anything with peanut butter in a sandwich? It's going to be honey. Needless to say, I was kind of thrilled when I found a sandwich that consisted of crunchy peanut butter, honey and fresh strawberries. Technically, it also contained banana. But it's gross, so I asked for it without. Which led to this:

Me: Can I get the [insert name of sandwich here] with no banana?

Serving guy: With no what?

Me: Banana

Serving guy: Ba-what?

Me: BANANA.

Serving guy: Ohhhhh, no BANANA. Sure!

(Okay, that doesn't really work when you type it. Let's just say that I pronounce it 'ba-nah-nah' and Americans pronounce it kind of nasal-y and with a shorter A sound and just generally WRONG...) 

Anyrandomsegue, the sandwich was pretty good, if a little oozy. Once we'd finished our sandwiches, we headed out to some Anasazi cliff dwellings just outside of town. Okay, technically, they're RECREATED cliff dwellings that were moved from somewhere else for some reason that totally escapes me and which I can't look up because the internet keeps crapping out on me #Starbucksfail. But given the choice between seeing cliff dwellings that were 10 minutes from where I was, and driving all the way across Colorado to Mesa Verde, I took the former. 

And hey, it wasn't a total waste because Lyndsy and I wound up buying some fudge. And when I say "some", I mean ONE AND A HALF POUNDS (700g. It doesn't sound nearly as impressive that way). Um. Whoops? (It was delicious) 

After our fudge buying extravaganza trip to the cliff dwellings, we headed over to Garden of the Gods. Holy gorgeous scenery, Batman! (by which I mean the superhero, and not the founder of Melbourne who died of syphilis at the age of 38 and had no nose. Although I'm sure he would have appreciated the scenery too... I'll stop now.) And now is about the point where I mention that if Garden of the Gods was in Australia, you'd probably have to park a 20 minute walk from any of the sites. In America, you have to try and frame your photos in such a way as to cut out the car park because you can pretty much drive up to the base of any attraction...

Ahem. How about I stop talking and show you some moody looking photos of Garden of the Gods to finish?

You're welcome. 

Next up, I find the most hideous special ugg boots of all time. Nice export, Australia... *rolls eyes*

K xx

Chicago, the bloggy friend hilarity edition

So I've already told you about meeting up with Sweeney and Lor and Penny at the 20SB Summit pre-party. This is the "Everything else that happened with Sweeney and Lor and Penny" edition. First and foremost, Lor brought me a box of Zebra Cakes.

Terrible photo courtesy of the sucky lighting in my hotel room

See? (If you're not aware of Lor's love of Zebra Cakes, click here.) OMG, exciting. Also, this was my breakfast a good chunk of the time because my hotel didn't have a restaurant and I was too lazy to find somewhere that served real food. Anyway, the Zebra Cakes led to the first of many Australian-American language differences.

Me: Ooooooh, Zebra Cakes!!
Lor: ZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEbra Cakes. They're called ZEEbra Cakes.

Subsequent exchanges:
Me: I kind of want another bag of crisps...
Sweeney: Crisps??
Me: These things?
Sweeney: You mean chips.
Me: Noooo, chips are hot.
Sweeney: Those are fries. Fries are fries and chips are chips!!!

Me in Lor and Penny's hotel room: Wow, those ARE weird power points.
Lor: Power...points?
Me: *points* Those things? The stuff you plug electrical stuff into?
Penny: You mean an OUTLET?
Me: Apparently.
Lor: Ohhhhhhhh. I thought you meant like on the computer. You know, PowerPoint.

Walking through Grant Park (and totally stolen from Lor's post because I'm too lazy to write it myself, and which you should all read because it's totally awesome):

Me: Oh no! That bubbler is running constantly. 

Lor: Uh, you mean the water fountain? Bubbler! HA.

Me: Well... we called it a bubbler in primary school.

Penny: You mean elementary school?

Me: PRIMARY. It goes from grade one to...

Lor: You mean first grade?

While eating waffle fries at Navy Pier which tasted like Velveeta (again, stolen from Lor's post, only with the emphasis on tomato changed):

Sweeney: Maybe if we drown it in ketchup? Or salsa? Pass the ketchup.

Me: Oh, you mean tomato sauce?

Lor: NO. To-may-to sauce is the thing you put on pizza. It's... sauce-y, you know?

Me: No, that's tomato paste. 

Lor: NOOOOO. To-may-to paste is the thing that comes in a can and is paste-y.

Sweeney: You really have the best definitions. To-may-to paste: paste-y.

In the bathroom at the Summit:

Me: Oops. I nearly tripped over the rubbish bin.

Lor and Sweeney: RUBBISH BIN!!!!!

Me: I feel like I'm in the middle of that scene in Love Actually where they make him say random stuff... You know, "BOTTLE!!"

Lor: I'm going to use that every time I don't want to do something. "Do you want to go to the movies tonight?" "Pff. Rubbish bin." 

Other Australian pronunciations/words that confuse Americans?

• Aluminium
• Vase (rather than vay-se)
• Arse
• Cowbag
• Queue
• Bathers

On Sunday after the conference finished, Lor, Penny and I went and ate our body weight in Chicago deep dish pizza, and still found room for this:

It was delicious. On Monday morning, we trekked down to the Field Museum. We saw Sue, the most complete T-Rex in existence. We saw stone age artefacts. Taxidermied specimens. A man-eating lion. Lor and I sat in giant plastic cicadas. They were NOT comfortable. And we laughed hysterically in the dinosaur rooms. Why? 

FAIL-o-saurus

Skulls with knobs on

This *bone* came from a gigantic dinosaur and you can touch it...

We're classy like that. Then we headed back to Lor and Penny's hotel to meet Sweeney. Cramming four girls and three lots of luggage into Sweeney's Mustang was an interesting experience!! From there, we headed to Navy Pier for a grand farewell to Chicago for Lor and Penny. 

We stopped to eat as soon as we got there. It was our last meal together, and we spent pretty much the entire thing in fits of hysterical laughter. I ordered a chicken salad wrap for lunch, which came with chips (sorry Sweeney, FRIES) or coleslaw. But there was also mac and cheese on the menu. So I asked for a side of that as well as my wrap. The waitress said that for like $2, I could sub in a serve of mac and cheese. 

Sweeney and Lor: (yelling) YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Waitress: *looks terrified* Okay then.

So all three of us were insanely excited about our mac and cheese. When it arrived, we each took a bite and then made this face:

Source

Lor: Uhhhhhhhh... 

Sweeney: This is made with smoked cheese...

Me: It tastes like bonfire.

Penny: *snort*

Lor: OHMIGAWD, YOU'RE RIGHT!!

It really did. Needless to say, we barely ate any of it. Lor's serve of mac and bonfire had been a lot bigger than mine and Sweeney's, so she felt the need to hide the evidence. In her sandwich. Under a lettuce leaf in Penny's salad. In the leftover waffle fries. IN THE SALSA. We could barely breathe we were laughing so hard. It was a bittersweet moment, knowing that we'd soon be going our separate ways, not meeting again for who knows how long.

After the lunch of hilarity, we wandered through the shops at Navy Pier, stopping to buy fudge, and to look at the stained glass museum (with added soundtrack courtesy of Lor singing 'Belle' from Beauty and the Beast). At the entrance to the pier, I left them to walk back to my hotel. I miss the bloggy friend bubble. Everything was ten times funnier in there... 

Oh, and? This crosses number 8 off my 101 in 1001 list - meet a blog friend in real life. It was a blast. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. Sweeney, Lor and Penny - I love you guys. Come to Melbourne soon. Kthxbai.

K xx

30 Days of Books - Day 7

I went to work this morning with every intention of going to a Step class at 5.30. Which meant I had to leave work at 4.30 to get there in time. When I looked at the clock and it was 4.45, I wasn't all that devastated. Because honestly, I HATE Body Step. So I came home with the intention of doing a circuit at home. But then my housemate, D, said that she was about to leave for a Body Jam class if I wanted to go with her. It cost me $20 because it was at a different gym, but it was totally worth it. Because it was AWESOME.

Anyway, let's get on with the books!

Day 7 - Most underrated book

Okay, I'm choosing to interpret this as "A book I think everyone should read". I'd have to go with this one:

Source

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, by Henry Hitchings. I'm reading it at the moment - it was an early birthday present from the lovely Kat. And it's fascinating - did you know that the word 'coriander' comes from the Greek for 'bedbug'? Apparently the smell of crushed bugs is much the same as the smell of coriander. I KNEW there was a reason I hated coriander.

It's also amazing/disgusting just how many English words originated in a word related to testicles. Avocado? From the Nahuatl for testicle. Musk? From the Sanskrit for scrotum. I officially can't eat musk sticks ever again *shudder* (God, I can't WAIT to see the Google searches that lead to this post...)

It's filled with lots of stuff NOT related to balls too - it starts with Roman times, moving through the Anglo-Saxon era and the Norman invasion through to exploration in the Americas, India, the Far East, and my own dear Australia, before finishing with the late twentieth century. It's pretty cool to see how words from other languages have been mangled by English, especially stuff from Arabic and Persian. And, indeed, how words from English have been transformed when being absorbed by other languages.

It's a great reminder that language isn't static - it's constantly growing and changing and reforming itself. And I can but hope that, one of these days, words like 'wibble' and 'arsebiscuits' will be both in common use and in the dictionary ;)

(Incidentally, if you're getting sick of me wibbling on about books, stick around - there's a recipe for homemade lasagna coming up at some point this week!)

K xx

Day 01 - The best book you read last year
Day 02 - A book you've read more than 3 times
Day 03 - Your favourite series
Day 04 - Your favourite book of your favourite series
Day 05 - A book that makes you happy
Day 06 - A book that makes you sad
Day 07 - Most underrated book
Day 08 - Most overrated book
Day 09 - A book you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
Day 10 - Favourite classic book
Day 11 - A book you hated
Day 12 - A book you used to love but don't any more
Day 13 - Your favourite writer
Day 14 - Favourite book of your favourite writer
Day 15 - Favourite male character
Day 16 - Favourite female character
Day 17 - Favourite quote from your favourite book
Day 18 - A book that disappointed you
Day 19 - Favourite book turned into a movie
Day 20 - Favourite romance book
Day 21 - Favourite book from your childhood
Day 22 - Favourite book you own
Day 23 - A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven't
Day 24 - A book you wish more people would've read
Day 25 - A character you can relate to the most
Day 26 - A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 - The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 - Favourite title
Day 29 - A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 - Your favourite book of all time