Stonehenge, Bath, Shakespeare's Home

The cottage at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Matthew and I bought paninis and he bought a cheese and onion pasty at Victoria station. Paul the hairy-eared Irish tour guide took the head count and yelled at us for having "malodorous" food and was stern about speaking loudly but he was pleased that we were attentive to his Stonehenge and Bath lectures and softened and befriended us by day's end.

Stonehenge's sky was low and the rolling green plain spread before the north wind. There was a sense of the sacred and the artistic and the epic and the journeying nature of primitive man in the 5,000 year old megaton stones. The audio guide had a quote from the last lines of classic literature master Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles describing the sullen stones. It is silly to go to world famous sites and pose in front of them so I decided to turn this idea on its head - literally (photos on Facebook to come).

The Georgian architecture of Bath surrounded us as we spotted the locals. Matthew sought out dogs and an old couple warned him that their grey Jack Russell bit but he thought it would not and we all had a laugh when the animal snapped at his too-close fingers.

Then the Bard's home and O my brothers it was like a Meccan pilgrimmage. The Tudor cottage was still intact after years of refurbishment and Matty asked a young blonde guide whether Shakespeare had written all his plays. She said we know that he didn't write all of the later stuff including Henry VIII and I interjected - but no one reads that play anyway - and she said but we know he wrote all of the major works, i.e. Hamlet, of which the soliloquies alone are enough to guarantee a man eternal fame. And she mentioned how he took these stories from sources and reinvented them and we said yes, interesting how art is all about borrowing and reinvention and this reminds me of a certain post postmodern blog.

I'm Going to London, Classic Literature, Etc.

Richard III, ugliest of British Kings.

Reinvest in yourself I like to say. So I bought this trip to London and tomorrow I'm leaving. In the meanwhile I've been trying to learn as much as possible about this quondam world capital, from the history of Robin Hood to Richard III, and everything in between. Late medieval English history is fascinating, especially because it is so neglected. My preparations wouldn't be complete without some classic literature so I'm reading Shakespeare's Richard III, of which I'll give you a quick coffee high history.

So there's the Lancastrian line and the York line and they're both descendants of Edward III, the famous Plantagenet, who's like the big King of the 14th century. And his spawn gets all the way through the Hundred Years War and then there's Edward IV who comes after Henry VI, who Shakespeare wrote three plays about. And Richard III was really disliked by Elizabethan England cuz he's a bad guy who murders his eloquent brothers Clarence and Edward IV. And Edward has this 12 year old son who's about to assume the throne, but Rich is like hold up, you're actually a bastard and your mom's not good enough to make you king and all his supporters are like hear hear and then he rules for two years before dying in battle on English soil (the only Brit-king to do so and the last to die in battle). Thus the tragedy.

So I'll be blogging from Londontown and if any of you have tips or want me to mention anything specifically just shout.

-Preparing for travel,
Daniel Adler

How Many Words Are In The English Language?

Uriah Heep, the subject of  Mr. Micawber's bombastic denunciation.

There are over a million words, or lexemes, in the English language. Including scientific nomenclature, that figure could easily be doubled. Shakespeare, master of classic literature, had a vocabulary of about 40,000 words. The average person knows about 10,000.

There are only going to be more, too. Is this a good thing? I like to think so. English is one of the few languages that absorbs words wherever it can get them. We can express whatever we want with our indisposable store of new words. They come into existence all the time, thanks to the Internet, although they also falling out of use just as fast.

Google's word cache project, the Ngram viewer, allows you to track the usage of any word over the past five hundred years, according to about 15% (and growing) of the world's literature.

I'll leave you with a quote from David Copperfield, which may influence your ideas about whether or not it is a good thing that English has such a broad lexicon:

"We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important; and sounds well...And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words."-754