Scenes from a cocktail party

Annoying guest: So what are you planning on going to graduate school for?

Ardith: Sanskrit.

Annoying guest: Wow. Is there a big market for that in the world today?

Ardith: Well, no. I mean, it leads to an academic career.

Annoying guest: I had no idea that you could study something so ... specialized. So you’ll teach people to write in this ... Sanskrit’s an old kind of writing, isn’t it?

Ardith: No, Sanskrit is the most important ancient language of India. You’re thinking of the script it’s usually written in, which is Devanagari.

Annoying guest: So, do you need to learn Indian? I mean, when you read it, do you translate in your head into Indian or English?

(long pause)

Ardith: India’s a very linguistically diverse country, sir.

More on the sturdy barons

Blackstone, 3 Comm. 278 (1st edn., 1768):

The first return in every term is, properly speaking, the first day in that term [ . . . ]. And the court sits to take essoigns, or excuses for such as do not appear according to the summons of the writ: wherefore this is usually called the essoign day of the term. But the person summoned has three days of grace, beyond the return of the writ, in which to make his appearance; and if he appears on the fourth day inclusive, the quarto die post, it is sufficient. For our sturdy ancestors held it beneath the condition of a freeman to be obliged to appear, or do any other act, at the precise time appointed or required.

An enimently civilized attitude to tardiness.

Radio play, act 3, scene 5

A: What's that in the sky? Is that because of the Empire State Building?
B: It seems like it.
A: It's awful. It looks like yellow toxic industrial smoke.
B: Oh, like in . . . um . . . what am I thinking of? . . .
A: New Jersey?
B: No, the Antonioni movie.
A: Oh, Red Desert.

Ma non troppo

“You really don’t like men in uniform?”
“Well, I like men in vestments. Does that count?”

(Conversation reported by a friend in the metropole.)

The Church of Saint Paul the Disseisor

Another wonderful linguistic trouvaille in Maitland and Pollock (I:499-500, nonessential footnotes omitted):

At least for the purposes of popular thought and speech, God and the saints became the subjects of legal rights, if not of legal duties. [ . . . ] In the old land-books the notion is put before us in many striking phrases. In the oldest of them the newly converted Æthelbert says, ‘To thee Saint Andrew and to thy church at Rochester where Justus the Bishop presides I do give a portion of my land.’ The saint is the owner; his church at this place or that is mentioned because it is necessary to show of which of his many estates the gift is to form part. [ . . . ] Gradually (if we may so speak) the saint retires behind his churches; the church rather than the saint is thought of as the holder of lands and chattels. When it comes to precise legal thinking, the saint is an impracticable person, for if we ascribe rightful we may also have to ascribe wrongful possession to him, and from this we shrink, though Domesday Book courageously charges St Paul with an ‘invasion’ of land that is not his own*.

*D.B. ii. 13: ‘Aliam Nessetocham tenuit Turstinus Ruffus ... modo Sanctus Paulus invasit.’ We might compare this to those phrases current at Oxford and Cambridge which tell how Magdalen has won a cricket match and the like; but there is less of conscious abbreviation in the one case than in the other.

A remarkable Scrabble word

Yex, v. To hiccough. OED illustrates with, inter alia, a quotation from Urquhart's Rabelais: "He ... yawned, spitted, coughed, yexed."

Overheard in the Atlantic conurbation (2)

“She thinks that Jesus is a hug. She actually said that to me.”
“Well, my mother thinks that Jesus is an ice-cream social, but she wouldn’t say it.”

“Most of my views on causation developed as a reaction against the Reagan administration.”