Stephen Turton

Look, Ma, I'm in the display window of cambridgebookshop.bsky.social!

The bust of Tolkien in Oxford’s English Faculty Library, 2015 vs. 2025. He’s aged more gracefully than I have.

Still, I’d like to think she actually dressed like Minerva on days out. A serviceable cuirass, a shield for all weather, and an owl peeping out from under her helmet.

Elizabeth Carter as Minerva, National Portrait Gallery.

Elizabeth Carter offers her view on fashionable accessories in 1748:

‘I should sooner fan myself with a cabbage-leaf than lay out any sum of money, in ornaments, that would buy a book.’

Not just Victorians/Edwards, of course. As a child, I was told that ‘horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow (or glisten)’. The earliest uses of the saying I can find are from the Gilded Age of America.

Screenshot from the entry.

I love finding yet-to-be-revised pockets of Victorian/Edwardian propriety on OED Online.

Here’s a note under SWEAT (first published in 1912) advising that the verb is ‘avoided in refined speech in the ordinary physical senses’; the preferred word is PERSPIRE.

And my favourite, ‘Fresh from the Salon’ Dyche (1774).

‘AI Doll’ Dyche (1802)

‘Young Boris Johnson’ Dyche (also 1764, a bumper year for Dyches)

‘Demon-Possessed’ Dyche (1764)

‘Stoned at 10AM’ Dyche (1788)

Four portraits from 1710 to 1802

The teacher with a thousand faces.

Thomas Dyche’s Guide to the English Tongue (1702) proved so popular that it was still being reprinted in 1821. Almost every edition had Dyche’s portrait at the front. Almost every portrait looked like it was of an entirely different person.

A curated selection:

Platform 9, King's Cross.

King's College Chapel seen from the Backs.

If trying to get onto Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross doesn’t work out for you, might I suggest Platform 9 next door? It’ll get you to Cambridge, which is only 200 years younger.

Frontispiece and title page (image © Forum Auctions).

The 2nd edition of The Feminine Monarchie: or the Historie of Bees by grammarian and part-time apiarist Charles Butler. A notice in 1634 announced that the book, having been ‘so long by sinister means detained’, would soon come out in a 3rd edition.

Who was trying to suppress the truth about bees?!

It’s not all fun and games, though. Moxon reports that a workman was once whacked ‘with so much violence, that he presently Pissed Blood, and shortly after dyed of it’.

Maybe HR departments are a good thing.

If someone refuses to pay a solace, ‘The Workmen take him by force, and lay him on his Belly’ over a stone block, while another uses a paperboard to administer ‘Eleven blows on his Buttocks’.

Title page and illustration from one instalment of Mechanick Exercises.

Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, a 17thC treatise on the printing press, is a delight.

A printing-house was customarily called a ‘chapel’. Workers who committed faults in the chapel—swearing, fighting, being drunk, leaving a candle burning at night, etc.—had to pay a fine called a ‘solace’.

Statue of Anne Lister at Piece Hall.

I've made the Anne-ual pilgrimage to Halifax to celebrate Lister's 234th birthday with @annelistersociety.bsky.social ! How has it been four years already?

I once went through the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English to collect all the attested Middle English spellings of ‘through’ (476).

Grose offers a synonym from Gloucester: MUCKSHUT. But I’m with Exmoor on this one.

Dusk over a rivulet.

Today’s word is DIMMET, ‘the dusk of the evening (Exmoor).’
(Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary, 1787)

Illustration courtesy of Port Meadow, Oxford.

Belated congratulations, Zoe! It was a superbly presented paper and a great contribution to #AnneLister studies.

Photo of the chapel bathed in sunlight.

After months of grey, a clear blue sky over Trinity College Chapel. Gather ye vitamins while ye may.

A safety sign that begins ‘HELP PREVENT A TRAGEDY’.

Could this substation sign contain the most inappropriate use of Comic Sans in the history of typography?

I guess Americans whose accents have the cot–caught merger would pronounce ‘hock’ and ‘hawk’ the same way, but what about Americans who don’t? Do they favour one pronunciation/spelling? Would Dustin Hoffman yell “Hey! I’m hawkin’ here” or “I’m hockin’ here”?

Thank you! I don’t think it’s possible to write dully about Lister, TBH. The source texts are so remarkable that they could make even the most turgid prose sound gripping.

It’s much the same over here. I bought some daffodils from M&S to force some colour into my room.

Snowdrops in the sunshine.

Today’s word is CANDLEMAS-BELLS, ‘the snowdrop.’
(Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, 1898)

Five days late for Candlemas, but they’re still going strong in the University Parks.

The Oxford rower's recommended summer diet in Training, in Theory and Practice by Archibald Maclaren (1866).

I hope the menu is less brutal than it was in 1866, when Oxford rowers were prescribed a lunch of underdone mutton and bread (crust only), with no vegetables allowed.

Today I learnt that when members of Trinity College, Oxford, book into hall for a meal, among the list of special dietary options they can select (alongside ‘Vegetarian’, ‘Halal’, ‘Gluten-free’, ‘Vegan’, etc.) is ‘Rower’.