John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons

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Entries from January 2009

More Nipples

January 30th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Even with the abundance of flesh available on the Internet nowadays, the word “nipple” elicits schoolboy humour, and my Guitar Nipple thread (Is Guitar Nipple a Hoax?) caused more hilarity than interest on the Delcamp forum. Some reactions: – “Watching topic to keep abreast of developments” – “I’ll ask my teat-cher” – “I think you’ve […]

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Tags: Guitar · Life

Is Guitar Nipple a Hoax, too?

January 29th, 2009 · No Comments

I posted the following on Jean-François Delcamp’s classical guitar forum, but just in case any guitarists in the know run across this post first: There’s a thread going about the recently disclosed cello scrotum hoax which I don’t want to hijack. But the doubt is raised. by none other than Baroness Murphy herself, who must […]

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Tags: Guitar · Life

Hi-Tech Highwaymen

January 27th, 2009 · No Comments

I’ve always been uneasy with tolls. I mean, a toll entails stopping someone at point C who has left A and needs to get to B and charging them money before allowing them to continue. So what is the difference between that and pointing a blunderbuss at your victim and saying “Stand and deliver?” Unfortunately, […]

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Tags: Life

Opposing Orwell

January 12th, 2009 · 1 Comment

David Beaver has a post on Language Log about George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. I find much to disagree with in Mr Beaver’s post, and Language Log’s Comments Policy says “blog comments should be short. If you have a lot to say, post it on your own blog and link to […]

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Tags: Language · Life · Writing

Hokey Cokey Nonsense

January 5th, 2009 · No Comments

There’s a light-hearted discussion going on over at Language Log about the Hokey Cokey, provoked by the Telegraph digging up the old story about its lyrics being anti-Catholic (a distorsion of “the Latin “hoc est enim corpus meum” or “this is my body” used by Catholic priests to accompany the transubstantiation during mass,” says the […]

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Tags: Language · Translating