Tuesday, May 10, 2011

A profusion of abbots & abodes

This is throwing up some surprises.

I got in a muddle with the number of t’s in the name of Abbott of Abottabad. Trying to put it right I typed Abbott’s Abode into Google to bring up the Language Log post

But what comes up top of the list?

Abbot’s Abode - yes, with just one t.

And that’s not all. There is a local connection. This Abbot’s Abode is the largest of the Monks Retreat cottages, holiday lets at Millers Dale, a place in Derbyshire which holds a very special place in my memory.

Well I might get around sometime to calculating the probability of this event, taking account of my poor typing & proof reading ability, the number of places called Abbot's Abode in England & Google's increasingly sophisticated ways of tailoring search results to the searcher, but for now I just need a bit of a lie down.