Nepalese nannies

I have recently been struck all over again by the reasoning abilities of young children – those aged between about three & five. This has come just from random bits of overheards, not proud parental or grandparental satisfaction at having a genius in the family.

But it has led me to wonder why so many people say they have no memory of anything that happened to them at these ages – if memory is not linked to the ability to reason, then where does it come from?

If I try to analyse my own memories they do seem to be linked more to emotional reactions – whether simple surprise, pleasure & delight, or darker ones such as worry & fear.

The Cameron children ought to have plenty of memories of the past few months, what with daddy getting to be prime minister & the move to Downing Street; then to cap it all they go on holiday to Cornwall & get a baby sister who, as said a Times leader no less, earned a mention in the history books as soon as she was born. Myself I think all this coverage is a bit much – especially that photo of daddy nose-to-nose with his darling. Of course it is a very nice picture, but surely one that is too private to be gawped at in the press.

The coverage did however provide one very intriguing tidbit – the Cameron’s have a Nepalese nanny who has been ‘with them for years’ according to a seemingly well informed Alice Thomson, also in The Times.

Then on Saturday the paper carried an article about French families desperately seeking English-speaking nannies or au pairs for their children, since an ability to speak & understand the language is essential in today’s world. One family who failed in the search settled for a Nepalese au pair instead.

Good gracious! Is this the new must-have for the status-conscious family throughout the EC? A quick Google confirms that this appears to be so. How, why have Nepalese women acquired such a status & reputation? Has it got anything to do with the gurkhas?

Related posts
Not just about politics

The wisdom of 3-year-olds

Shout it out loud

Somewhere on the radio this weekend I heard someone pronounce vociferous as voiciferous.

Which is rather brilliant, actually.

Maternity does & donts

Maternity leave did exist as a right, for some at least, when I started my full time working life; there even used to be a belief, when I was a student, that the Civil Service was particularly liberal in allowing this privilege to unmarried women. There were limits – the story went that more than 3 pregnancies & you were out.

This was in the days when the most liberal of university authorities would send you down for the remainder of the year if you got pregnant, prepared to allow you back on the assumption that the baby had been adopted. Many educational establishments simply sent you packing altogether.

If I remember rightly (the details can be checked, but I am relying on memory here) you were entitled to 3 months maternity leave with some kind of pay, with a possibility of an extra 3 unpaid.

There was however a very significant catch: you had to stop working at 7 months. The medics were unbending on this one – to carry on working full time was dangerous to the health of both mother & baby. This view no doubt dated back to the days when only working class women in manual jobs, which might expose them to all sorts of dangerous substances or practices, would dream of working at all while pregnant. There was also a question of taste & decency – somehow it wasn’t quite right to have a heavily pregnant woman around – where are you supposed to look? No proud display of bumps then, keep it decently hidden behind a voluminous smock!

We fought & won that one, but still we, the medical professions, the breast feeding brigade, or just fashion, find ways to try to govern how women behave during or immediately after - & sometimes even well before – they get pregnant. Purely in the best interests of themselves & the baby, you understand.

Link

The way we view pregnant women

Bank holiday delights

Even in my childhood we never went out on Bank Holidays – or not very far. As my father used to say: Why spend the holiday stuck in a traffic jam?

The number of cars on the road rose dramatically during the 1950s from under 2 million at the start of the decade to almost 5 million by 1960; even so, that seems nothing at all compared with the 27 million on the roads today. But the first stretch of the M1 was opened only in November 1959; for holiday travel to the seaside or inland attractions only old-fangled roads were available to drivers.

It wasn’t just the cars but the nervous drivers who contributed to the jams, especially the dreaded Sunday Drivers. These people owned a car, but drove it only rarely. Many of them were elderly ladies. I had two maiden aunts in that category, & my French teacher at school was the owner of a splendid cream Armstrong Siddeley with a navy blue soft top & brass fittings, which made barely more than one outing a year.

So Bank Holidays on the road came to be seen as especially dangerous. It became normal for the BBC to lead the evening television news with the count of the number of people who had died (so far) on what should have been a happy day. It was only in the 1970s that the tradition was stamped on, as road safety experts pointed out that in fact Bank Holiday deaths were not unusually high, & that a false sense of security about the safety of the roads at other times meant that drivers were failing to pay due care & attention.

But I still don’t understand why some people willingly submit themselves to the misery of a Bank Holiday on crowded roads – there are always alternatives. The herd instinct is astonishingly strong – it used to be particularly noticeable in London parks; walk into say, Hyde Park on a sunny day through one of the gates on the Bayswater road & the number of bodies on the grass would rival Blackpool beach; walk just a short distance into the centre of the park & you could be in one of the most remote parts of the countryside.

Nowt so queer as folk

Links
Criminal on the Road By T. C. Willett
Vehicle Licensing Statistics: 2009 Data Tables (Excel 742 kb)
Table 6: Motor vehicles licensed by taxation group: 1909-2009

In No Strange Land

This poem by that troubled man Francis Thompson is a well judged corrective to the more anguished questionings of depression.

In No Strange Land

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air -
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars! -
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places -
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry - and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry - clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

Francis Thompson

Osiris & Seth, Cain & Abel

The story of the Nile journey undertaken by Florence Nightingale reminded me of the story of Osiris & how he & his brother Seth each married one of their own sisters – all four were the children of Nut, the goddess of the Sky & Geb, the Earth god.

Which in turn reminded of the question – Who did Cain & Abel marry?

This was one of those I tried Googling while I was still just learning – I was surprised to find that nothing much turned up. It is just one indicator of how the web has grown that today my query produced 399,000 results.

It is not that I want to ‘know’ the answer, but how it is dealt with. After all if The Bible is supposed to be an infallible handbook of sexual morality for all time, must there not be an implication that brother/sister incest is condoned – or even mother/son? Or did god create at least one other couple to get round these problems?

It is fascinating how some of the attempted answers rely on the supposedly extreme length of life lived by these earliest members of the human race. Marrying a sister who is a couple of centuries younger than you is absolutely not the same as …

But the questions around the first man, or the first member of any new species, are not just problems for moralists or theologians. Scientists too talk about the first humans in the plural, leaving the details a bit vague. Is there an intermediate stage where there are the equivalent of ‘mixed race’ beings? Must all the first members of a new species come from the same two parents or is there the equivalent of a line of near relatives evolving together like waves rippling to the shore? Is there a minimum number of members for a species to be a species?

I think we should be told.

Links
Ancient Egypt: the Mythology - Nut
Who Did Cain Marry?

Related posts
Counting in the Bible
How can genes move without people?

Poetic nostalgia

Fell off the book buying wagon again this week – the library is having a bit of an extra clear out ahead of a reorganisation, so there are some very tempting bargains on offer.

One little treasure is Where’s That Poem: An Index of Poems for Children compiled by Helen Morris & originally published in 1967. It was aimed at teachers who might be trying to track down a particular poem, or were looking for suitable poems on a particular topic. It also contains a useful set of pithy reviews of the main anthologies available for schools back then.

So something for me to both wallow in nostalgically – Oh yes, I had forgotten all about that one - or take as an inspiration to track down something which is new to me – for example [Alan] Brownjohn’s Beasts.

Helen Morris took a robust view on what counted as suitable for children: “To classify poems as suitable for a particular age group is to err … To say that a particular poem is suitable for a child of a particular age is to try to cram every child into a teacher-designed & teacher-enforced scheme of development which bears no resemblance to real, personal individual growth.”

But nor was she on the side of those who, in the Seventies, took this attitude to the lengths of saying that teachers should not enforce schemes of grammar & spelling on children but rather encourage them to use their own creativity to produce their own kind of poetry. She confirms my memory that the poetry of Andrew Young was very popular in schools “Recommended for use … to teach children to look closely & describe accurately.” That advice may have worked better for children who had more experience of rural life & nature than it does for today’s urban, car-transported offspring, though he may once again speak to children if they are to experience much ice & frost & snow in our changed climate.

Links
Obituaries: Helen Morris - People, News - The Independent
Where's That Poem
WILLIAM TYNDALE JUNIOR SCHOOL, ISLINGTON (Hansard, 5 November 1975)
The Inner London Education Authority and the William Tyndale Junior School Affair

Related posts
Hard Frost
Book buying
10 years old

Mediocre regression

Our year were the first to do General Studies in the Sixth Form. There was an external exam, but it did not count formally for anything, was just one of the early steps in the various efforts that have been made to broaden out the curriculum, which was even tighter, & started to be so at an earlier age back then, not least because of the need to do Latin.

Latin O level was a condition of entry for those aiming to study for a BA in virtually any subject at most English universities, & in the days when 8 'O' levels were regarded as plenty, keeping up Latin usually meant dropping at least one of your science subjects from the mix.

At our school the teaching load for general studies was shared between different teachers. I especially remember one term being taught by the RE teacher, who was also the parish priest, who had us discussing what ‘being normal’ means & introduced us to Galton’s study of the heights of parents & children. When I said that I was exactly half way between my parents in height, he told me that meant I was the perfect regression. I think he meant it to sting – we didn’t really get on for some reason, perhaps because he was a very short (and rotund) man - & until that lesson we thought of regression as a going backwards, back to animal nature, the opposite of progress & civilisation.

Edna Healey says in her biography of Emma Darwin that her husband Charles was, like his father Robert & grandfather Erasmus, ‘well over’ 6 feet tall’ (various internet sources say 5’ 11½”). That surprised me because for whatever reason I have always thought Darwin was quite short, as were many Victorians; thinking of him on the Beagle meant he was always, in my mind, associated in some way with the short-of-stature Admiral Nelson. Darwin’s height can only have added to the discomforts of that voyage – it’s no wonder he liked to spend long hours riding & roaming free when he was on dry land.

Francis Galton was of course a cousin of Charles Darwin (his mother was Charles’s father's half sister by Erasmus’ second wife). It occurred to me to wonder if Galton had a particular family reason for investigating the relation between the heights of parents & children – perhaps a little cousinly jealousy at Charles’s superiority? I haven’t been able to find any information on Galton’s height but the explanation for his choosing height shows that my suspicion was unworthy – there were good technical reasons for his choice. Still, by deciding to call it ‘regression to mediocrity’ Galton leaves a suspicion in the modern mind which regards the mediocre as simply not good enough.

Galton deploys a nice clear argument from first principles about why height should follow ‘the beautiful regularity’ of what we now call the Normal curve.

The Normal curve, or Law of Error, depends first upon there being many separate sources or causes of difference between individuals & then that these differences add together (rather than, for instance, multiplying up) to produce the overall difference from the mean. Finally positive differences must be just as likely to occur as negative ones, & small differences must be more likely than large ones.

For Galton height depends on many elements all of which vary between individuals – the lengths or thicknesses of more than a hundred parts of the body ‘each so distinct from the rest as to have earned a name by which it can be specified’. These include fifty separate bones, two cartilages at each joint, the thickness of the scalp & the soles of the feet.

A long way from current popular ideas of a gene ‘for’ everything, & one that we would do well to remember, particularly when thinking about why some people are fatter than others.

Links

Regression towards mediocrity in hereditary stature
On the Intellectual Versatility of Karl Pearson.

Related post

Are our children too fat or too short?

Fathers job

Ed Balls has been trying to alter the perception that some have of him as a bully by, for example, letting it be known that he is the family baker of birthday cakes for his children.

Why does that make me feel even more uneasy?

I-ity

I came across this very nice quote from Jane Carlyle in Joan Perkin's Women & Marriage in C19th England.

In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity [sic], or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half I still find myself a self-subsisting & alas! self-seeking me.

The full context of the quote can be read through the link below.

Joan Perkin's book is a useful corrective to the usual easy assumtions about what marriage really entailed for women in legal, financial & social terms, but one wonders at Jane Carlyle's ability to put up with Thomas under any circumstances.

Links

Full Text - The Carlyle Letters Online

Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages: Amazon.co.uk: Phyllis Rose.

Related post

An –ity bit of difference

Monstrous regiment

Yet again a politician is making the news because of problems with ‘that woman’, in this case a Treasury civil servant who has upset Iain Duncan Smith.

Of course men (& women) say extremely rude things about male colleagues, but it is true to say that they are more likely to be very specifically aimed, rather than this generic cat calling, which makes the use of 'that woman' arguably misogynistic or sexist.

In the days when women were relatively rare in senior positions, dislike or dissatisfaction with one particular woman was always expressed in the kind of terms which implied that women are just not up to the responsibility. So that if you had two unsatisfactory people, equal in grade or responsibility, the man would always be complained of, & thought as being unsatisfactory, simlply as ‘Roger’ (for example); Joan’s shortcomings would always be identified as those of ‘women’.

Related post

That woman

Telling a liar from his lies

“Unemployment went up by 100% last month” (exaggeration for political effect).

Interviewer: Do you know how much unemployment rose last month?
Interviewee: No (even though I do know I am letting you tell us).

Particiapnt A: Unemployment rose by 2½% last month, according to official statistics.
Participant B: You’re lying because the government is fiddling the figures.

Actually, the truth about unemployment (now, today this minute) is unknowable – whatever you mean by that term, it cannot be measured instantaneously in real time.

Snow patrol

The county council has begun to recruit teams of volunteer snow clearers, just in case we have another winter like the last one. As they say, they cannot possibly (or at least not at reasonable cost) clear every single pathway in this rural county & yet so many people were trapped at home for the want of no more than a few yards of cleared pavement or path.

I wonder how – or if - they have managed to get insurance to cover these volunteer activities.

Related post

Neighbourly duty

Social mobility

One thing I have noticed during these long school holidays – there seem to be many more children about in wheelchairs.

It could be just that odd phenomenon – once you have noticed one you just keep noticing more & more, something which was actually there all the time. I don’t think there can have been some sudden upsurge in accidents at birth, or congenital problems, or nasty disease which we would probably have heard all about by now.

The children I am thinking of are aged about 3 to 7 –part of the current baby boom, so you would expect the numbers to increase. It may also be that there is an almost uniformity in the wheelchairs – perhaps a new, or at least local, NHS standard. None is electric, they still need to be pushed by someone & they look rather like a snazzy director’s chair in black. The seat is pretty high off the ground & they have very manoeuvrable wheels.

My best guess is that this just reflects the great improvements that there have been in making everywhere, at least in towns, much more accessible to people with all kinds of mobility problem – ramps, automatic doors etc etc so that now any family with a disabled child can go out just as easily as any other. I have even seen a bus driver have to tell one family, which he clearly hated having to do, that they would have to wait for the next bus because he already had a wheelchair on board. Fortunately on that particular route they should not have had more than 5 minutes to wait.

The other thing, which is going to make me sound patronising at best, is that these children seem to be extremely lively, healthy & happy. My reason for mentioning that fact is that it makes me feel that the kind of therapies & hard work described in Blue Sky July are now the norm, rather than the old fashioned way of a sadly head shaking “They’ll never amount to much.” And of course being able to join in & socialise, experience the same outings as everybody else, can only help with that process.

Related post

Blue sky July

Mr Bennet & Mr Nightingale

William Nightingale, father of Florence & Parthenope, had a lot in common with Mr Bennet of Pride & Prejudice.

He had inherited a comfortable fortune from his great uncle, on condition that he change his name to Nightingale; unfortunately this great uncle also specified that the fortune could not be passed on to any female, but must go to some other male relative if William were unfortunate enough to have no son.

It seems not to have occurred to William, who came from a long line of Sheffield traders & bankers & who had studied at Cambridge despite being a Unitarian, that he should do anything to acquire some other form of capital that he could use to secure the future of the two daughters who were his only children; he lived the leisured life of a gentleman, the business of running his estates seems not to have been very onerous. At least he took charge of the education of his daughters.

It was left to his wife to do her best to ensure that suitable husbands were found for the girls.

Mr Bennet was also a loving father with an estate entailed to the male line; he had a tendency to hide in his study ignoring as best he could his wife’s continuing vulgar and insensitive behaviour in pursuit of husbands for her daughters.

It wasn’t that it was not worth bothering to provide a fortune for a daughter – the idea that it would just become the property of her husband could be circumvented by the use of private contracts. So why did they just shrug their shoulders of the responsibility.

The fortune inherited by William Nightingale was said to be £100,000. this sum seems to have served the same role as did ‘millionaire’ in the middle years of the C20th , shorthand for well-to-do.

It also became a journalistic cliché in reports of C19th elopements – the woman involved was always said to be worth £100,000 in her own right, even when, as in the case of Robinson Fowler, Manchester’s stipendiary magistrate, she was the mature wife of a fellow magistrate.

Related post
Young Jane Austen & the older woman

Wet dry weather

We had some funny weather on Wednesday, minutes of blue sky & sunshine followed by heavy clouds which plopped down the kind of raindrops which make you run for cover but never follow up on their threat.

We journeyed home along alternating stretches – a mile of heavy rain, followed by a mile of dry surface – all the way to the village, where the centre was almost awash while up at home the road down the hill was dry.

Good news this morning however – the hosepipe ban has been lifted.

You only breathe through your eyes

Florence Nightingale & the burka.

I have just started to read Anthony Sattin’s ‘Winter on the Nile’ about a journey in 1849-50 undertaken by Florence Nightingale & Gustave Flaubert. There are all the signs that I am in for a tremendously good read – starting with a string of satisfying coincidences.

Here were two people aged about 30, each facing something of a crisis as they wondered if their life's ambitions might ever be fulfilled. Before the new decade was over Florence Nightingale had been to the Crimea & Madame Bovary was published.

There is no evidence that they ever met or socialised – their being on the same ferry was pure coincidence - but Anthony Sattin came across the evidence through first a glorious episode of library serendipity, a eureka moment, when he discovered letters written home from the trip & then by following up other leads.

The reason for this post is that I want to note Florence Nightingale’s description of how & why she came to dress one day in a burka.

Florence was escorted on the trip by family friends, the Bracebridges. At the end of a week in Alexandria while they waited for the ferry which would take them on to Cairo, Florence expressed a particular desire to be able to go to the mosque during prayers – something, it was thought, that no European woman had done before. Undeterred by the advice that the only way was to go disguised as a local woman, she, Mrs Bracebridge & her maid donned the required dress. Even so they were advised not to show their hands or to speak.

The women were only in the mosque for 15 minutes, observing from the minaret. The description of the less than reverent occupations of the large congregation – basket making, story telling, sleeping – reminded me of the description of the old St Paul’s, to which John Donne was expected to bring some kind of order & control when he was appointed dean.

Unlike Mrs Bracebridge, who was shocked, Florence rather approved of all this bustle, & anyway, when the faithful heard the call, they all bowed down together & for 5 minutes were totally absorbed in their prayer. She however was outraged at the way the women were treated – no better than animals. “If I could have said where any woman may go for an hours rest, to me the feeling would have been perfect.”

Here is her description of being harnessed into the trappings of a burka.

First an immense blue silk sheet (the head comes through a hole in the middle); then a white stripe of muslin which comes over your nose like a horse’s nose bag, & is fastened by a stiff passementerie* band, which passes between your eyes & over & behind your head like a halter; then a white veil; & lastly the black silk balloon** which is pinned on the top of your head, has two loops at the two ends through which you put your wrists in order to keep the whole together. You only breathe through your eyes.
*Decorative trimming of gold or silver lace or (in later use) of
braid, beads, or other material.
**A balloon-cap

An extended version of Florence Nightingale's experience at the mosque is available online at Florence of Arabia

Links
The pull of Egypt
A Winter on the Nile: Amazon.co.uk: Anthony Sattin: Books
Florence of Arabia
Related post
Florence Nightingale, passionate statistician

The illiterate vulgar X

“Everybody knows that "X" marks the spot, whether it comes to locating buried treasure, winning spot-the-ball competitions or casting a vote on polling day” or so opens the BBC item on ‘Why 'X' does not always mark the spot.’

But why does X mark ones choice of an MP? Or alternatively, why do teachers use X for no, wrong?

Somewhere there must be fascinating documents or discussion about how this came about - I rather assume it came with secret ballots. And indeed the 2nd schedule to the Ballot Act of 1872 which first gave us secret voting in parliamentary elections contains these very precise guidelines:

The voter will …with the pencil provided … place a cross on the right hand side,
opposite the name of each candidate for whom he votes, thus X.

and warns that the vote will be lost if the X is omitted.

I have not been able to check if there was any controversy over the precise form of mark to be used (as opposed to controversy over whether secret voting would be a Good or a Bad Thing), but as the use of a cross, made in place of a signature by a person unable to write was a very old tradition, I assume not. The whole emphasis of the new voting arrangements was on the secrecy, privacy, confidentiality of the individual voter, so the traditional inscrutability of a nameless X in place of a signature carried an obvious symbolism.

Which custom our illiterate vulgar do ... keep up; by signing a cross for their mark when unable to write their names - William Blackstone 1766

Links

15Aug1872, First Ballot Election

The Ballot Act, 1872, with copious notes and index.

Related post

Election permutations

David Cameron

I am beginning to wonder if David Cameron might be as lightweight as some have always claimed, careless of detail, cavalier with the facts, dangerously flip & loose lipped.

Witness his slip up over whether the Americans were fighting WWII in 1940, & his failure to recognise how others, particularly the Commonwealth, had come to our aid from the beginning. Witness the remarks he made in India about Pakistan.

Or is he just very clever at shifting the debate, deftly establishing the notion of junior partnership, disengagement from special relationship & Blair-lite adoration.

Incidentally I noticed from an article about his educational career that his A levels were History of Art, History, and Economics with Politics – no A level mathematics required to study economics (albeit with politics & philosophy) at Oxford in 1985.

How can anyone understand

In the 1960s it was the elders who were on the back foot, mocked by the babyboomers for asking questions such as Who are The Beatles? Ever since then politicians have been getting themselves into trouble over questions about their favourite Spice Girl or whether they have the Arctic Monkeys on their iPod. New Labour were so terrified of being fuddy duddy that they invented the ludicrous business of Cool Britannia, observed with tolerant bemusement by experienced heads of state.

Now the boomers are getting old & the tables are turning; it is the young who are being regarded in disbelief. They have never heard of John Wayne!

David Crystal had the draft manuscript of his new Little Book of Language read by a 12-year-old who asked exactly that question. She had neither seen nor heard of the movie Stagecoach. Crystal describes this as ‘a yawning chasm between our cultural mindsets.’

It is of course not just a question of knowing, or even admiring, John Wayne who never appealed to me very much. That whole culture of westerns on tv as well as at the pictures, morphing into the idea of Reagan’s America.

The name of Wayne was introduced into Crystal’s book as an example of a pseudonym. We English 12 year old sophisticates were used to mocking the choice that some film stars made when they abandoned their real names for one more suitable for the silver screen, but in this case the reason was only too obvious. Imagine being a boy called Marion!

Not just the films but that whole raft of cultural beliefs would seem strange to today’s young, living in a world where the western means Brokeback Mountain & ideas of the masculine ideal veer more towards the metrosexual.

The yawning chasm can open up even between those much closer in age than Crystal & his 12 year old reader. I remember a casual conversation in the office about the arrangements for the approaching Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. What did you do on Coronation day, I asked?

Such pitying looks for an old lady. Answers ranged from I wasn’t even born, to I was only three. Imagine not being able to remember the Coronation, or to be the proud owner of a Coronation Crown (a commemorative 5/- coin), a small blue-leather bound New Testament, & memories of first glimpsing tv & first tasting beer – someone’s idea of a joke when I wandered into the kitchen where my father & all the other men were having a glass was to give me a sip from his glass – ugh!

And so it will continue. Just recently I had the pleasure of watching the face of a five year old struggle with the very concept of ’11 years ago’ – when there had actually been another film of the same name.

When I first began writing on this blog I often used to pause to think about whether my cultural references would mean anything to readers who might be anywhere in the world. I used to try to put in helpful links for those which might be obscure but you end up with annoying blue underlines all over the place. In the end it seems best just to leave readers to fend for themselves – after all, that is what search engines are for – to check what on earth it is that someone is on about.

Links
David Crystal Guest Post: Who’s John Wayne?
A Little Book of Language
David Crystal
John Wayne

Related posts
Film credits

Don Dirk of Dowdee