Sunday 1 March 2009

News & Olds

Highland council has reduced the number of snow blowers that it uses down to 5 from high of 19, and decreased the amount of rock salt that they use due to the warmer winters they have had recently. Bet they wished that they had them a couple of weeks ago when they had 3 feet of snow in two days.

Numpty is one of my favourite words and one that I frequently find a use for, turns out that I am not alone as a poll of my fellow countrymen in 2007 found it to be the favourite word of us Scots.

Talking of words scientists in Reading have been carry out research on the way words evolve in Indo European languages over time and believe that they have discovered the oldest words in the English language; I, we, two and three date back tens of thousands of years. Interesting stuff and you can read the whole story here.

3 comments:

Sezme said...

Numpty is an awesome word! (I imagine it could have been applied to me at various times in my life.)

It could most definitely be applied to the entire U.S. Congress, et al.

When I was in college, I had to take a class about the history of the English language. It was really interesting (having to speak and translate Old English and Middle English was not fun, though).

Lori Stewart Weidert said...

I have never heard of Numpty; I will try to remember to incorporate it into my vocabulary.

DBA Dude said...

rt, Most political types certainly qualify as numpties. I cannot imagine speaking Old English to be any sort of fun at all.

Lori, I am sure that you will encounter your share of them - good to have a "code" word that you can use and not many others understand.