Botched Words

This morning I was talking to my daughter Zoe about the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch but accidentally spoonerized it and instead said "Big Garden Word-botch".

Floordrobe

This morning I was browsing my way through Waterstones when I came across Kitchen Table Lingo by the English Project, a celebration of new words that have been invented and used within families.  'Floordrobe', my favorite, is a term for the place where a teenager keeps their clothes (ie: the floor as opposed to a wardrobe).

Thinking in Afrikaans

I went to a shop yesterday and was served by a woman with a distinctly South African accent.  She made a intriguing mistake while serving me.  The cash register showed the correct change to be "£3.81" but she was about to hand me "£3.18" when she corrected herself, saying "I'm thinking in Afrikaans".   Is there something about the way numbers are represented in Afrikaans that could lead to such errors.  Or was the remark just a racist denigration of the intelligence of Afrikaners?

Taking the Pants from a Highlander

Most of the mathematical logicians who have come after Boole are men who would have stuck at the impossible subtraction in ordinary algebra.  They say virtually, "How can you throw into a heap the same things twice over; and how can you take from a heap things that are not there."  Their great principle is the impossibility of taking the pants from a Highlander.  Their only conception of the analytical processes of addition and subtraction is throwing into a heap and taking out of a heap.  It does not occur to them that the processes of algebra are ideal, and not subject to gross material restrictions.

From "Lectures on ten British mathematicians of the nineteenth century" by Alexander Macfarlane (1916).

(I should perhaps mention, for those mystified by the above reference, that Scotsmen, and presumably Highlanders in particular, are reputed not to wear any pants under their kilts.)

The Pfaffian in the Grassmannian...

From a post by David Guarrera at Imaginary Potential:

One example that I do understand, since I’ve read the paper many times, is Hori and Tong’s “proof” of Rodland’s Conjecture: that the Pfaffian in the Grassmannian G(2,7) lives on the same kahler moduli space as a hypersurface Calabi Yau in a Grassmannian. The proof uses beautiful physical intuition about the dynamics of non-abelian gauge theories in two dimensions.

However, you may think that the kahler moduli spaces of Calabi Yau’s are useless. Fair enough, I say. But they’re quite beautiful.