language

Window tax

In Things, language on 13 February 2010 with Comments Off

To be filed under “things I didn’t know about that I prob­ably should’ve and that answer so many ques­tions: win­dow tax.

From wiki­pe­dia:

Prop­er­ties with between ten and twenty win­dows paid a total of four shil­lings, and those above twenty win­dows paid eight shil­lings.  The num­ber of win­dows that incurred tax was changed to seven in 1766 and eight in 1825. The flat-rate tax was changed to a vari­able rate, depend­ent on the prop­erty value, in 1778. People who were ineligible for church or poor rates, for reas­ons of poverty, were exempt from the win­dow tax.  Win­dow tax was rel­at­ively unin­trus­ive and easy to assess. The big­ger the house, the more win­dows it was likely to have, and the more tax the occu­pants would pay. Nev­er­the­less, the tax was unpop­u­lar, because it was seen by some as a tax on “light and air”.

The tax was imposed in Scot­land in the 1780s, instantly explain­ing (almost) all of the build­ings in Edin­burgh with bricked-up windows.

Addi­tion­ally, the tax is con­sidered to be a pos­sible ori­gin of the phrase “day­light rob­bery”, though this remains unproven.

Talking about talking monkeys

In language on 4 November 2008 tagged apes, evolution, language, linguistics, monkeys, university, video with Comments Off

It’s not often I get to sit and watch videos online and still file it under ‘being pro­duct­ive’, so I enjoy it when I can. This is Susan Savage-Rumbaugh talk­ing about Kanzi, a bonobo who can “talk”. While the evid­ence on the mat­ter is slightly con­tra­dict­ory, it still seems like a good excuse to watch a film about a mon­key*.

*Yes, yes. Tech­nic­ally, a bonobo is not a mon­key. I know that. But in my mind’s fuzzy “prim­ate” cat­egory, everything is a mon­key. And it would annoy my lec­turer less if I used the cor­rect term, and where would the fun be. Also, mon­keys are cuter**.

**Insinu­ations that I am not tak­ing my Ori­gins and Evol­u­tion of Lan­guage course entirely ser­i­ously, and am just treat­ing it as a fun diver­sion from my really heavy sub­jects and overly com­plic­ated dis­ser­ta­tion, may not be entirely unfoun­ded. But surely enjoy­ing a course, for whatever reason, is a good thing?

Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd!

In Odd, language on 31 October 2008 tagged language, news, signs with Comments Off

 

When offi­cials asked for the Welsh trans­la­tion of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfor­tu­nately, the e-mail response to Swansea coun­cil said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”. So that was what went up under the Eng­lish ver­sion which barred lor­ries from a road near a super­mar­ket. [Full story]