Just ahead of Episode Twelve of Bulldog Drummond, a reminder that tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be conducting another Clubland Q&A live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern/8pm British Summer Time. Steyn Clubbers ask the questions, and I try to answer them.
Thank you for all your kind comments about this serialisation of Sapper and about all our other Tales for Our Time. Over seven years ago now, we launched this series of audio adventures on a whim, threw it together somewhat hastily, and learned on the job. So I'm enormously grateful for your appreciation of it.
In tonight's episode, it is the morning after a grim night before at Goring-on-Thames. Has a globalist cabal with big ambitions succeeded in taking Bulldog Drummond out of the game?
A thick grey mist lay over the Thames. It covered the water and the low fields to the west like a thick white carpet; it drifted sluggishly under the old bridge which spans the river between Goring and Streatley. It was the hour before dawn, and sleepy passengers, rubbing the windows of their carriages as the Plymouth boat express rushed on towards London, shivered and drew their rugs closer around them. It looked cold ... cold and dead.
Cold and dead - there's a lot of that about. If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club you can hear Part Twelve of our serialisation of Bulldog Drummond simply by clicking here and logging-in. All previous episodes can be found here.
Robert, a First Fortnight Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes from Ottawa re our listeners' back and forth of recent days:
Mark's musings on 'cranking the car' in his commentaries on Parts Seven, Eight, and Nine of Bulldog Drummond, generating a whole raft of responses, led him to wonder if the expression 'crank the car' outlasted the actual crank, in the same way that 'dial the telephone' outlasted the actual dial. These questions recall the work of J. Peter Maher, Papers in Language Theory and History: Creation and Tradition in Language, which includes a raft of similar examples, including explanations as to why, e.g., Greek πέτρα 'rock' (French 'pierre/Pierre') is related to English 'feather', and Latin 'aqua' to English 'eagle'.
JPM's intricate, careful expositions call into serious question central parts of the early Chomskyan oeuvre in that he shows that in many cases '.... the surface structure remains, while underneath the "deep structure" of (de/con)notations undergoes massive changes', e.g., the surface pronunciation of Greek πέτρα has remained (almost) unchanged for thousands of years, while its semantics ((de/con)notations) have changed apparently beyond recognition.As a linguist, JPM ought to be far better known, and read, than Chomsky; we can chalk that down to similar trends in climate science, where those with greater insight are marginalised by those with lesser.
Well, I'll look into that, Robert. To be honest, my main interest in this area is sentimental: I feel a slight pang when once common vernacular expressions disappear. On GB News, heading into commercial breaks (which, oddly, they no longer seem to have), I liked to say, "Don't touch that dial! We're back in two minutes" - and tweeters used to tweet that I was apparently so out of it I didn't realise we haven't had dials on our TVs for half-a-century. No, I've been saying it since my debut on radio when I was fourteen, and it was obsolete then. But when I was a kid I was given a book on old-time American radio called Don't Touch That Dial, and liked the expression so much I figured I'd do my bit to keep it alive. I may say it on tomorrow's Q&A, if we have any ad breaks.
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Please join me tomorrow for Part Thirteen of Bulldog Drummond, a few hours after our live Clubland Q&A.
