The book is set during the Great War of 1914-1918, and seems to have been written about the same time. I imagine that at the time it may have been described as ‘an improving book for girls’. Or possibly ‘gels’.

The language used in the dialogue is marvellous. It reminded me of Harry Enfield’s Mr Cholmondley-Warner.

At least two characters use the word ‘topping’. From ‘The Cassell Dictionary of Slang’ by Jonathon Green:

topping adj. [early 19C+] excellent, enjoyable, first-rate. [SE top, 20C use is either ironic or consciously archaic]

I also encountered the word ‘aëroplane’, which I assumed was an umlaut over the first e. In fact it turns out it’s a diaeresis (or trema). From the Wikipedia:

It indicates that two adjoining letters that would normally form a digraph are actually split over two syllables. To put it simply: the diaeresis indicates that a vowel should be pronounced apart from the letter which precedes it.

For example, in the spelling coöperate, it reminds the reader that the word has four syllables, not three.

Noël Coward is pronounced No-el rather than Nole.
Noöne is no-one rather than noon.

A topping story and discovering a new feature of English, now that is tip-top!

UPDATE: Who knew that getting WordPress to deal with accented characters would be so difficult?

It’s a fabulous word which just invites you to create lots of new words in a similar vein. I’m just in the middle of some prime quality bloggage, for example.

I’ve just seen a tweet from Saint Stephen of Fry:

Good guestage today on QI: Bill Bailey, Danny Baker & Jeremy Clarkson as well as @alandavies1 of course

which pleases me greatly

From the Wikipedia:

In computing, mega- can sometimes denote 1,048,576 (2²⁰) of information units (example: a megabyte, a megaword), but can denote 1,000,000 (10⁶) of other quantities, for example, transfer rates: 1 megabit/s = 1,000,000 bit/s.

The prefix mebi- has been suggested as a prefix for 2²⁰ to avoid ambiguity, but is yet to be widely used.

So, rather cheekily, disk drive manufacturers always use megabyte to mean 1,000,000 bytes, which makes their drives appear larger. A 500MB drive will have 500,000,000 bytes, or about 4.8 mebibytes.

Conversely, the milli- prefix denotes thousandths (10^-3) and has the abbreviation lower case ‘m’. 5mA refers to 5 milliamps, or 5 thousandths of an amp. Amps get an upper-case ‘A’ because they’re named after Andre-Marie Ampere.

Under no circumstances should you confuse the two! It annoys me when I see computers advertised with 512mb of memory. 512 millibytes is just over half a byte. OK, it’s fairly obvious in this case that they meant to use ’512MB’, but all it says to me is they either didn’t know or, worse, didn’t care about the difference between mega- and milli-.

Incidentally, a byte originally referred to a collection of bits, but in these modern times everyone seems to have agreed that a byte is made up of exactly 8 bits. Somewhat amusingly, half a byte or 4 bits can be referred to as a nybble. Beyond that, 2 bits are a morsel, although I’ve never really heard that used in real life.

So, 512mb is just over a nybble

UPDATE: Oh my goodness, it gets worse! It turns out that upper case ‘B’ refers to bytes, lower case ‘b’ is for bits. Which means that 512mb is 512 millibits, or just over half a bit!

Damn! How can I rant about people confusing M with m when I’m confusing B with b myself?

As always, it’s a learning experience

This is the first of an infrequent series dedicated to rants about abuse of the English language

The topic today is the word ‘unique’.

Unique means the only one of its type in the world, unlike any other. So it follows that the property of uniqueness is either true or false. There can be no degrees of uniquity. Either a thing is unique or it isn’t.

Please don’t describe something as ‘fairly unique’ or ‘extremely unique’. You may wish to substitute the word ‘unusual’ in these cases; ‘fairly unusual’ or ‘extremely unusual’.

When people use degrees of uniqueness whilst speaking to me, I normally have to interrupt them to explain that ‘unique’ is a boolean quality; that is, it is either true or false, with no grey areas in between.