Jamie123

It reminds me of "William's Truthful Christmas" by Richmal Crompton. Eleven year old William Brown is spending Christmas with his aunt and uncle. He has taken a little too literally the vicar's Christmas sermon on "casting aside deceit and hypocrisy and speaking the truth". SPOILER: Uncle Frederick was being overoptimistic. Lady Atkinson returns later in a mercilessly forgiving mood.

You're right - I do need to research exactly where I stand. If we're set for long-term separation there likely need to be some safeguards. Deep down I still love her and I like to think this separation is only a temporary thing. Right now I couldn't handle having her back in the house. (I have uneasy dreams about it.) But maybe one day...

I've told my wife that the only reason I would ever divorce her would be to get remarried, and since that's not on the cards I see no reason to give free money to lawyers. If she wants a divorce then that's up to her, but it'll be her project not mine. Maybe one day I'll reconcile with her, but until then I'll be a MGTOW

I'm happy that my wife and daughter have started being nice to me again, but I can't help thinking I'm being taken for a ride. My wife has now rented a nice apartment, and my daughter ("child") is staying with her over the summer vacation. My wife said to me the other day that she has counted all the money she has coming in and it's not enough to cover her rent. I asked her if that included the allowance I'm still paying her. She said no, and including that she might just have enough. Then she said that our daughter needs £550 to pay the deposit on the apartment she is renting for college next year. I told her I didn't have enough to pay it, so she said could I pay part of it and she would pay the rest? I asked her how she would get the money and she said she didn't know. Well you can guess what I was thinking, can't you? Do you use the term "loan shark" over there? If she gets herself in trouble with one of those, which muggins do you think will be getting her out again? So I gave her the £550 (despite putting my account into the red) - after all it is for my daughter's education, fair enough. But last Saturday I took them both over to Ikea at Reading to buy some furniture for the apartment. Fine, no problem. Everyone needs furniture. But while we were there (and this is what my "moan" is really about) they spent about £70 on stuffed animals. I asked them if this was really needed, but mostly kept my gob closed for fear of being put back into the dog house. It may be my wife's money, but whose going to be supporting her when her account is empty again? While we were in the waiting room waiting for the furniture, I tried relieving the pressure by performing the "Octopus and Cat Show" with two of the stuffed toys, but was promptly told to shut up. *Sigh* I wrote a resume for my wife so hopefully she can get a job, and I thought it would be a good idea to ask our curate to be a reference. Our curate is actually a canon at Guildford cathedral (maybe similar to a stake president's counsellor for you?) and thought that might add a bit of gravitas. However, when I approached the curate she told me she wasn't happy with the way my wife had been "giving everyone the run-around" and she might not write nice things about her if asked. I didn't ask for details, but I can infer that there have been shenanigans that I don't know about. Anyway if you read this far, thanks for listening. Moan over.

That's a scary thought!

That's how I understand it too. Some countries (France or Ireland for example) have a nonexecutive president, who is kind of like an elected monarch, and a Prime Minister who is head of government. This is probably the least-fuss route we would take if we ever abolished the monarchy. Some great wise fatherly (or motherly) scholar or writer or musician - someone who could inspire everyone - would be perfect. But think who we could get!

Ummm...the Prime Minister of Canada? We have one too...

Ooooooo Mikbone said a naughty word! I'm not a Cockney but I prefer "merchant banker" 😉

Fourteen of the countries you're referring to still have the British monarch as their head of state. Don't ask me to name them all, but there's Canada, Australia and New Zealand to start with

Perhaps mine was an exaggeration. But I've seen the same (or similar) in enough places to think it must have some element of truth. I've even seen it on Lehto's Law. Very senior judges have something similar over here. In extreme circumstances they can be impeached, but they cannot be prosecuted the same way you or I could. Absolute immunity does apply to the monarch, but I'm pretty sure a misbehaving monarch would be forced out one way or another.

https://eji.org/issues/qualified-immunity/#:~:text=As one federal judge summarized,one has answered them before.

I just realised I didn't answer your question. Yes you can make a "declaration of renunciation".

The way I understand it is that no ruling can be made that a government action was unconstitutional unless a clear precedent exists that that action was unconstitutional. And since no ruling can ever be made, no precedent can ever be set. It might have come straight out of Catch 22.

Getting rid of the monarchy would be hideously complicated and monstrously expensive. I don't think anyone wants an elected president that badly.

Nobody talks about "subjects" these days. (Except notionally, and in relation to the monarch.) We are British Citizens. Maybe I am (like Terry Jones) "fooling myself", but king or no king, I can't believe we live in more of a dictatorship than a country where the police can beat you up and steal all your money, and then hide behind "qualified immunity" and "civil asset forfeiture". I'll get flamed for saying that I know, but I'll bet every counter argument will boil down to one thing: "Don't spank my child". (I wish Anatess was still here. She'd give me a run for my money for saying that!)

https://youtube.com/shorts/-kMhnf0o9OM?si=c_eScjwJyj2hCk5L Oh yes he is your king. It doesn't matter two hoots if you're anti-monarchy, if you're British then he is your king. Or do you think you're special and different from the rest of us, and get to choose your own personal head of state? It's no different from silly Democrats saying that Trump was not their president. Maybe Trump is an idiot and maybe he's not, but either way, during his term of office he was president. https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?si=tfFKMlL2bCJTgrnD

Everyone should try haggis. If you don't know what goes into haggis, don't look it up until you have eaten some. If you knew you wouldn't ever taste it, and once you have tasted it you won't care.

They're always banging on about antisemitists here. I don't understand who these antisemitism are. I don't hate Jews. Do you hate Jews? I don't believe I know anyone who hates Jews. (I know people who get cross about Israel, but not liking Israel is not the same as "Jew hating". Israel is a country. It is not a religion or a race.) One of my best friends at school was a Jew. Admittedly he was a bit of an idiot (and a lot of people told him so) but his being an idiot had nothing to do with his being Jewish. On one occasion half the school got so tired of his shenanigans that they carried him to a notoriously muddy patch on the edge of the soccer pitch and threw him in. By the way, when I say he was "an idiot" I don't mean he was unintelligent. He was one of the cleverest people I've ever known. He was just a bit on the loopy side. But again, that was nothing to do with his race or religion*. *Not that he was in the slightest bit religious. Neither were any of his family. They even had a Christmas tree every year.

I don't know, but I suspect that a German trying to read Dutch is rather like an Englishman (or an American) trying to understand Robbie Burns.

Thanks very much, and thanks to your nephew too. I really appreciate this. They call this "agglutination" (a word I learned only recently). From what I've read, Finnish is famous for its levels of agglutination. The individual word elements they call "lemmas". I recently found an interesting paper (A. Corral, G. Boleda, R. Ferrer-i-Cancho, Zipf’s Law for Word Frequencies: Word Forms versus Lemmas in Long Texts | PLOS ONE) where they have compared the Zipf laws for several languages including English and Finnish. My own code only looks at complete wordforms - theirs automatically splits words into their individual elements to study the frequencies of those elements, and does this for multiple languages! (I fear that may be beyond my abilities - though maybe I could persuade them to share their code!) To give you an idea of the sort of thing I'm looking at, here is one of my graphs: What I call the "beta index" is the log-log slope of the numbers of unique words exhibiting a particular frequency plotted against that frequency (e.g. 10,000 words appear once, 5,000 appear twice, 1000 appear 3 times etc.). The "alpha index" is the log-log slope of the frequency of a word plotted against its "rank" (rank 1 being the most frequent word, 2 being the second, 3 the third etc.) The Finnish cluster is more compact than the English (even accounting for the fact that far fewer Finnish items appear) suggesting there is less diversity in the alpha index, and also the beta indices are significantly higher. Corral et al. found similar results for their wordforms, and to some extent their lemmas too (though oddly their beta indices for English are significantly higher than mine - though their study is based on only 3 English and 3 Finnish texts). Plenty of room for investigation here - just so little time to spare though 😒

Don't you think Ken Page is unbelievably brilliant as Old Deuteronomy? He makes me weep and shiver all over! I never saw this on the stage - only on the movie with Elaine Page as Grizabella and Sir John Mills as Gus. The night we had booked to see it was the night my daughter was unexpectedly born early. Still, I'm not complaining! 😀

Another thought: we often use the same word to mean different things - for example "head" could mean what's on top of your shoulder, or it could mean the person in charge of some group or organization, or it could mean the top of a sheet of paper, or it could mean a toilet on board a ship. In the latter three, the word is used by analogy. Another example, "tolerance" could mean the act of putting up with things that irritate you, or it could mean a range of values of some quantity which are acceptable for a particular purpose (like the tolerance of a resistor). It is regularity of the language that interests me most. Particularly the Finnish documents are much truer to Zipf's law than the English ones. I have done some statistical tests that prove this is true, but I am interested in what causes it. There must be something about the language that makes it so. By the way, I got the email today to say the paper has been accepted. I won't present it myself. I have a colleague who would get much more out of a trip to Cambridge than I would. P.S. what I've read of Kullervo so far is very strange. It starts with a family of swans. (In the original they were apparently swans and chickens, but Tolkien's version only mentions swans.) A hawk and an eagle carry off two of the cygnets to different countries, where they appear to grow up as humans. No explanation for what's going on. The remaining cygnet stays with his mother and grows up evil - again somehow becoming human along the way. I've not had much time for reading, but I gather so far the Finns have some very strange ideas!

Don't ask me why, but I texted that joke to my wife. She said "That's not funny". I said "Why not? It's no different from 'parrots eat 'em all'!" She said "I get the joke, but with all the wars going on in the world I don't find it funny." You'd think after 20 years I'd know better than to try!

Thanks Carb - I appreciate this. Knowing the right questions to ask is tricky, which is why I've thought it over for a few days. These are the sorts of things I am curious about: In English we have many words with very similar meanings: "Big" and "large" mean almost the same thing, but there are subtleties: we would say "big wheel" for a carnival attraction or a child's scooter, but we wouldn't say "large wheel". Similarly we might say "there is a thief at large" but never "there is a thief at big". I remember once as a kid asking by father why the label Lee and Perrins sauce bottle said "Original and Genuine" when those two words mean the same. He told me that no two English words mean exactly the same: we wouldn't for example say that "genuine sin" means the same as "original sin" - though "genuine Picasso" could be interchanged with "original Picasso". Similarly "Contrition" and "remorse" are similar enough to be confused, and people do often say "remorse" when they really mean "contrition". (One could be remorseful about something without being in the slightest bit contrite.) Similarly "resolution" and "will" don't mean quite the same, though people do confuse them. For example, you can resolve to do something, and yet still not do it willingly. I'm sure that wasn't always the case: the name "William" for example is usually said to mean "Helmet of Resolution" - coming from the German Wilhelm = will helm = "helmet of will". The subtlety of distinction had (presumably) not yet emerged when the name was coined. Are there similar things to these in Finnish? In English we write and talk differently depending on our audience. When we talk to children we use different words than we would use with adults. Similarly we would write a technical or academic paper using different language to what we would use when talking about the same things. Some people use a form of Early Modern English when praying (the, thou, thine) that they would never normally use. You would use different language in a love letter to your girlfriend/boyfriend than you would use in a letter to your boss. Again, do these kinds of differences appear in Finnish, and if so to what extent. Sorry if that's rather a lot. I could probably research these things myself, though I doubt very much I have the skills to learn Finnish properly. I've just started to read J.R.R. Tolkien's adaptation of the Finnish legend of Kullervo - it says in the Intro that Tolkien never particularly mastered Finnish (and we're talking here of a man who invented languages of his own!) so I doubt I'd have much of a hope. One year I came equal bottom of the class in French! (Though in my defence, I did come top in English the same year.)