From the cover of Kathryn Dalziel‘s Privacy in Schools: A guide to the Privacy Act for principals, teachers and boards of trustees (Privacy Commissioner of New Zealand, 2009), a cartoon by Chris Slane:
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Image: teacher and schoolboys in a classroom surveyed by several cctv cameras.
Caption: schoolboy to teacher: “Please sir, can I have some more privacy?”…
Via Shannon Burns:
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Image: Defendant standing in front of a judge.
Caption: The internet made me do it.…
From the ever-wonderful PhD Comic:
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Unsurprisingly, you can now buy PhD merchandise – the perfect gift for researchers and supervisors everywhere.…
The Kennelly Archive, recently made available online, is a superb collection of photographs providing a rich historical record of Co Kerry in particular and Ireland in general from the mid-50s to the mid-70s. A selection of the most evocative of the photographs has been published in a sumptuous book – Eyewitness (complete with a jacket blurb from my fellow Kerryman and TCD colleague Brendan Kennelly praising it as “one of the most original, gripping compilations ever to come out of Ireland”, which, if anything is an understatement – the review here is even more adulatory).
The shot on the top left is part of a collection of 124 images relating to the Mossie Moore murder, the events which inspired John B Keane‘s play The Field, made into an oscar-winning movie of the same name directed by Jim Sheridan and starring Richard Harris and John Hurt. The visceral connection to the land, which is the dark heart of The Field, is one of the themes beautifully captured in the Kennelly Archive photographs.
The images are by turns gorgeous, moving and arresting – my favourite is a perfect composition of a ship called the Oranmore beached at Banna strand in February 1970).…
Among his many accomplishments, Alex Steuart Williams – with Graham Francis Defries – draws and writes the weekly Queen’s Counsel cartoon column in the Times. Williams has just released a new book of cartoons, 101 Ways to Leave the Law. From his website, a typical observation concerning the evolution of man lawyers:
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Suggestions welcome as to where scruffy, messy academic lawyers fit in to this picture.…
One Irish politician recently appealed to another not to do anything “precipitous“.
Interesting appeal, but did the appealing (well, actually, unappealing) politician really mean that?
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary provides:
precipitous
/prisippitss/
• adjective 1 dangerously high or steep. 2 (of a change in a condition or situation) sudden and dramatic. 3 hasty; precipitate.
and
• verb /prisippitayt/ 1 cause (something bad) to happen unexpectedly or prematurely. 2 cause to move suddenly and with force. 3 Chemistry cause (a substance) to be deposited in solid form from a solution. 4 cause (moisture or dust) to be deposited from the atmosphere or from a vapour or suspension.
• adjective /prisippitt/ done, acting, or occurring suddenly or without careful consideration.
• noun /prisippitayt, -tt/ Chemistry a substance precipitated from a solution.
Unsurprisingly, the late William Safire (whose special gift was in conveying his pleasure in ruminating about language) clarified that precipitous (“steep”) and is not a synonym for precipitate (”abrupt, rash, headlong”). It is one of the Common Errors in English Usage identified by Paul Brians:
…Both of these adjectives are based on the image of plunging over the brink of a precipice, but “precipitate” emphasizes the suddenness of the plunge, “precipitous,” the steepness of it.
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