"how did I become so obnoxious / what is it with you that makes me act like this"

[larryhammer]

Random observations:

Just how lonely are the clouds in the Lake District, anyway? And do they wander about? Given the climate, I would think they'd be many and close together, and travel the wind's straight path.

(Yes, yes, I know: in context Wordsworth's saying he was apart from others the way a high cloud is apart from the earth, with an emotional distance. But he's the one who chose to use ambiguous syntax and break the line where he did, creating the easy alternate reading.)

Meanwhile, in the Department of Feeling Uncultured, I hadn't realized that Laurence Alma-Tadema was a woman. Her name was originally Laurense, which is apparently the female form of Laurens, the Dutch Laurence.

(Memo to self: just because I am a male Laurence, doesn't mean it's always a male name.)

If you're in a meeting that includes people of a certain generation, and someone says "Anybody?" and gets no response, the odds are, someone will finally say, "Bueller?"

(My cultural literacy: let me show you how dated it is.)

---L.

Comments

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

The last time I was in the Lake District the clouds were very gregarious indeed and if they were wandering, it was with the ulterior motive of drenching as many tourists as possible.

So Lawrence A-T had a daughter called Laurence A-T? But no confusion could possibly have arisen because only one of them had a beard...

[larryhammer]

No confusion at all ...

(And that Lawrence A-T married a Laura A-T also would not further muddy the waters.)

---L.

[incandescens]

It amuses me that there is a (very masculine) character in a French roleplaying game (In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas, about angels and demons in the mortal world) called Laurent. This game got reworked/rewritten by the American publishers Steve Jackson Games, who kept the character but renamed him Laurence -- which is the feminine form of the name in French. This just appeals to my sense of the ridiculous somewhere along the way.

[larryhammer]

Hee.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

"Bueller?" extends at least as far as my generational segment, though at 36 I'm right around the cutoff; much younger and one wouldn't have had enough sarcasm-internals to understand the film in 1986/87. (To be sure, I didn't see it in a cinema--a friend's older brother liked it and got his parents to buy VHS, which enabled my friend and me to watch it one afternoon, only a few months after it was released.)

[larryhammer]

*nod* And it's at about the mid-30s and up that people smiled-n-chuckle at the reference.

---L.