Sometimes I love Wikipedia. A colleague of mine was complaining that her husband was rubbish at saying when something was blue or green (unless it was really blue or really green) and I said that there’s a word in Welsh that means both blue and green. Aha! Her husband in Welsh. I searched on Google and Wikipedia came up with a lovely page that says this blue/green blending is common and that that’s sometimes referred to in English as grue.
According to Wikipedia and another nice page, this term actually came from philosophy, where it is used to illustrate the problem of making general statements such as “all emeralds are green” rather than the more limited “all emeralds I have seen so far are green”. That reminded me of the surreal conversation I had at Kessingland with Grant about his PhD thesis (How the natural sciences do or don’t provide a basis for terms from ethics like ought, should and so on). It was standard brain-bending philosophical stuff that I could just about keep up with, but what made it surreal was that I was holding the washing up I was about to do, and he held the smelly potty he was about to empty.
And of course Wikipedia also contains a page about the meaning of the word grue that you’d get from reading geek things like User Friendly: a dark-loving monster in the text adventure Zork.
More education at the dinner table: last night we talked about primary colours, and how light and pigment have different sets (must get some torches and coloured cellophane for them to play with), which somehow led on to tides and the moon. (Sounds a bit like describing a dream!) Tonight Katy found some Alphabite like things in the freezer (like oven chips, but in the shape of a letter) and K did some spelling. Oh and J said he wanted to go and see the Moscow State Circus because there was an advert for it on the table – which country is it the capital of?
