D3X73R

We went for a walk with the neighbo(u)rs, and we saw this sign. The sign reads "Permissive Footpath avoiding Golf Course", and all the adults in our group (2 English, 1 Spanish, 1 American) found the sign amusing. Jokes about what kinds of permissive activities we might find on the path (or that we might find the path doing) resulted, as well as a conversation about what the sign meant and whether it could have been phrased better. You can tell from this that we're not seasoned country walkers, we're just lockdown people finding new ways to get some exercise. The term permissive footpath is a term of art in the British land-use bureaucracy, and such signs can be found on many paths. It differs from a public footpath in that the land is privately owned. The landowner is permitting people to walk on their path. This explanation of the term offers other expressions like permitted footpath and concessionary footpath , but these seem to be much less common, and we wou...

In the hope of having a weekend, I wasn't going to write a long blot post this week. This really has taken over my Sundays the last few weeks. But then I started writing another monster post. About 1/3 into it, I reali{s/z}ed I'd need to explain this little thing about country and countryside . So, I've pivoted to writing this shorter thing and am ahead of the game for next week's post too. Yay. So. Country is a polysemous word—it has multiple meanings. And those meanings can create real ambiguities. For instance: Lynne has lived in the country for 20 years . That sentence is true on the 'national territory' meaning of country , but false on the 'rural area' meaning of country , since I have lived in a particular national territory (the UK) for 20 years, but I've lived in a city (Brighton) for all of those 20 years (well, technically it was a town when I moved here ). Most of the time, such ambiguities don't bother us. If Sid goes for a walk in...

As promised last time, here's more about birds. See the previous post for more about garden birds and some other bird-related things and for information about Cecil Brown's categories of BrE-AmE bird-name relationships. The last instal(l)ment was called garden birds , though there are some birds there that might be found prevalently elsewhere (I stuck parakeets in with garden birds, just to be able to say something about parakeets in gardens) and there might be some here that are found in your (BrE) garden or (AmE) backyard . If you have already read the garden birds post, you might want to have another look at it as I have made late additions to it (marked as such) to cover "gardeny" birds that I'd missed in the first (AmE) go-round . And if I come across more that belong in the categories here, I'll add them. (Immediately after I first posted this, Jim Martin pointed out more. I've not marked these as 'late additions' because they've c...