I'm with Barry - that sounds pretty cool to me. Particularly the car - in an ideal world only an E Type Jaguar could have been cooler or - my first choice would have been a Shelby Cobra. The classic muscle car. I've read the 'Great Gatsby,' but many years ago. I remember the prose was as shiny and polished as one of the cuff links of the titular character. I think I read it during the counter-culture binge I had at the time - as previously mentioned - so I really didn't give a toss about the world described and the anxieties associated with it. Was the book referential to William Randolph Hearst - or was that just Citizen Kane? Rosebud.
I'm very impressed William with your son's academic choices. Easy for me to say - I wasn't his father with an anxious eye towards his financial future. I only went onto tertiary education at the age of 40 and had definitely decided that I would study for the love of it only - subjects that I was genuinely interested in - not for any assumed career advancement. Which is just as well - knowing about late antique and medieval history, early Christian and Islamic theology hasn't served any practical purpose in my life since. All the better for it though. People should be able to learn just for the sake of it? It doesn't have to be directly vocational? I fancied linguistics for a while as a direction to pursue - but I soon realised that the discipline quickly descends - ironically - into something that resembles mathematics. Which my brain can't cope with. The history of Indo-European languages and their diffusion - with associated technologies - is something I have read a lot about. Almost half of the world speaks a dialect derived from the root language that split east and west from - best guess - the Caspian steppe around 4000 bce. The old models suggested spread by conquest - but that is largely discredited these days - it seems more likely that it was a process of assimilation as the language brought - at the time - revolutionary technologies with it. Domesticated horses and the wheel - farming perhaps or perhaps not - domesticated live stock probably - well not a wheel singular - it is generally understood that the wheel had been already in use by potters - but two wheels - with an axle in between - that was truly revolutionary. It's like inventing the telephone - one phone rubbish - two phones - that changed the world for ever. Europe these days is almost completely dominated by derived Indo-European languages - the singular example in opposition is where you are. Basque. It's a language isolate - it is not connected to any other language spoken today. Not for the want of trying, nobody can work out its origin. My best guess would be that it is the only surviving pre Neolithic language in Europe - so maybe Mesolithic or upper Paleolithic - I'd support this with the ideas that the words for axe, knife and hoe are derived from the root that means stone in Basque. Also the Basques then - and now are famously ill disposed to outsiders - even the Romans gave them a wide berth. So fact fans - would anybody like to guess what the only commonly used loan word in English comes from Basque? Yours - I.
@Barry Giddens
