Faded Page

The following may be of interest (with apologies to those already in the know). 

In putting together the next “New Month Old Post” post for Thursday, I came across a resource called Fadedpage ( https://www.fadedpage.com/ ) which contains a growing number (currently 5659) of free, high-quality, public domain (in Canada) ebooks in PDF, Epub, Mobi (Kindle) and other formats. 

For example (from a fairly random look through), it has Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, novels by C. S. Lewis, Nevil Shute and Evelyn Waugh, Winston Churchill’s Second World War series, books by Albert Camus in French, lots by George Orwell such as Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier, the Biggles stories of W. E. Johns’s and seemingly everything by Enid Blyton (or if you prefer the American equivalent, books from the Stratemeyer series including a couple of Laura Lee Hope’s Bobbsey Twins stories which I enjoyed at Junior School). Too many to mention, really.

Many, of course, are also available from the Kindle store, but often at a cost, and I tend to find that the digitisation of free Kindle books is of variable quality. 

It is fairly straightforward to add books in Mobi format to a Kindle device, but if anyone is unsure I could append a few screen shots showing how to do it.  

 

Now, I wonder how Biggles broke the silence.

Ties Teens and Sells

Emptying the household waste baskets, I interrupted my son’s video call. He continues to work at home most days. He had put on a smart shirt and tie, and was talking to some important-looking blokes in suits. 

“Sorry,” I apologised when I went back later.

“We were in conference with coun-sel,” he explained. That’s how he said it: “coun-sel,” with too much emphasis on the ‘e’ of the second syllable.

He could see I was looking to mock him. “Just emptying the bas-kets,” I was about to say.

“I know it sounds pretentious,” he said. “I thought I would never say it like that, but we have to avoid confusing coun-sel with coun-cil. It wouldn’t do to be asked to phone the council and to phone the counsel instead, not at the rates they charge.”

“It’s like when I started work,” I said, dredging up a memory from the distant past as usual.  

I told him about two people checking over a set of accounts to make sure they had been typed correctly. The one reading out loud from the handwritten draft kept saying things like “thir-tie” and “for-tie” instead of thirty and forty. I thought it sounded silly until it was pointed out that if the typist had typed thirteen in place of thirty, or the other way round, it might be misheard and wrongly passed as correct. Soon, I was pronouncing all my -ties and -teens too. Some you didn’t really need to change, such as twenty because it would never be confused with twelve, but we changed it anyway: “Twen-tie pounds, fif-teen shillings and eleven pence.”

“That would be so easy to carry through into everyday life,” he said. “You don’t usually talk about barristers outside work, but we’re always talking numbers. You could end up saying it without thinking. We deal with about thir-tie or for-tie coun-sel and thirt-tie or for-tie coun-cils.”

“It’s so powerful,” I said, “that even when you tell someone about it, they start doing it themselves, even after fifty years.”

“Fif-tie,” he corrected me.