Tom Roper's Weblog

…an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge…” R.B. Sheridan The Rivals, 1775

Category: It really is appalling

  • Countless reasons why lists are bad

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    Tom Roper
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    Library people, what do you want from a library organisation / body twitter account? Generally speaking? Would really like your views. — Ned Potter (@ned_potter) February 4, 2015 It started as on Twitter. @nedpotter asked a question. What, did we think, a library organisation Twitter account should be like? I weighed in, to say,as did…

  • Literally robust

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    Tom Roper
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    I enjoyed reading John Sutherland's article in G2 today as I ate my lunchtime sandwich, How language is literally losing its meaning, occasioned by the admission to the Oxford English Dictionary of the abuse of the word literally to add vague emphasis to a statement.  He also inveighs against the misuse of robust.  A few minutes later,…

  • The Elysian Fields

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    Tom Roper
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    As I drove from one training session to another through the coastal suburbs of West Sussex, I was startled to come upon some new houses being built, called the Elysian Fields. I wish I had taken a photograph, for no one will believe me. The houses themselves were in that nondescript modern idiom so widespread,…

  • Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance

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    Tom Roper
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    In this morning’s Financial Times, they interview the new lord mayor of London, David Wooton. The interview is a clear piece of propaganda for the Corporation of London, but, for all that they probably paid a PR a great deal of money to come up with convincing and plausible statements, I think they should ask…

  • Craig Raine and the Dewey Decimal classification

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    Tom Roper
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    I am reading Craig Raine's Heartbreak at the moment, and enjoying it very much. It is very much a poet's novel, but none the worse for that. However, I paused, shocked, when I reached page 30 of the hardback edition, in the second story of the novel, that of Gallagher, a poet and Frazer, a…

  • Ian McMillan banned from speaking in a Sheffield library

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    Tom Roper
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    It's not just Mubarak's police state that tries to silence writers.  Ian McMillan,  presenter of the Verb on Radio 3, has been banned from running a creative writing workshop at Upperthorpe library in Sheffield, the SINTO blog reports. There's no justification given on Sheffield council's website.  It is curious that this should happen in Sheffield…

  • In agriculture, learn from Dazhai

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    Tom Roper
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    When I was a young thing in revolutionary China there were two slogans, in agriculture, learn from Dazhai and in industry, learn from Daqing. The capitalist version of this, with which librarians have been bombarded throughout the thirty-two years I’ve practiced the art, is that we should learn from the great wisdom and successes of…

  • Plants can’t read

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    Tom Roper
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    'The propagation of this plant without a licence is forbidden'; so reads the label on a rose I bought today for a relative's 90th birthday tomorrow. I don't believe she reads this blog so I think I am safe in disclosing this. Could there be a better example of the crazy lengths to which capitalism…

  • The Kübler-Ross model: the five stages of grief

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    Tom Roper
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    Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you my interpretation of the five stages of grief, from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance

  • Les apéros géants

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    Tom Roper
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    I buy Le Monde on Fridays, ostensibly for the book reviews, but something else often catches my eye. Today it was a story entitled Facebook saoule la préfectorale, about the trend for French young people to organise street parties on Facebook at which they get drunk in a manner Le Monde haughtily describes as plutôt…

  • Absolutely

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    Tom Roper
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    Ian McMillan held forth, quite rightly, on the abuse of the word absolutely in Saturday’s Guardian. I’m as guilty as any of the use of this as a modish substitute for the simple word ‘yes’. However I think he is wrong to claim this as a recent phenomenon. When I was at university in the…

  • Travel in the 21st century

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    Tom Roper
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    I read Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, Don’t blame the system for winter travel chaos. Stay put, as I sat on a train hoping to get to work, and itemising the claims I need to make to Southern for disrupted journeys. I have stopped bothering to tweet the daily annoyances of my commute from Seaford…

  • My night of metal hell

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    Tom Roper
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    The ancients believed that the mother pelican fed her young by piercing her breast with her bill, and feeding them on her blood. This archetype of parental self-sacrifice is often cited chez Roper, but never with greater justification than last night when I took daughter, daughter’s friend, and daughter’s friend’s boyfriend to Brixton to see…

  • My iPhone 3.1 hell

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    Tom Roper
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    I upgraded my iPhone to the latest version of the software on Friday, since when: it freezes and crashes constantly apps open and then close again immediate the battery life has deteriorated, for example I charged it fully overnight, and used it lightly today, lightly as I couldn’t get it to play any music on…

  • On the road to Rio again

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    Tom Roper
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    Readers who have stayed with me since March may recall the invitation I received to address an International Psycholinguistics Meeting in Brazil on the dichotomy between representational and derivational models. The organisers had mistaken me, a humble British librarian, for the distinguished professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Roeper. I wrote to…

  • Bank holidays

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    Tom Roper
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    Bank holiday have always been so so dull, from my childhood, when they were like another Sunday, only worse, to now. They don’t offer a long enough respite from work to allow one to relax. There is nothing to do, expect try to rinse away the stale taste of the day with tea, or with…

  • Road to Rio

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    Tom Roper
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    I have been invited to give a series of papers on psycholinguistics at a conference in Rio de Janeiro. A splendid opportunity, but it was not meant for me. Someone at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro wrote to me, saying that 'we follow your work here with interest, specially the Theory of Mind…

  • Light blogging

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    Tom Roper
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    The small matter of moving house, and a wait of eighteen working days for broadband to be transferred to the new house mean that my updates have been sporadic. I rely on wifi in cafés in London, the over-subscribed and under-powered computers in Seaford library and the iPhone; Seaford is without public wifi, just as,…

  • The mark of Cain

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    Tom Roper
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    A passing reference in Robert Scoble’s blog to the CEO of an American company who, to show his faith in his company in the face of the slump, had the company badge tattooed on his leg, set me worrying. What if this were to take off over here? In Britain such behaviour would meet more…

  • And another thing…

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    Tom Roper
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    …in the wasteland of further education, not only are we not recruiting enough students, not only, thanks to the latest government computer-based fiasco even more are put off because the Learning and Skills Council has made a hash of the EMAs (Education Maintenance Allowance: the financial incentive to lure 16-18 year-olds into colleges), the new…

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