Friday, May 14, 2010
FIL's tooth
Some weeks ago, a large flake fell of the front of one of FIL's upper incisors. Rather in the way that large flakes of stone fall off the dressed stone blocks used to face houses in Edinburgh New Town. Some kind of sandstone, laid with the grain vertical? Anyway, he finally got around to the dentist yesterday and about 20 minutes later the tooth was as good as new, plus a filling repaired somewhere else. Cost £45. It seems that these days they can use some sort of oral polyfilla to mend damaged teeth. No need to drill a socking great hole into which to plug a great plug of amalgam. You can just paste this stuff onto the damaged area, wait a short while for it to harden, then buff it up, rather as if you were polishing a car. I wouldn't have known it was a patch. Clever stuff.
Moving off FIL's tooth and passing quickly over Jenkins' Ear (something one used to do in GSCE History), we land on an interesting piece in last week's TLS about universities, penned by a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College. Whatever one of those is. I bring various things away. That universities started out as places for training priests and court officials, most of whom were priests anyway at that time. Good tie in here with the Barlow book (see above) which has a lot to say about the role of the 12th century church in building the civil institutions we have today. The allegation that most third world countries do not give a toss about the humanities. They chuck their dosh at useful people like mathematicians, engineers, accountants and opticians. No room at the inn for Anglo-Saxon studies or hut circles. Maybe the Indian Army in the time of the Raj generated more Sanskrit scholars from the ranks of bored soldiers than the liberated universities of India do today? Which results in the surprising claim that one third of the world's learned humanities articles come from the UK. This despite the fact that UK further education has become obsessed with original research. The purpose of education is no longer to educate but to extract new facts out of old. Education workers are no longer prized for their ability to transmit their knowledge and enthusiasm to their pupils. So what place would the chap who did the Wake research of the last post have in our brave new world? Do we want to have place for such chaps?
My own position is that the world would be a poorer place if we did not have people who wanted to do such stuff, but they ought to do it under their own steam or in their spare time. Not sure that I want to throw government money at paying people to do it. Nor am I sure that we can afford to give everyone a posh education who wants one. Or whose parents want one for their offspring.
I close from a further titbit from Barlow. The derivation of the word 'fine', as in parking fine, is 'finis' or end. A fine was a way of closing something, achieving closure in psycho. speak. Someone had done something wrong but one did not want to execute the chap and imprisonment was expensive. So one closed the something with a fine.
# posted by Jim @ 12:20 AM 
