Sunday, May 16, 2010
Ovine puzzles
Continuing to muse about pecorino, said by the article in Mr W. to be made of sheep milk. But the English for sheep is sheep, the French is mouton (or mutton by the time it got here) and the Latin is ovis. Those familiar with European Community statistical systems may know of something called the Enquete Ovine - which I believe to be the sheepy equivalent of the decennial census practised on persons. So no pecorinos to be found in the immediate vicinity. However, turn to the P section of Lewis and find that pecus is Latin for domestic animals in general, with beasts being a near equivalent in rural English, and that a pecus balans is a bleating beast or a sheep, with bleating being the balans bit. Sometimes abbreviated to balans and said to be poetical rather than rural. But this may be a red herring. Perhaps pecorino is the Italian diminutive or pecus giving us small beast, so sheep, rather than big beast which is cow.
Wouldn't be nearly so much fun if I had an Italian dictionary and got the answer direct.
What is not so much fun is a further defeat by the Shearings web site. First of all we select an 8 day bus holiday in Wales. All well and good. Click on give me more details and we get taken to a 5 day version of the 8 day holiday. Start again and this time click on book holiday rather than tell me about holiday and this time it sticks with us. Maybe it likes one to buy sight unseen? Press through to stage 5 of 8 of the booking process. Name and address, special needs, seat on coach and so on and so forth. But then it asks for an email address. Type it in and the thing announces that this email address won't do as it is already in use. Hmm. Go back to the beginning and try again. We have to change seats as the thing has not yet released the seat from the failed booking. But never mind, press on. Fail for the second time for bad email address. Give up at this point. I only have one email address. What would happen if we had a bed-sit house with one computer and email address full of people who like coach holidays? Are Shearings going to deny themselves this important slice of business? Do they only allow any one email address to appear it at most one booking at a time? On the grounds that no-one in their right minds would want more than one? We await a call from the Shearings' call centre with interest.
# posted by Jim @ 4:01 AM 
