Back in the late 1980s I worked as an executive recruiter. The firm where I worked was a very small one, specializing in a particular sector of manufacturing, and we were just a tiny bit pretentious in that we only took on managerial or executive candidates. Our group operated in
In July of 1974 I found myself in Castelfranco Veneto, a large town northeast of Venice. The “old” medieval part of the town was encircled with a moat and crenellated walls while the circular road around those walls was surrounded with renaissance (or later) buildings, most with archways (called “portici”
When describing a lexicographer, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) opined that a writer of dictionaries was “a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words”. Oh, Mr. Johnson, despite your erudition, you must not have savoured many of the exquisite joys of etymology. I love
In the mid-1990s my family and I were vacationing on the Island of Saint Kitts. The choice of Saint Kitts was largely mine. My 6th great-grandfather Robert Choppin (died 1688) arrived in Saint Kitts in 1629 as part of the fleet of Sir Thomas Warner (who was one of the
In the 5th hour of the 5th day of the 5th month of the 5th year of this new millennium my mother died. Perhaps she was making it easy for me to remember. Nonetheless, she would have liked the numerical symmetry of it. Her interior or innate wiring was a
Sometimes they call it “brain fog”, or that the word one forgets is “on the tip of the tongue”. Some envision their brain as a huge repository of files, storing all sorts of information and that, for the moment, they can’t find the file. I conjure something different. Like