Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: “I am about to – or I am going to – die; either expression is used.
We were looking for the “real” outback where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.
Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you.
True smiles are brief – between two-thirds of a second and four seconds. That’s why a held smile begins to look menacing. A true smile is the one expression that we cannot fake.
Today’s mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.
Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a wheelchair and out of an upstairs window.
We’re sending ye tae Wapping, ye soft English nancies, and if ye wairk very, very hard and if ye doonae git on ma tits, then mebbe I’ll not cut off yer knackers and put them in ma Christmas pudding. D’ye have any problems with tha’?
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial.
The most elusive element of all, however, appears to be francium, which is so rare that it is thought that our entire planet may contain, at any given moment, fewer than twenty francium atoms.
One of Milton’s poems contains the well-known line “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.
That is the great thing about being a foreigner – that you get to spend your life with a whole new set of cultural attachments in addition to the ones you inherited at birth.
1 per cent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.
But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog.
Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe.
The universe was vaster – vastly vaster – than anyone had ever supposed.
When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade.
With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them.
Bobcats – admittedly much smaller creatures than mountain lions – are known to exist in considerable numbers and yet are so shy and furtive that you would never guess their existence. Many.