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I've occasionally remembered to follow Ben Jonson's walk from London to Edinburgh, as blogged and tweeted by James Loxley. Yesterday they mention being frecked by rain. Loxley explained:
"‘freck’ here being either a shortened form of ‘freckle’ or a variant of ‘freak’, meaning dappled or flecked. It’s a great but rare word – used, so the OED tells me, by George Sandys in his translation of Ovid and then, much later, by John Clare. It catches the experience of being touched by raindrops falling thinly enough to be felt individually, rather than merging – as they often go on to do – into a more general, more thoroughly wettening, rain. These are the gradations that you become aware of, and that matter, when you spend a lot of time outdoors."
My first thought, before I read the explanation, was that the rain was heavy and unpleasant, and that they were frakked in the BSG sense, or even worse, harmed as though hydraulic fracturing had occurred. Much nicer, as it turned out.
There are applications for smart phone cameras that make a person (or dinosaur, or whatever) appear in photographs that one takes. This one puts a guy dressed up as Shakespeare in the photo. At least I think that's how it works. I don't own such a phone, so I can't experiment with it, unless I can convince Arthur to do so. The app is free until almost the end of August.
http://bloggingshakespeare.com/snap-shakespeare-a-global-challenge
"‘freck’ here being either a shortened form of ‘freckle’ or a variant of ‘freak’, meaning dappled or flecked. It’s a great but rare word – used, so the OED tells me, by George Sandys in his translation of Ovid and then, much later, by John Clare. It catches the experience of being touched by raindrops falling thinly enough to be felt individually, rather than merging – as they often go on to do – into a more general, more thoroughly wettening, rain. These are the gradations that you become aware of, and that matter, when you spend a lot of time outdoors."
My first thought, before I read the explanation, was that the rain was heavy and unpleasant, and that they were frakked in the BSG sense, or even worse, harmed as though hydraulic fracturing had occurred. Much nicer, as it turned out.
There are applications for smart phone cameras that make a person (or dinosaur, or whatever) appear in photographs that one takes. This one puts a guy dressed up as Shakespeare in the photo. At least I think that's how it works. I don't own such a phone, so I can't experiment with it, unless I can convince Arthur to do so. The app is free until almost the end of August.
http://bloggingshakespeare.com/snap-shakespeare-a-global-challenge
