PERIODS IN ENGLISH HISTORY

The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period  during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603).  Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history.  The symbol of Britannia (a female personification of Great Britain) was first used in 1572, and often thereafter, to mark the Elizabethan age as a renaissance that inspired national pride through classical ideals, international expansion, and naval triumph over the Spanish.

The Georgian era is a period from 1714 to c. 1830–37, named eponymously after kings George I, George II, George III and George IV.  The sub-period that is the Regency era is defined by the regency of George IV as Prince of Wales during the illness of his father George III.  The definition of the Georgian era is often extended to include the relatively short reign of William IV, which ended with his death in 1837.

The Victorian era is the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901.  Its later half overlaps with the first part of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe. Defined according to sensibilities and political concerns, the period is sometimes considered to begin with the passage of the Reform Act 1832.  The period is characterised as one of relative peace among the great powers (as established by the Congress of Vienna), increased economic activity, "refined sensibilities" and national self-confidence for Great Britain.

The Edwardian era covers the brief reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910, and is sometimes extended in both directions to capture long-term trends from the 1890s to the First World War.  Samuel Hynes described the Edwardian era as a "leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag'"  Wikipedia

Hapology, also known as syllabic syncope, is a sound change involving the loss of a syllable when it's next to a phonetically identical (or similar) syllable.  Haplology is a type of dissimilation.  Perhaps the best-known example is the reduction of Anglaland in Old English to England in Modern English.  The reverse process is known as dittology--the accidental or conventionalized repetition of a syllable.  (Dittology also means, more broadly, the double reading or interpretation of any text.)  The counterpart of haplology in writing is haplography--the accidental omission of a letter that should be repeated (such as mispell for misspell).  The term haplology (from the Greek, "simple, single") was coined by American linguist Maurice Bloomfield.  Example:  English humbly was humblely in Chaucer's time, pronounced with three syllables, but has been reduced to two syllables (only one l) in modern standard English.  Richard Nordquist  https://www.thoughtco.com/haplology-phonetics-term-4083268

Permanent  conquest of Britain began in AD 43.  By about AD 100 the northernmost army units in Britain lay along the Tyne–Solway isthmus.  The forts here were linked by a road, now known as the Stanegate, between Corbridge and Carlisle.  Hadrian came to Britain in AD 122 and, according to a biography written 200 years later, ‘put many things to right and was the first to build a wall 80 miles long from sea to sea to separate the barbarians from the Romans’.  The building of Hadrian’s Wall probably began that year, and took at least six years to complete.  The original plan was for a wall of stone or turf, with a guarded gate every mile and two observation towers in between, and fronted by a wide, deep ditch.  Before work was completed, 14 forts were added, followed by an earthwork known as the Vallum to the south.  The inscription on the Ilam pan, a 2nd-century souvenir of Hadrian’s Wall found in 2003, suggests that it was called the vallum Aelii, Aelius being Hadrian’s family name.  Hadrian’s death in AD 138 brought a new emperor to power.  The emperor Antoninus Pius abandoned Hadrian’s Wall and moved the frontier up to the Forth–Clyde isthmus, where he built a new wall, ‘this time of turf’– the Antonine Wall.  This had a short life of about 20 years before being abandoned in favour of a return to Hadrian’s Wall.  In the late 2nd or early 3rd century, many mile castles had their north gates narrowed so that they could only be used by pedestrian traffic, while a major repair to the Wall itself took place.  The forts on Hadrian’s Wall had a long life of nearly 300 years.  Many modifications took place, to the barrack blocks, the headquarters buildings and the commanders’ houses in particular.  Some forts became overcrowded with buildings; others acquired open spaces.  So far as we can determine, all continued to the end of Roman Britain, that is into the early 5th century.  The latest coins found on Hadrian’s Wall were minted in AD 403–6.  David Breeze  Read more and see wonderful pictures at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadrians-wall/history/

Gray's Anatomy is an English-language textbook of human anatomy originally written by Henry Gray and illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter.  Earlier editions were called Anatomy:  Descriptive and Surgical and Gray's Anatomy:  Descriptive and Applied, but the book's name is commonly shortened to, and later editions are titled, Gray's Anatomy.  The book is widely regarded as an extremely influential work on the subject, and has continued to be revised and republished from its initial publication in 1858 to the present day.  References in popular culture:  Early in the 1970 Tamil film Malathi, medical students Gemini Ganesan and B. Saroja Devi try to obtain the 28th edition of Gray's Anatomy from an old book shop.  In the 1991 movie The Addams Family Granny (Judith Malina) binge reads Gray's Anatomy while Gomez (Raul Julia) is playing with his train sets.  The 1996 Steven Soderbergh film Gray's Anatomy, featuring monologuist Spalding Gray, also takes its name from the title of the book, as does Gray's Anatomy:  Selected Writings, a 2009 book by British political philosopher John N. Gray.  In the 1998 Star Trek: Voyager episode "Message in a Bottle", the new Emergency Medical Hologram designed by Ensign Kim begins reciting the contents of Gray's Anatomy when activated, beginning with a description of the cell.  The American medical drama Grey's Anatomy (2005 –) takes its name from the textbook.  The name of Jim Leonard Jr.'s 2006 play Anatomy of Gray, which centers on a doctor visiting a small town in Indiana in 1880, takes its title as a play on Gray's Anatomy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray%27s_Anatomy

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "pie"—defined as a baked dish topped with and sometimes also surrounded by pastry—may well derive from the Latin word pica, meaning magpie.  Magpies didn't actually acquire the prefix mag- until the 17th century.  Before that they were called simply "pies" or "pyes," the original Latin having been shortened and smoothed as it made its way through older versions of French and English.  These chattering pies first show up in English manuscripts in the 13th century, along with their close relatives crows, rooks and ravens.  But it's not long before the word pie starts to turn up with its edible meaning.  The dictionary references a Rogero Pyman selling pies in 1301.  And the cook who joined Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims headed for Canterbury, "koude rooste, and sethe, and broille, and frye,/ Maken mortreux, and wel bake a pye" in the Canterbury Tales.  One possibility is that this linguistic sleight of hand occurred because of the association between a magpie's characteristic black and white plumage, and the appearance of medieval pies.  The word pie quickly became an adjective describing things that had patches of black and white, like a friar's habit.  Later it came to denote birds, animals and people whose feathers or coats displayed contrasting patches of light and dark:  Think piebald horses, pied wagtails, and the Pied Piper of Hamlin.  The OED points out that early haggis recipes also call for an astonishing range of anatomical bits and pieces to be minced together with suet, oats and vegetables.  And the word haggis or haggesse turns out to be an alternative name for magpie.  The idea that the link between the two kinds of pies was the jumble of ingredients also seems to be borne out by the fact that by 1650 there are references to a "printer's pie" which describes what the OED calls, "A mass of type in confusion or mingled indiscriminately, such as results from the accidental breaking up of a form of type."  Alison Richards  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/17/142460593/for-the-origins-of-pie-look-to-the-humble-magpie

Tenterhooks aren't connected with tents, nor are they the hooks used by butchers, as the common misspelling 'tenderhooks' might suggest.  A tenter is a wooden frame, often in the form of a line of fencing, used to hang woollen or linen cloth to prevent it from shrinking as it dries.  The tenterhooks are, not surprisingly, the hooks on the tenter used to hold the cloth in place.  Tenters are no longer everyday objects but a hundred years ago, in wool weaving areas like the North of England, they were a common sight on the land around the many woollen mills, called 'tenter-fields'.  It is easy to see how the figurative expression 'on tenterhooks', with its meaning of painful tension, derived from the 'tenting' or stretching of fabric.  The expression was originally 'on the tenters'.  The English West Country playwright John Ford was the first to record that expression in the play Broken Heart, 1633:  Passion, O, be contained. My very heart strings Are on the Tenters.  Towards the end of the century the more accurate 'on the tenterhooks' began to replace the earlier phrase.  This first example that I have found of it in print is in the 1690 edition of a periodical that was published annually between 1688 and 1693, The General History of Europe:  The mischief is, they will not meet again these two years, so that all business must hang upon the tenterhooks till then.  Copyright © Gary Martin, 2018  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/on-tenterhooks.html

Marinated Radishes  Pour 1 tsp. salt and 1 tbsp. sugar into 1-quart glass jar.  Add 24 crisp radishes, cut about 1/16 of an inch apart and 2/3 of the way down.  Shake jar vigorously and marinate at room temperature at least 6 hours.  Pour off accumulated liquid before serving. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1873  April 11, 2018