Thursday 21 February 1660/61

Annotations

• - Josh on Sat 21 Feb 2004, 11:44pm. Flag this

  “Mr. Moore, who staid with me till late at night talking and reading some good books.”

  No, Sam, no, don’t torture us this way, at least mention one topic and one title!

• - vincent on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 02:09am. Flag this

  My guess? its some of those Risque novelettes ala Francaise; ‘tis why he fails to mention [not yet ready to embarrass his future readers].
  

• - vincent on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 02:25am. Flag this

  “…build scaffolds against the Coronacion …” 2 months to organise
  The Coronation of Charles II, April 23rd 1661.
  

• - vincent on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 02:53am

  Brief and to the point.”…here met with Mr. Hawley, and with him to Will’s and drank,…”

• - vincent on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 05:15am. Flag this

  Samuel Pepys last night misses all important meeting of the science clique.
  “..February 20 To Lond: about buisinesse: & to our Meeting, trying severall Exp: about refining Metalls….”
  He should have gone, might have solved the minting problem.
  Evelyn and SP have not met up yet?
  

• - J A Gioia on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 01:00pm. Flag this

  out of doors

  here’s a locution that, up until reading the diary, i thought was particular to us new yorkers. the rest of america rightfully says ‘outdoors’ to signify our vast and magnificent landscape. that single article ‘of’ indicates, to me, so very many doors and, perhaps, a slight cultural unease at venturing too far under the sky.

• - mary on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 01:12pm. Flag this

  Out of doors

  Here, I think, the expression means simply ‘gone out’ and doesn’t imply that he’s set off on a hiking trip!

• - daniel on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 04:13pm. Flag this

  out of doors

  I agree with Mary. he also uses “abroad” in this sense which many of us on the eastern seaboard in the US would not.

• - Jenny Doughty on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 04:49pm. Flag this

  ‘Indoors’ is often used in England (especially in the London area) to mean ‘at home’, qv ‘her indoors’ for ‘the wife’.

• - Lawrence on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 07:30pm. Flag this

  Indoors/out of doors is certainly used here in Oxford with the same meaning as Pepys’ is using it here, I just assumed that my Lord was out, some where quite local, lady spotting I shouldn’t wonder?

• - Laura K on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 09:39pm. Flag this

  Native New Yorker here

  and I’ve never used nor heard the expression “out of doors” used in the sense J A Gioia refers to above. As far as I know, NYers say “indoors” or “inside” and “outdoors” or “outside” like the rest of Americans.

• - vincent on Sun 22 Feb 2004, 10:22pm. Flag this

  “Out of doors” “gone abroad” are the same, equals out of sight, on the street sumwhere or is it in the street , in/on, the Romans could not figure it out and the Latinists followed the habit. “build scaffolds against the Coronacion”; “against”, one would now use ‘for’ saves a syllable, is that not so.
  Modern ‘bring’ ‘take’ which one gets the “to” or the “from”? ‘tis devolution or evolution or simple being laxadaisical.
  

• - dirk on Mon 23 Feb 2004, 02:59am. Flag this

  “for” & “against”

  If 17th c. English use of prepositions was in anyway similar to present day Dutch, there would be a subtle but not unimportant difference between building scaffolding “for” the coronation and “against” the coronation.

  “For” would simply indicate the purpose, whereas “against” would emphasize the time still available to do the job.
  

• - Hic retearius on Mon 23 Feb 2004, 07:58am

  Since we are on prepositions and we’re in the wee hours here-

  “of” is a preposition rather than an article (English is blessed with two, a definite and an indefinte, a detail calculated as a major challenge to speakers of sensible, tidy, inflected languges like the Slavs but merely to be a toe stubber to speakers of French and German!) (Mind you, the Czechs exact a horrid revenge upon English speakers by spelling words without vowels and even a contrived sentence without vowels.)
  Whot say, Vincent: in English “of” governs the accusative, the dative or the locative?

• - vincent on Mon 23 Feb 2004, 08:59pm. Flag this

  “of” :Try generative if all else fails try the Apostrophe “’” s.

• - Nigel Pond on Wed 17 Mar 2004, 07:45pm. Flag this

  “of” = genitive (cf Latin).

• - language hat on Sat 20 Mar 2004, 09:27pm. Flag this

  None of the above.
  English does not have cases, so it has neither accusative, dative or locative. (The idea that “of the boy” was a genitive construction was invented by people who desperatedly wanted English grammar to be just like Latin.)

• - alex on Sun 21 Mar 2004, 12:00am. Flag this

  English does have cases. It had a full case sytem (which was almost the same as the Latin case system), and it retains the genitive in the form of the possessive, and the old accusative case persists in English pronouns (him, them, whom, etc.)

• - language hat on Sun 21 Mar 2004, 04:30am. Flag this

  cases:
  This is getting pretty far afield, but it is not useful to use the category “case” for a few remnants like the English pronouns. Old English, like Latin, had cases as a basic feature; like Latin, it lost them over the centuries (during which Latin split into several divergent parts now called French, Spanish, Italian, &c). “His” is a possessive pronoun, not a genitive.