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General Discussion / Re: Short and sweet - ideas for "icebreakers"
« Last post by Bowerthane on January 19, 2021, 10:06:18 AM »’Ere, how’s this for downright eerie? I happen to be reading W. J. R. Gardner’s Decoding History: The Battle of the Atlantic and Ultra too and, it says here, “it is now fairly common to refer to the output itself by the name of Ultra... However, it is important to note that there were other terms in use such as ‘Z’, ‘Special Intelligence (SI)’ and ‘Boniface’.”
Why does this remind me of an old Dave Allen sketch where God tosses a coin to settle which combattant’s prayers to answer? Has St Boniface had that problem?
( Or did somebody in the Bletchley Park/ MI6/ IGS loop... know? As if St Boniface were the longest-run mole or Deepest Throat of all time. To whom the Germans transmitted their prayers innocently thinking it was all in Godes privitie, never suspecting that he was passing the sigint ‘product’ on to the Old Country..?)
( Any more Anglo-Saxon connections to Bletchley Park, we may wonder? The etymology seems to be “Blecca’s LĒAH” if the earliest surviving recorded form, Blechelai in AD 1106-9 is anything to go by, and it’s bang on Watling Street and therefore the Treaty Line King Alfred negotiated with King Guthrum at Wedmore. There’s certainly an Old English church of some heft surviving at Wing, about ten miles south of it: All Saints with an “Aisled nave; and apsidal chancel, with crypt beneath”. Oh, and, as a teenage jobseeker in the 1980s, a certain budding Anglo-Saxonist slept rough under a hedge near a roundabout outside Milton Keynes about five miles to the north. So I may have passed through Bletchley, a former Wrennery or two and even Shenley where Alan Turing was billeted in the pub thumbing my way into Oxford, before or after a Chemistry undergraduate picked me up in his slick, red sports car, who liberated me from one of life’s great mysteries by explaining how valency worked on the way in.)
Why does this remind me of an old Dave Allen sketch where God tosses a coin to settle which combattant’s prayers to answer? Has St Boniface had that problem?
( Or did somebody in the Bletchley Park/ MI6/ IGS loop... know? As if St Boniface were the longest-run mole or Deepest Throat of all time. To whom the Germans transmitted their prayers innocently thinking it was all in Godes privitie, never suspecting that he was passing the sigint ‘product’ on to the Old Country..?)
( Any more Anglo-Saxon connections to Bletchley Park, we may wonder? The etymology seems to be “Blecca’s LĒAH” if the earliest surviving recorded form, Blechelai in AD 1106-9 is anything to go by, and it’s bang on Watling Street and therefore the Treaty Line King Alfred negotiated with King Guthrum at Wedmore. There’s certainly an Old English church of some heft surviving at Wing, about ten miles south of it: All Saints with an “Aisled nave; and apsidal chancel, with crypt beneath”. Oh, and, as a teenage jobseeker in the 1980s, a certain budding Anglo-Saxonist slept rough under a hedge near a roundabout outside Milton Keynes about five miles to the north. So I may have passed through Bletchley, a former Wrennery or two and even Shenley where Alan Turing was billeted in the pub thumbing my way into Oxford, before or after a Chemistry undergraduate picked me up in his slick, red sports car, who liberated me from one of life’s great mysteries by explaining how valency worked on the way in.)
irony? I’m also reading Hannah Crawforth’s Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature ( 2013 CUP, ISBN 978-1-107-04176-9) and guess what she went and said the other night: