Goodbye Beasthouse

I only just added Lawrence Miles' "The Beasthouse" to my list of links (I'd thought I'd done it ages ago but just noticed last week that I really had not), so naturally he decided to put a note up saying he was going to take the site down.

The last couple of posts have been humongous affairs, alternately bitingly funny and majestically thought-provoking. I'm going to miss the thing while it's gone (I suspect that it or something like it will pop up sooner or later). Here's a sample to entice you into having a quick (or not so quick) look:

I'm told that Sir Richard Francis Burton, nineteenth-century explorer and sexual experimentalist of repute, spoke twenty-nine languages. How good at a language do you have to be before you're said to "speak" it, I wonder? For example, I wouldn't truthfully say that much of the population of Feltham actually speaks English, even though they're capable of understanding some of it. The ability to shout "Happy Meal" can't really be called a vocabulary, as such. Burton may well have been familiar with twenty-nine languages, but did he speak some of them "just a bit" rather than with any degree of elan? Is your ability to speak a language measured by the context, or by some all-purpose yardstick? Because under the right conditions, I too could be said to have a working knowledge of any number of dialects. I know two really good words in Russian, "svetafor" (traffic light) and "precrassny" (pretty). Should I ever be queried about an attractive traffic light, or should a Russian girl ever ask me how she looks in her fetching new red hat, yellow jumper and green skirt ensemble, I might accurately be described as being able to speak Russian. Just not in any other circumstances.