Yawn

In Competition No. 2891 you were invited to think of the most boring lecture topic possible and submit an extract from that lecture.

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Stephen Daisley

Nine reasons why Trump means business this time

Christopher Gilbert gamely -submitted an extract from a real lecture he is due to deliver on the impenetrable-sounding topic of heteroscedasticity. But Brian -Murdoch, observing that it was all ‘a bit near the knuckle’, decided against putting his own genuine ‘Comments on the Prologues to the Old Frisian Laws’ into the ring. His fictitious offering not only made it into the winning line-up but also won him the bonus fiver. The rest take £25 each.

Scribal Division of Words at the End of Lines in Vernacular Prose Manuscripts of the 14th Century

… trisyllabic verbs and indeed perhaps also adjectives are, as one might expect, especially significant, given that the scribe had to assess quantitatively by syllable how many centimetres remained in which he could insert a more or less truncated dash, or, of course, some other indication of connection to the rest of the word at the start of the subsequent line, perhaps by a virgule over the final letter, as long as that was not itself an abbreviation, which could well be the case if the word contained a consonantal gemination at the end of the second syllable.