It's official: Anglesey is in Staffordshire

[HughC]

>> to confuse the enumerators <<

The spirit lives on.  Go into a village shop or post office in Wales, and the conversation will immediately switch to Welsh to exclude the stranger.  I longed to be able to tell them I'm not a mochyn saesneg: I'm celtic swine like you.  But I never got beyond lesson one.

Of course we're all foreigners really -- almost everywhere in the world.

[Jean McGurn]

Then there are all those who died in France and Flanders having Theatre of War = Aldershot 

>> to confuse the enumerators <<

The spirit lives on.  Go into a village shop or post office in Wales, and the conversation will immediately switch to Welsh to exclude the stranger.  I longed to be able to tell them I'm not a mochyn saesneg: I'm celtic swine like you.  But I never got beyond lesson one.

Of course we're all foreigners really -- almost everywhere in the world.

Reminds me of a couple of friends in the mid 1960's going into a shop in mid Wales at the height of the troubles that  many Welsh were having with English people buying up cottages for holiday homes.

 The two women inside never stopped talking - Welsh of course - the girls bought what they wanted and as they got to the door to leave one of the girls turned back and told these two Welsh women-  in fluent Welsh - that they should be careful what they say about their customers as they could lose custom that way.

What the two women didn't know was that my friend had Welsh grand=parents and had grown up speaking the language even though she  lived all her life in England and had an English accent.

Jean

[weste]

I can remember that happening in north wales inthe 1970's. No disrespect intended but i suspect most people are use to that happening all round the country now.

[HughC]

Jean,

I can almost cap that story.  Years ago I worked with a chap whose family had moved from North Africa to France and later to England.  He looked European: possibly his ancestors were not in fact Arabs, but anyway his elder brother still remembered Arabic from his childhood.

The said brother was once travelling with his wife in one of those old Southern Region trains with no corridor: each compartment had its own door on each side of the carriage.  Sitting opposite them were two Arabs in full regalia who started making unsavoury remarks about his wife.  "Nice bit of stuff: I could do her some damage if I had a chance" -- that sort of thing.

To his credit he said nothing.  His wife didn't understand the lingo, anyway.  When they reached their station and stepped onto the platform he turned round in the doorway and, in perfect Arabic, wished them a pleasant onward journey.  Their faces fell when they realized he must have understood every word they were saying.  Much more effective revenge than making a scene!

Just shows: never assume you're safe speaking a language you think those around you won't understand (unless perhaps it's Navajo and you're in Japan).

[CarolA3]

We could be charitable and put it down to lack of geographical knowledge (Mesopotamia in Rutland is another example) ............

I don't know about Rutland, but there's Mesopotamia and Jericho in the city of Oxford - that's the Oxford in Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  Not to be confused with any other Oxford.

Sometimes these unlikely place names turn out to be kindasorta rightish, so I've got into the habit of checking via Google etc before assuming they're all bonkers.  Although it often turns out that they are.

[HughC]

Thanks, Carol, for bringing back distant memories of punting on the Cherwell and rowing on the Isis.  Oh, my misspent youth!  Does the aroma of roasting coffee at Carwardine's still waft up Cornmarket to the Broad?  That cured me of Nescafé for life.

Anyway, this particular twixt-the-rivers was, specifically, Ctesiphon, where he was killed in action in 1915.  The editors of Burke's Landed Gentry evidently didn't believe there was such a place and "corrected" it to Cresiphon.  Perhaps that should be a lesson to us, as you say, not to assume everything that looks wrong is necessarily bonkers -- though in the case of Ancestry it usually is.

And I promise never to confuse my alma mater or its home city with any other place, be it in Akron, Ohio, or anywhere else in the world.

[weste]

wee hugh, i agree with you that's the best revenge. I was with a load of nurse specialist and they were doing a masters course and lowly staff nurse that i was had paid to do the module. They rubbed it in a few times how hard fourth level was and i 'd heard little bits of conversation on what they were on about. I had done an ou degree. I turned round and asked what they were calling hard and they rattled on about a topic.  I said oh you meann....I got asked how i knew and turned round and told them it was second level ou!

[Sloe Gin]

 Does the aroma of roasting coffee at Carwardine's still waft up Cornmarket to the Broad? 

Sadly, no.  But don't you mean the Cadena?

[CarolA3]

Does the aroma of roasting coffee at Carwardine's still waft up Cornmarket to the Broad?

Sadly, no.  But don't you mean the Cadena?

Sloe Gin - that's exactly what I was about to say

And wee Hugh - if Burke's can get it wrong, what hope is there for us common folk
Btw I'm 'town' rather than 'gown', so my youth was misspent in the pursuit of less esoteric pleasures.  Woolie's caff and the Fantasia were more my style.  All gone now.  Happy days.

Carol