Let's truncate like we did last summer !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

1 August

Did I bemoan boxset before ? Probably.

It now has a pair in crop top, not, as in crop circle, anything to do with what happened to Farmer Jack's wheat (or rye), but a mutational shortening of cropped top.

I have a theory, and it goes back to the debate that raged at the time of Swift whether raged should appear rag'd so that it was clear that it did not end with a separate syllable, -ed, as in blessed. Others argued not to have rag'd marked out as an exception, with all the others of its kind, but for 'blessed', as more unusual, to be rendered as we know it, blessed.

This, I believe, is what is going on here : in a marginally literate world, where so much is aural, boxed set has 'slipped' to the linguistically nonsensical boxset, and equally cropped top to crop top.

Laziness, ignorance, fashion - I don't really care which it is, but I despise it !


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