Which? Marrow or marrow?
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Hèý! Ťhæþ wõřķš! Great, now I have to explore a whole new range of ways to annoy my coworkers!
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My question was about the ‘other’ definition of the term. There are Canada goose, so maybe there are Welsh rabbits…I don’t know.
Oh, and don’t forget, there’s beer in the cheese sauce!
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According to Alton Brown, the etymology of the term comes from an ethnic slur by the English. “The Welsh are so stupid, you can give them cheese and tell them its rabbit!” No clue how accurate that is, but there you have it.
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Ah, so the same origin as “American Cheese”.
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Another thing about Foote can be seen from how he uses epithets for people as though they are characters in an epic poem. Twenty-five years on, I still recall that he calls Sherman “red-haired.” He uses the epithet every.single.time Sherman is mentioned. Obviously if he’s using schtick from epic poetry in telling his history, it should ring warning bells about his historian bona fides.
My recollection is that in these books he’s a fiction writer telling a national epic in sparse language. He did research and took pains to get facts right, but the end result is lots of interesting characters playing their parts in a historical epic. I don’t recall any footnotes, though i thought he listed sources, maybe?
It may sound like I didn’t appreciate these books at all, but in some ways I did. The epithets rly help sort out who is who in a large, long story, and help the reader track the people like Sherman and Grant who he follows throughout. But is that kind of character-based historical enough for the given reader? is a fair question. In addition to questions raised about his received ideas on the causes of the war.
From the Red Dwarf episode “back to reality”
Sebastian Doyle:
Remind me a little: what do we do at the Ministry of Alteration?
Cop:
You… change people, Sir.
Sebastian Doyle:
In what way?
Cop:
You change them from being alive people, to being dead people. To purify Democracy.
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might as well spoil your fun 
I like the article, but there’s one nagging question.
How does it sound when (mostly White) activists in the West say “You Africans don’t believe what you think you do. What you really believe is more in line with what we think you should. If you disagree with us it’s because you’ve been fooled by Westerners”? That sounds more than a tad patronizing and colonial to me. Don’t get me wrong. I think Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law rises to the level of State Terrorism and a crime against humanity. Maybe there’s a better way of saying it. But you don’t win too many friends telling people in another country that you understand their values and culture better than they do.
Well, I’m not gay, and I’m not from Africa… But this is far from the first time I’ve heard of African Queer culture.
One example:
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You could apply the same question to basic human rights violations everywhere, though.
Culture varies widely through time and space, and the evaluation of human rights with it. The principle of universal human rights collides with that.
How we deal with this is politics and diplomacy. Sometimes successfully, sometimes embarrassingly.
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Heh. Touche.
Traditional dishes borne out of poverty - show me one place in the world where that isn’t the case.
You eat what is available. And if you’re hungry enough almost everything is sort of edible.
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That seems unlikely, as there was also a cheese-based dish called English rabbit (and one called Scotch rabbit, for that matter):
To make a Scotch rabbit, toast the bread very nicely on both sides, butter it, cut a slice of cheese about as big as the bread, toast it on both sides, and lay it on the bread.
To make a Welsh rabbit, toast the bread on both sides, then toast the cheese on one side, lay it on the toast, and with a hot iron brown the other side. You may rub it over with mustard.
To make an English rabbit, toast the bread brown on both sides, lay it in a plate before the fire, pour a glass of red wine over it, and let it soak the wine up. Then cut some cheese very thin and lay it very thick over the bread, put it in a tin oven before the fire, and it will be toasted and browned presently. Serve it away hot.
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'Should’ve let ‘em have the whiskers and the claws and you’d’ve been amazed at what they’d cook up. You know their big dish down on the coast?’
‘No.’
‘Pig’s ear soup. Now, what’s that tell you about a place, eh?’
Rincewind shrugged. ‘Very provident people?’
‘Some other bugger pinches the pig.’
— Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
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Right you are. The underlying problem is that the audience for such works – what a lefty might identify as the petit bourgeois and a right-winger as the liberal elite – is addicted to superficially progressive but fundamentally reactionary explanations. They want to be praised for their outward tolerance of the marginalized, while having their resentments and fears cosied. The result is unsound writing about history, science and public policy, centered on cliches (the tragedy of gay life) and assumptions (historians and activists are wrong because of ideological blinders).
All this sort of work does is slap its hand on the table, buckle you in, and explain the little-known facts that prove things were worse back then than anyone realizes — thereby showing what a great job we’ve already done fixing it.
Whether this was such a book will remain an academic question, as it will be rewitten.
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This incident has been a anxiety inducing nightmare for me. I’m looking at writing my first history book and the idea of making a glaring error was already weighing heavy on my mind.
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