Spinney is a nice word for a smallish gathering of trees, alongside copse, coppice, etc. I’m not aware of a term for one specifically in an open field, though.

Apart from the hole, that could be chicken on a raft, an old Royal Navy dish.

I haven’t tried it myself yet, but you can get yeast improvers , a powdered ‘mother yeast’ that claims similar results to sourdough.

I have a starter in the fridge that I only use once every two or three weeks, and have not had any mould problems; perhaps you just have to be only a little less lazy to keep a viable one, and feed on that sort of a schedule?

I agree though, that making sourdough bread can be a nuisance time-management-wise until you find some sort of rhythm that suits you.

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

(Samuel Beckett)

I think it’s a very good idea, and I can’t see any obvious disadvantages except, perhaps, the loss of posting and comment history from the currently existing communities.

Maybe also consider merging [email protected] ? That one seems to be quite general too, and posts often become discussions of how to cook the showcased dish (plus I really dislike the name of the community).

I don’t think I’ve come across that before, but I’d say it depends on what is meant:

• I don’t know what that thing is.
• There is a thing, but I don’t know what it is.
• There is a thing such that I don’t know what it is. I.e., I do not know what all things are.

There may well be some other ones, but I don’t know what they might be.

Yes, it is a famously polarizing taste, but a small amount in something hefty like a ragout adds umami without adding too much of the marmite flavour. I’m vegetarian, and find it’s really handy for adding meatiness to such things.

If you try it and like it, do try marmite spaghetti.

Miso, Marmite, MSG, and Maggi are all good.

Not all at once, though.

I have a Xerox colour laser printer that I’m very happy with: accepts off-brand toner, speaks postscript, good quality printing, no problems at all. I’ve also been very happy with Brother laser printers in the past.

Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature by C C Bombaugh, one of my favourite reads, feels like it might be an obscure book.

Swot is a venerable and frequently used word, derived from the word sweat. Neek is what’s current with my children’s generation (South London): it’s a portmanteau of nerd and geek, apparently. Spod may well be regionally and temporally specific, as it’s what I used to be called in SW England in the 1980s.

These kinds of insults definitely exist here in the UK too, e.g., swot, spod, as well as geek, neek, nerd, etc. I don’t think these are imported from the US, as they’ve been around for a long time. Perhaps a manifestation of anglo-saxon anti-intellectualism?

It reminds me of Vermeer’s Milkmaid. Not Renaissance either, but a beautiful photograph never the less. Accidental Baroque?

A red Majohn A1 with a Pilot VP stub nib in place of the standard EF nib, Lamy Peridot ink.

That’s interesting. I wonder why we’re getting different results.

Different versions of xetex, perhaps? I’m using

XeTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.999992 (TeX Live 2020/Debian) (preloaded format=xelatex)

A little out of date, as I haven’t got around to updating my Debian yet.

Did you try my minimal example? I don’t use xelatex, but I’ve just tried running it on my example code and the output is the same as with pdflatex.

Isn’t that what you get if you use the ’ character for apostrophes? For example:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
My apostrophe's curly. Or is it?
\end{document}

deleted by creator

Yes, that seems about right to me.

I can’t quite put my finger on the rule for when you can use “for me”; perhaps there isn’t one.

I do think, however, that you can safely put “For me,” at the beginning of the sentence instead of using “to me” later: “For me, it seems…”, “For me, it looks like…”, etc.

For me, “for me” is more subjective than “to me”, suggesting there may be other equally valid points of view.

But I would never say “It seems for me”, or the other items in your list except for “…makes more sense for me…”.