Finally, At 3:04 P.M. -- FBN With Crude Oil Price Story; Hickory, Dickory, Dock -- March 8, 2017

This almost feels like a panic.

But there's something happening here, and you don't know what it is ... 

Ballad Of A Thin Man, Bob Dylan

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A Note To The Granddaughters
Failte gu Alba
Welcome to Scotland

This is so cool. Earlier I ran through the contents of the current issue of The New York Review of Books. I couldn't wait to get started on the essay about The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland. To some extent, the "borderland journey between England and Scotland" was a bit redundant. After all, this is a book about the Marches. LOL.

I should not laugh. I had no idea what "the Marches" were until I read George Eliot's Middlemarch some few years ago.

The essay was good, not great, but good, and then I ran into something that made my day. Do you remember this from an earlier post?

From The Book of Numbers, John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, c. 1996, page 2:

One such system is:

wan, twan, tethera, methera, pimp,
sethera, lethera, overa, dovera, dick,
wanadick, twanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, pimpdick,
setheradick, letheradkic, hoveradick, doveradick, bumfit,
wanabumfit, ...

Such rustic sequences appear in many countries. They are usually highly corrupted versions of the standard number systems of ancient languages.

Hickory, dickory, doc,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one;
The mouse ran down.
Hickory, dickory, dock.

Probably "hickory," "dickory," and "dock" are the words for "eight," "nine," and "ten" in one of these systems (compare "hovera, dovera, dick"), while "eeny, meeny, miny, mo" mean "one, two, three, four" in another.

Hold that thought.

From the essay today:

One especially telling encounter involves a shepher named Willy Tyson, who at local country shows is celebrated for counting his flock in the ancient Cumbri dialect of Rheged, which the Victorian believed was:

perhaps the last remnant of the lost aboriginal language of [the region], passed down through an oral tradition over forty generations ...

"Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dick, yan-a-dick, methera, bamfit, gigot ..."

Something tells me the author of the new book missed a few of the counting words, and might have gotten a few of them wrong ("methera" as both "four" and "twelve"?). Whatever.
Wow, like the Bakken, reading never ceases to amaze me, what I might find.