True Meanings

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in an Elder Scrolls Online beta test.

As soon as I saw my invite I thought to myself “Aha, this will make for an interesting blog post”. Unfortunately the NDA is still in effect, and since I'm not fluent in legalese, I decided to err on the side of caution and say the only thing I know I'm allowed to say about the game:

I like it!

That's all I'm going to say to avoid any misunderstandings. But to leave this post at that wouldn't be very interesting, so I decided to mull over a couple of interesting other potential misunderstandings while I'm on the subject.

First up is a word that's often misused due to a slight misunderstanding. Evacuate. Way too often the word is used like this: The people in the boat were evacuated. This is wrong. Very wrong. The sentence should read: The boat was evacuated. You see, to evacuate is to empty something out, and to empty out people, is to give them enemas.

You can evacuate almost anything, boats, elevators, houses etc, and in so doing, the people do leave the premises. You just don't want to the fire brigade to evacuate you in the middle of a fire...

Next up is a common and fairly well known misunderstanding. Big Ben. This is not the name of the clock tower, but the name of the great bell inside the tower. The tower itself was up until 2012 simply called... the clock tower. Or the Parliament Tower.

During the jubilee in 2012 however, it was renamed The Elizabeth Tower in honor of Queen Elizabeth II.

Still most people will continue to call the whole shebang Big Ben, and to be fair, who cares? As long as everyone knows what their talking about.

And now I'm going to end with a tasty treat. How many of you have ever eaten a Danish? No not a person from Denmark, but the pastry.

Interestingly enough, they're not really Danish at all, but Austrian, Viennese in fact. But they quickly became very popular in the Nordic countries, and here they are in fact called wienerbröd (Viennese bread). They're known in the English speaking world as danish because they were made popular by Danish immigrant bakers in the early 20^th century. So now you know what you're eating when you are gobbling down those tasty flaky treats covered in jam.

That's it for this week. I hope have a good one!