A second-hand treasure

Finding classic ethnography in second-hand bookstores or charity shops is one of my great pleasures. This weekend I rumbled a copy of Te Rangi Hiroa Sir Peter Buck’s “The Coming of the Maori” for the bargain sum of £2.50.         Te Rangi Hiroa was an amazing man – an anthropologist, politician, doctor, health … Read more

on dialects of english

My friend J once described something as being “kitty-corner” from a person in a restaurant, and I seriously thought she was making up random feline-words because she’s such a sucker for cats. It turned out that kitty-corner (or catty-corner) is some Yankee slang for “diagonally opposite” – who knew? I just thought of this as … Read more

yellow peril

I highly recommend Tze Ming Mok‘s Yellow Peril blog, commentating on multicultural life in Auckland, New Zealand. The other Kiwi blogs at the Public Address group are just as good, but hers makes me laugh and think (and realise why I hate and love Aotearoa) all the time.