Category: International
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Reader Mailbag 3
Twelve Mile Circle finds itself with an overflowing mailbag once again with lots of intriguing readers suggestions. Each one of these could probably form an entire article. However, I’ll provide the short versions today to try to clear the backlog. Once again, I’ll say gladly that 12MC has the best readers. I really appreciate learning…
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Lover’s Leap
A photograph and a quote used on the recent Hot Springs article referenced Lover’s Leap in Hot Springs, North Carolina. Twelve Mile Circle has noticed numerous other Lovers’ Leaps over the years. So then I wondered. In all of those dozens of examples, had there ever been a verifiable case where an actual lover leapt?…
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Nearly Nothing Named for Nixon
I joked as I wrote More Presidential County Sorting that nobody will ever name a county for disgraced former U.S. President Richard Milhous Nixon who resigned in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. That led me to wonder, well, had anyone ever named anything for him? Maybe I was being overly harsh? Actually…
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Half of Something is Better Than Nothing
Would Twelve Mile Circle stoop so low as to devote an entire article to a bad pun? Well yes, I’ve gone there before. The Operative Phrase Non-native English speakers in the audience deserve an explanation in advance. When something is said to be half-assed it implies that the effort used to produce it was insufficient,…
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End of the Line
Many longtime Twelve Mile Circle readers probably already guessed that this article that would come next. Immediately after a story about the beginning of the alphabet, naturally one would expect to find one about the end. It became an equally difficult task too, except for the most notable location. Take a moment to ponder this…
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Head of the Class
I thought back to my school days when a teacher would call roll alphabetically. Naturally people with surnames like Anderson would get the first call. Mine fell somewhere in the middle so I had to pay attention for a little while. Then I could daydream for the rest of the drill. However, I always felt…
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Traveling’s Greatest Hits
It occurred to me, as I wrote two recent travelogues, that I’d visited a lot of interesting places in the last few years. I recorded my thoughts and impressions from those journeys on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle. The intent was to describe my adventures while still fresh in my mind. Looking back through…
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Nimby Lane
Twelve Mile Circle has an international audience so I’m never sure whether a term that’s part of my lexicon translates geographically. Many readers probably know the term NIMBY. For the rest of you, and particularly the foreign-language readers, NIMBY is an acronym for “Not In My Back Yard.” As defined by Dictionary.com NIMBY is… “…used…
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How Tautological
Previously I noted the inherent redundancy of places named River Ouse in England. The literal translation worked out to something like Water River or even River River. Similar repetitions occurred likewise wherever one language overlapped another. That happened as new settlers migrated into territory occupied and named previously by earlier cultures. Then I found a…
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Ouse
I came across the oddly named River Great Ouse as I researched Pathway to Bedford. The river ran through Bedford, the County Town of Bedfordshire. It amused me even further to discover that locals pronounce it somewhat akin to “Ooze”. A body of water likened to a great ooze seemed awful to me. Hopefully it…