"I thought I'd had one too many wines for my birthday lunch," she said
February 17, 2018 11:38 AM   Subscribe

"I was just trying to enjoy my book when all of a sudden an earthquake happens..." At 14:31:05 today, Britain suffered its largest earthquake for over a decade, being felt across major population centres such as Cheltenham, Manchester, Blackpool, Rhyl and Salford. The 'massive' quake centred on the village of Cwmllynfell (pronounced 'Cwmllynfell') in Wales, at a depth of 7km, and is the 17th in the UK so far this year. "I posted on Facebook immediately." While residents carried on or prioritised, and cats startled, questions have been asked. Please send British tea and moist crumpets.
posted by Wordshore (63 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
@LeriP: Apparently the epicentre was in Cwmllynfell. Looking forward to hearing all the newsreaders pronounce that one #earthquake

@rhodria: They’ll pronounce it ‘South Wales’


Nice bit of anglocentric humour there - a great collection of tweets, thanks Wordshore.
posted by humph at 11:48 AM on February 17, 2018 [12 favorites]


From the "largest" link:
A minor earthquake with a 4.4 magnitude has affected parts of Wales and England.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 12:00 PM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Also from the "largest" link:

Bryan Jones, 72, of Treorchy, Rhondda Cynon Taff, said: "It was like a tremor but it was quite frightening for my granddaughter - she swore a little bit and my wife got up asking 'What was that?'"
posted by Wordshore at 12:05 PM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


...which startled next door's cat into regurgitating half a dead mouse and a large quantity of undigested Felix onto my garden path..

Wait. The cat ate a mouse and another cat?
posted by Splunge at 12:08 PM on February 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


In here for the tags

/and i saw this tweet wondering 'what earthquake?'
posted by infini at 12:08 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


...which startled next door's cat into regurgitating half a dead mouse and a large quantity of undigested Felix onto my garden path...
I blame Confuse-A-Cat.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:10 PM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Welsh is a perfectly phonetic language. Could do without the language-shaming here.
posted by scruss at 12:10 PM on February 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Wait. The cat ate a mouse and another cat?

His bag of tricks had to come up dry sometime or other.
posted by sysinfo at 12:21 PM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Is it language shaming to point out that English people can't pronounce Welsh for shit? I'm not convinced that two people on Twitter called "Eleri Powell" and "Rhodri" are likely to be shaming the Welsh language.

But to the point, this was quite exciting in Bristol! I live in a third storey flat at the top of a house, and it was pretty disconcerting when the whole building started wobbling under me.
posted by howfar at 12:25 PM on February 17, 2018 [23 favorites]


Somewhere, a cup tinkles in its saucer.
A meek 'oh my' passes down the miles
of manicured gardens, as armies rumble
the monuments of cities continents away.
The budgie chirps 'goodness' to thin air
while Bach quivers slightly and the fat
roast sways in the oven, brain-dead, but
chuckling in its oil...
- from The English Earthquake by Eva Salzman.
posted by misteraitch at 12:34 PM on February 17, 2018 [20 favorites]


"Welsh is a perfectly phonetic language. Could do without the language-shaming here."

Was it not clear that I was eyerolling at the ever present failing of the anglocentric media to bother to pronounce Welsh (my homeland) names correctly? Thank you for sticking up for us but it's slightly misplaced on this occasion, I think.
posted by humph at 12:41 PM on February 17, 2018 [17 favorites]


Trail of chaos in Plymouth
posted by tomcooke at 1:03 PM on February 17, 2018 [11 favorites]


Meh. Fellow Bristolian here but felt nothing. I blame the incessant din of the traffic.
posted by RandomInconsistencies at 1:03 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Mining twitter to see what assumptions people jumped to, and starting to notice a pattern:

BecFinley: Omg as if it was an earthquake I felt earlier... I thought it was the neighbours in the flat downstairs really going for a bit of Saturday afternoon fun

Isabel61413015: I thought my neighbours were just having crazy sex but no it turns out it was a mini earthquake

Jordanhaylock4: Blamed that earthquake on my neighbours shagging

AlexKing: Literally thought my neighbours were having rough sex but turns out we just had a mini earth quake

rhiajayconnors: When that little earthquake shook my whole bedroom and my wardrobes I generally thought my neighbours were having some wild sex.. was only till my mum come back and asked if I felt it
posted by Wordshore at 1:05 PM on February 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


God I hope she means her mum asked if she felt the earthquake.
posted by howfar at 1:17 PM on February 17, 2018 [14 favorites]


Funny. Mexico just had a 7.2 quake yesterday.
posted by Omon Ra at 1:27 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


It occurred to me recently that we have trouble pronouncing Welsh names mostly because we don't realize that "w" is pronounced "oo". We pronounce it that way in English, too, but for some reason we've forgotten that we do. I blame it on the strange decision - made by who? when? - to classify "w" as a consonant. Which it isn't.
posted by clawsoon at 1:27 PM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Welsh is a perfectly phonetic language.

it was camfell - then the earthquake struck and now it's cwmllynfell

the power of earthquakes should never be underestimated
posted by pyramid termite at 1:28 PM on February 17, 2018 [12 favorites]


I live in Japan. I have a very healthy fear and respect for earthquakes, especially since the gargantuan Sendai quake in 2011. The thing to be aware of in a quake (and really, even before a quake happens, so basically all the time) is where you are. What building you're in. If you're out in a big field with nothing around, you have nothing to fear, but if you're in an older building not up to code...that's when things get scary.

It's fun to laugh at a little quake like this hitting the U.K., but I'd wager virtually no buildings in the entire country were built to withstand earthquakes--I'd be happy to admit I'm wrong if so. Older buildings, especially brick buildings, turn into something like melted butter if it's a strong quake.
posted by zardoz at 1:38 PM on February 17, 2018 [15 favorites]


Folks on twitter were blaming the quake on fracking in the area. Google seems to suggest that fracking has been banned though.
posted by HiddenInput at 1:47 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Whenever I talk to my mother about wanting to retire to California for my health, she gets all panicky and says she'd be afraid of earthquakes. But I bet nobody in California ever had a sheet of ice slide off the roof, hit them on the head, knock them down, and not break because it's so thick and heavy.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:53 PM on February 17, 2018 [21 favorites]


Manmade quakes are a thing.
posted by Pendragon at 1:54 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


I never thought of it before, but the element "cwm" in "Cwnllynfell" is the same word as the English word "coombe"/"combe"/"coomb". It's a current Welsh word, of course (although technically English enough to be useful for Scrabble players), but in English I think I'd say it's mostly dialectical except in place names. Lots of old words survive in place names, of course, and by English standards this is a very old word indeed.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:00 PM on February 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


Funny. Mexico just had a 7.2 quake yesterday.

Which, for the record, because seismologists are mathematical sadists, means it was roughly 800 times bigger than this one.
posted by Sys Rq at 2:05 PM on February 17, 2018 [20 favorites]


Older buildings, especially brick buildings, turn into something like melted butter if it's a strong quake.

I had the weirdest experience of cultural clash when a Californian visitor mentioned that they felt nervous in our brick house, and I realised that as an Australian I felt nervous being in a timber house.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:06 PM on February 17, 2018 [32 favorites]


I'm still unsure if he're having a number of small quakes around here recently (I don't think I recall so many reports of 3-4 earthquakes in our general area), or in fact our apartment block is slowly turning into a sinkhole. It's getting way too strange being alone at night in the dining room and hearing the glassware in the big, wooden cabinets.

So, it's either earthquake, sinkhole or ghosts. Man, I can't believe there's actually something where "earthquake" is the least scary possibility.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:18 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


The Wikipedia list of earthquakes in the British Isles, which shows that several have caused fatalities. The Dudley one in 2002 is also one that is oft-quoted by many who got through it. But I remember the April 2014 ones, as I'd recently moved to that neck of the woods and was felt right across the whole of Rutland.

(For people unfamiliar with Rutland, it is an inland landscape perhaps a bit smaller than Texas.)

(And yes there is a place called Rutland, and as of 2006 it had the highest fertility rate of any county in England. Stop sniggering at the back.)
posted by Wordshore at 2:30 PM on February 17, 2018 [9 favorites]


I've lived my whole 46 years in the UK and failed to notice literally every earthquake I've ever been around for. I only ever read about them after .
posted by biffa at 3:00 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


There's a bunch of Rutlands across the pond.
posted by brujita at 3:26 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


@LeriP: Apparently the epicentre was in Cwmllynfell. Looking forward to hearing all the newsreaders pronounce that one #earthquake

@rhodria: They’ll pronounce it ‘South Wales'.


Not if they're Liam Dutton.
posted by elsietheeel at 3:44 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


I had the weirdest experience of cultural clash when a Californian visitor mentioned that they felt nervous in our brick house, and I realised that as an Australian I felt nervous being in a timber house.

I remember when a friend and I, both California natives, went on a road trip to Denver. We stopped in Salt Lake City for the night and took a sightseeing trip around town and were amazed at all the brick houses, We couldn't imagine why they'd build their houses out of something that would crumble in an earthquake...it took us a few minutes to realize that they don't really have earthquakes in SLC and can brick it up as much as they'd like (but as an amateur student of LDS history I *did* know why the streets were so wide and could navigate around town pretty easily due to the grid system based on location from the Temple).

I consider myself rather intelligent and my friend got a perfect score on her SATs and went to Stanford. It's amazing how cultural norms are can be so pervasive!
posted by elsietheeel at 3:51 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Sometimes people will hear I'm from San Francisco, or CA in general and will go off about how *they* could never live there, after all, you could die in an earthquake! And I bite my tongue and don't mention how much worse a hurricane is or a tornado or a really freezing snowstorm or a 100 degree plus for over a week heatwave...

But I try not to be a dick because to me, an earthquake is a fun inconvenience you know? I was a few months old during the 1989 earthquake and according to my mother I laughed the whole time. So I know that if you weren't born here, especially if you live in a place like the British Isles where Earthquakes aren't just a fact of life- Earthquakes can be fucking terrifying!

It's like if you live in Kansas a tornado is just a thing that happens and you get in the bathtub and laugh about it later. If you live in Boston, yeah some years are going to get hell blizzards, hey look at this selfie I took of me and my car under ten feet of snow! And of course in SF (1906, 1989) we know how bad a bad quake can be and we build accordingly.

But in a place, anyplace that doesn't build accordingly because earthquakes are rare, even a small quake can be devastating, and I'm just glad it doesn't seem like a lot of people were hurt in Wales and Britain.

And I will also add my voice to the league of Californians who find brick buildings terrifying. That shit'll fall over!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 4:36 PM on February 17, 2018 [9 favorites]


Guess every country has its list of hazards - some natural, some manmade, some unavoidable, some by choice - that can take out numbers of the people. True, here on Albion earthquakes don't (currently) make the list. Neither does the wildlife, as we only (officially) have one native deadly animal, though there are some non-native ones which are problematic, and bees and wasps cause fatalities as do dog bites, cattle (big problem when walking in rural England) and a few other things.

But it's mainly the summer heatwaves (air conditioning is rare), winter cold (domestic fuel is expensive), and the diet that are the main dangers to the general population here, not earthquakes. Thankfully. If the country dips much below freezing, or above 80F, or there's more than half an inch of snow on the ground in some places, then things grind to a halt. No idea how some parts of the country would cope with an earthquake (though, with the prices of property in London, even a minor earthquake there may be enough the destroy the property insurance industry).
posted by Wordshore at 4:58 PM on February 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Everyone is always the most laid-back (or resigned, at least) about the natural disasters they're most accustomed to, so as a native Southern Californian, I greet earthquakes with a *shrug*. Stuff coming out of the sky, however...


And I will also add my voice to the league of Californians who find brick buildings terrifying.


Yeah, I don't think I would be happy about going through a quake in an older UK building.

When I bought my first house here in western NY, I was appalled to see that the hot water heater was just sitting out there in the middle of the basement, cheerfully minding its own business. Whereas in CA that thing would be chained down with fifty different redundant safeties (because in quakes, hot water heater falling down = potential large boom).
posted by thomas j wise at 4:59 PM on February 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


Sometimes people will hear I'm from San Francisco, or CA in general and will go off about how *they* could never live there, after all, you could die in an earthquake! And I bite my tongue and don't mention how much worse a hurricane is or a tornado or a really freezing snowstorm or a 100 degree plus for over a week heatwave...

Everywhere has something that will kill you. I have to admit I also find the Bay Area version of a 4.5 earthquake kind of a fun novelty. I'm also aware that there is always the looming possibility of the kind of quake where there's really fuck all that can be done to guarantee your safety.
posted by atoxyl at 5:00 PM on February 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


I will also add my voice to the league of Californians who find brick buildings terrifying. That shit'll fall over!

But, but, bushfires!

And seriously, the reason fire is such a pervasive factor in the Australian landscape is because of trees that exploit fire to spread their seeds and kill their competitors. These trees, particularly eucalypts, practically promote fire through indigestible leaf litter and flammable oils. And some chuckleheads thought they would be such fine additions to similarly arid landscapes in California. Honestly, the earthquakes weren't enough?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:03 PM on February 17, 2018 [15 favorites]


Yeah I laugh my head off at the complete idiots who thought it would be a good idea to plant Eucalyptus in CA. That's the main reason the Oakland Hills fire was so bad back in the day- the pretty Eucalyptus on the hill fucking exploded in the heat and a fire that might have been confined to one or two houses before the fire fighters came became a raging inferno that killed 25 and burned more than 2000 houses.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 5:11 PM on February 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


or a 100 degree plus for over a week heatwave...

Yeah, but you lot still get those sometimes AND you don't have AC.

*smug ex-Sacramentan*
posted by elsietheeel at 5:15 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Never for over a week. A few days in September/October? yeah. That's what referred to as "Indian" Summer. But it rarely cracks 90 and never for more than a few days. (of course I'm talking bay area not east bay or LA) (also we are getting sometimes 80s for a week during our "Indian" summers and more and more because of GW...) (ugh soon it'll be worse waaaah.)
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 5:30 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


That's the main reason the Oakland Hills fire was so bad back in the day-

Well that and the fact that the Berkeley fire appliances didn't have fittings that worked with the Oakland hydrants and vice-versa and it started right on the border
posted by mbo at 6:18 PM on February 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


As a Chilean, I'm a bit of an earthquake snob, don't really bother to put my kindle down or get out of bed for less than a 7.0.
It is cute to be around tourists when we get a 6.0 or so, and watch them freak out while the locals go on about their business.
posted by signal at 6:33 PM on February 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


Metro: How the UK reacted to 4.4 magnitude earthquake

Telegraph: Largest UK earthquake for a decade hits Wales and west of England
posted by Wordshore at 6:37 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


So, it's either earthquake, sinkhole or ghosts.

Or the neighbours
posted by Green-eyed grenade at 7:37 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


I (English) learnt about the Welsh "w" from one of my middle school teachers, himself a Scot, who taught us all how to pronounce "Plaid Cymru" correctly and the Scots(?) phrase "It's a braw bricht moonlit nicht, tha nicht!" to boot.

He also once spent an hour between playtime and lunch teaching us how to read our palms, reading direct from the 4-page centre spread of Best magazine, which probably came from the staffroom. Oh, and he once challenged us to come up with the answer why simply teaching to the test wasn't really educating us! Whenever I hear about the pressures on teachers, the constant testing of pupils at a young age or overly rigid curricula I think of him (and several more amazing teachers too).

Anecdotes aside, excellent use of the ComeOnEileen tag.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 7:48 PM on February 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


*smug ex-Sacramentan*

Surely the menace around Sac is flooding? Not as a thing that happens regularly (this century) but if you're looking for the local Big One.

(And the semi-mythical Sacramento Tornado)
posted by atoxyl at 8:30 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


...it took us a few minutes to realize that they don't really have earthquakes in SLC and can brick it up as much as they'd like...

Not really, SLC has some big earthquake faults.
posted by Long Way To Go at 9:25 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Every person gets jaded to the dangers in their areas.

In Florida we can't be bothered about a Hurricane that isn't at least a 4 and headed straight to us. Like that eye has to be clearly coming to get us, otherwise it's just a rainstorm with a bit of extra wind.

I mean in 2016 I was thinking of driving into a hurricane off the coast of Jacksonville for a philosophy conference. My only concern was to get in ahead of the main bands, so that the wind wouldn't be too bad.

Extra story: I live in the center of the state. So, the actual threat of a hurricane is mostly hypothetical for us. However, last year Irma made it's way right to us. Exciting! You could tell who was a native and who wasn't by the degree of freak out. The natives went out and got an extra propane tank and picked up debris in their yard. The transplants were all worried about shutters and hoarding a couple of week's worth of water and generally acting like they expected to be in a Mad Max movie after the storm.

It was a nice few days off from work, though.
posted by oddman at 5:29 AM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Surely the menace around Sac is flooding? Not as a thing that happens regularly (this century) but if you're looking for the local Big One.
(And the semi-mythical Sacramento Tornado)


Oh sure, because of all the jagoffs who built their McMansions in the goddamn flood plains. My house was on high ground and above both dams. I checked all the flood maps and I never would have been under water - I DID had to worry about coyotes and cougars though. And escaped inmates?

Now I live in a place with non-mythical tornados, if you believe my landlord and the tree in my front yard that lost a major limb a month after I moved in. Or maybe it was just a 65+ mph wind gust. Oh and I still have the potential threat of escaped inmates.

Fricking parents working in fricking corrections.
posted by elsietheeel at 7:22 AM on February 18, 2018


@seismo_steve: [Twitter thread] Some preliminary geological interpretations about today's #Swansea #SouthWales, UK magnitude 4.2-4.7 #earthquake (magnitude estimates vary between reporting organisations).
posted by Wordshore at 8:25 AM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


You know, it wasn't until just now that the weight of vacationing atop the San Andreas not many miles from where some major flattening happened in 1906 kind of crawled over me. I know I'm far more likely to die just getting here but just for a second there, the heebie jeebies. Time to remind the kids about doorjams.

Just down the road you can see former sea stacks in the middle of these clifftop fields. These formations are formed at the ocean's /edge/ not fifty or sixty feet above sea level a half mile inland. Plate tectonics man. Nothing to put one's insignificance in place like walking along sedimentary layers that have heaved 45-90 degrees.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 3:13 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Ogre, you're a NorCal native. When was the last time a catastrophic earthquake happened in the Bay Area? World Series 1989, right? You can either look at that as it's unlikely to happen or that it's due to happen any day now.

OH MY GOD GO HOME GO HOME NOW.

Also I just realized I moved from Sacramento, a place with no earthquakes, to a place that actually gets earthquakes AND is 60 miles east of a fricking VOLCANO that last erupted 100 years ago. What on earth was I thinking?

Also see above re: 65+ mph wind gusts that are currently happening because a storm is on its way in, bringing with it snow and power outages. Waaaaahhhhh.
posted by elsietheeel at 3:42 PM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Ogre, you're a NorCal native.

I'm leaking data. Elsewhere it would be time to burn the account :)

Not only a Nortñeo but one who grew up living atop a fault. Every so often one would throw stock off shelves at the supermarket, clang mom's china around. Got one when I was at school once, sounded like a truck was going by. Still, yup, incredibly infrequent but all this chatter just brought it home for a second: lalala, oh, I'm in earthquake country again.

Went through the earthquake simulator at the California Academy of Sciences for the first time recently and that's a hum-dinger. Really brings Loma Prieta back. About eight seconds is when that quake stopped being fun and started being "cut the shit." I'd conveniently forgotten that part, thanks Cal Sciences!

I've been up here an awful lot and honestly I've worried about wildfire more than death at the hands of Da Big One.

We did have The Meaningful Conversation with the kids about where best to shelter in an earthquake. (Table?!? The fuck they learning...) Its back to being background thing like spotting the exits, another one of life's safety checklists (we got water here?) Everything here should be to code and free of soft-story collapse. Nuffin' to worry about :] This is not earthquake weather anyway.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 10:05 PM on February 18, 2018


I always think that the main thing that makes Welsh pronunciation hard to the English is that in welsh the stress is usually on the penultimate syllable and in English, it's on the first syllable.
I rarely see that mentioned, but honestly, I think it would resolve 90% of the pronunciation difficulties people have.

You'll never quite get double LL correct, but if you get the syllable stress right you can get close enough that no one will notice.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:17 AM on February 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'm leaking data. Elsewhere it would be time to burn the account :)

It's in your profile and I made a specific point not to detail details because that's against the rules! :D

I remember that earthquake simulator from grade school but it never really scared me that much, but I also haven't been there (except to the Planetarium) post-1989. I really really really want to go back so much, but now I'm a 300 mile drive away and it's always full of kids (except on Thursday nights, which seem more about drinking and socializing than looking at exhibits, which is what I want to see because I am a science nerd).

And I hate to break it to you, but the table IS the the best and doorways are the worst. Mythbusters confirmed it and your kids are smarties.
posted by elsietheeel at 6:47 AM on February 19, 2018


Doorways where safer in certain kinds of buildings, like adobe houses, where the wall might fall over and the doorway, being made out of wood and being a meter deep, would stay standing. For most of current construction, not so much anymore.
posted by signal at 8:02 AM on February 19, 2018


I checked for the main historical disasters in my area. If I stay off ships and don't go down mines I look to be pretty good. There was a helicopter crash about 35 years ago which killed 20 though, and the route is about to be reopened so you never know.
posted by biffa at 8:57 AM on February 19, 2018


Conversation at work today (a few miles from the epicentre) leads me to believe that apart from rattling radiators and dancing bottles in the supermarkets, the main result was a lot of people questioning their sanity then going outside to gather in bewildered groups and confirm that no, that really did just happen.

Cannot believe I missed it!
posted by Otto the Magnificent at 12:31 PM on February 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Awww, don't feel too bad. The little ones basically aren't that exciting and the big ones are apparently terrifying. As a native Californian I've only felt two (and slept through another); the first was the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which mostly made the water in our spa slosh around a bit, and then one a few years ago where my boyfriend and I looked at each other and went "Was that...?" and yes, it was.

Turns out the epicenter of that was close to where my parents live -- which is where I live now. None of my furniture is earthquake braced and I've got glass items on high shelves and the like because I've never had to think about it before. I should probably do something about that. But I also went to the shops today without a coat and it was snowing by the time I got there because I've never lived in a place where it snows before.
posted by elsietheeel at 5:08 PM on February 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Joe in Australia: "I never thought of it before, but the element "cwm" in "Cwnllynfell" is the same word as the English word "coombe"/"combe"/"coomb". It's a current Welsh word, of course (although technically English enough to be useful for Scrabble players), but in English I think I'd say it's mostly dialectical except in place names. Lots of old words survive in place names, of course, and by English standards this is a very old word indeed."

I learned the English version when it turned up in Tolkien. A good way to learn a lot of older words, actually.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:09 AM on February 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I learned the English version when it turned up in Tolkien. A good way to learn a lot of older words, actually.

This is your regularly-scheduled reminder that Tolkien had very odd ideas about plate tectonics.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:17 PM on February 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think it was more that he worked from language to the implied history to the geography that would support that history. Rather than the other way around.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:19 PM on February 20, 2018


This is your regularly-scheduled reminder that Tolkien had very odd ideas about plate tectonics

To be fair, he wrote The Lord of the Rings when many *geologists* had very odd ideas about plate tectonics. It wasn’t until after they mapped the seafloor in the fifties and sixties that plate tectonics became a thing for realsies.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:12 AM on February 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


Doorways where safer in certain kinds of buildings, like adobe houses, where the wall might fall over and the doorway, being made out of wood and being a meter deep, would stay standing. For most of current construction, not so much anymore.

The term you're looking for is "load-bearing." And yes, modern buildings don't feature a lot of load-bearing doorways, but in older buildings it's more common. But since most people have no idea if a doorway is load-bearing or not, a table is a much better bet.
posted by zardoz at 8:45 PM on February 21, 2018


« Older Don't call it a comeback: Dabrye finishes his x/3...   |   "The first Phoenicians on this beach" Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments