An archaeological expert has claimed that two innocuous-looking stones at the side of a road in Berwick St James could hold clues to the secrets of Stonehenge.

Dennis Price, who is a renowned expert on the site and used to work with Wessex Archaeology, believes the two large stones standing at the side of a lane next to the B3083 could be parts of Stonehenge’s mysterious altar stone. (more…)

Apropos charting the ups and downs of certain dislogistic terms in the recent columns, I was reminded of a remark made by Richard Trench (1807-86) in a speech to the Philological Society of London that “the history of … the wrong ways into which a language has wandered… may be nearly as instructive as the right ones.” The Society, on Trench’s suggestion, decided to undertake the complication of A New English Dictionary that was eventually published as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), justly called `the mother’ of all English dictionaries.

As an example of the twists and turns of etymology, particularly the pejorative mantle that certain words took on in a religious sense, the last column traced the life history of `ethnic’. Ethnic was born, as it were, as ethnos (through Greek ta ethne), meaning “a band of people living together, nation, people”, then “people of one’s own kind”, but began to mean a heathen, a barbarous or unenlightened person, and was applied to all people except Christians, Jews, and Muslims until reverting to its ancient, original meaning only over a century ago. (more…)

New York - Before every dangerous mission in Iraq, Captain Richard A. Briggs Jr. stood on the hatch of his vehicle, drew a pentacle in the sky with his finger and recited the Wiccan Warrior Prayer for protection.

It was a quick, effortless ritual, but one that Briggs was thankful for in the spring of 2003 when his unarmoured cargo truck turned a corner on an Iraqi road and rolled right into machine gun fire. (more…)