May 5: falconers etc

I see that when you try to buy a book in a foreign language on Amazon you are buying from a section marked C programming languages, which I suppose is Computer programming. Can it be that Computer Programming gets a higher billing than all the languages put together because it sells more? It might, I suppose. I stopped being surprised by these things some time ago. It reminds me a little of a small note in a Court document at the beginning of the 17th Century. It was the Court of King James I of England and listed all the people present at the two or three day Court celebration. One of the lowest items on the list is falconers etc or falconers et al (I can’t quite remember which). The etc or the et al includes the King’s players, that is to say Shakespeare and his company. They are just glossed over, invisible they are so irrelevant, some collateral damage of the language, relegated to an abbreviation, a bit like those hundreds of non-English languages on Amazon.


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