Music Hall - a most capacious form of performance

The following usage of capacious had me reaching for my dictionary:

It [Music Hall] was a most capacious form of performance - people would come up and perform a turn... acting, comedy, song...

I like the idea of free space it conveys!

It also makes me think of one favourite books - Tipping The Velvet by Sarah Waters. This is a wonderful tale of closeted Victorian society. I love the lesbian and gay characters, it is shocking in parts and deeply romantic too.

capacious |kəˈpā sh əs|

adjective

having a lot of space inside; roomy : she rummaged in her capacious handbag.

DERIVATIVES

capaciously |kəˈpeɪʃəsli| adverb

capaciousness |kəˈpeɪʃəsnəs| noun

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin capax, capac- ‘capable’ + -ious .

Demotic Street Language - The Telegraph on the Money?

I stumbled across the following blog post, and while I rarely agree with The Telegraph's view on the world (rather to conservative/establishment-friendly for my taste), this "Telegraph blog post" makes a very interesting point/parallel:

Call me old-fashioned but should the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in the run-up to an election (or at any other time for that matter) say that people are “gagging for change”? As we all know only too well, Dave has had the advantage of one of the finest educations money can buy. Is it too much to expect that somewhere along the way he may have acquired a vocabulary that would allow him to make a trenchant political point without reaching into the demotic depths?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100032397/demotic-dave-cameron-should-mind-his-language-and-remember-kinnock/

I like his usage of the term demotic - 100% correct but a very old fashioned formal term for Street Language.

I think politician should avoid try to be cool or expressing too much emotion, they will need to stay calm and focused under intense pressure, winning the general election is only the beginning not the finish line!

demoticadjectiveKnox picked up her demotic style of writing when she worked for a newspaper in Madison popular, vernacular, colloquial, idiomatic, vulgar, common;informal, everyday, slangy. antonym formal.

My favourite films ... Harry Potter à l'Ecole des Sorciers

First of all, I didn't particularly like this film on first viewing. I went on the opening day to the Odeon in Brighton (a huge screen with a top quality sound system) with Nadjib who was already a big Harry Potter fan (another story) and he loved the film straight away. However I was disappointed, I had read and quite enjoyed the book, however the film adaption didn't work for me. In brief, it was as if they had tried to cram as many as possible scenes and details from the book into a film. The result for me was disappointing, firstly it was rather disjointed and secondly it was a bit long.

OK so at first it was a disappointment, but now it is one of my favourite movies which I can watch over and over again (I've just finished it again!). What has changed? Firstly I wanted to like Harry Potter as Nadjib did, when the film came out Xmas 2001 we had only been together for two years and had just moved from Luton to Brighton.

However this affection for Nadjib alone was not be enough to change this very good but clunky film adaptation into one of my favourite movies (despite numerous attempts, I can not really get into virtual gaming despite having playing a very cute wood elf warrior and a female barbarian with impossibly large breasts).

What made me into a Harry Potter fantastic (although I am only keen on the first three books), is that through Harry Potter I finally learnt to speak passable French! This something gripping and memorable about JK Rowlings writing style, and I found when picking up Harry Potter à l'Ecole des Sorciers that it was relative easy to read in French, there were loads of words I didn't know but I got the sense of the story and slowly with time + a french-english dictionary I filled in the details. There area still odd words witch catch me out, for example chahut: Quiconque fera du chahut pendant mes cours sera immédiatement renvoyé avec interdiction de revenir.

To be honest, the film doesn't quite work as a whole, but the individual scenes are great, the acting is good (a collection of the great and good from British acting). Also the sounds track is pretty good and dubbed into the French I can watch this over and over again!