Some things I’ve found interesting on the web….
Quid and Quidhampton
I’ve found a couple of references to the idea that the slang word for a pound, ‘quid’, is derived from the village ‘Quidhampton’. The theory goes that the paper mill at Quidhampton made paper which was then used for the bank notes.
I don’t know whether this is likely to be true, but there are a number of references to it on the internet:
- british money slang | plonkee money
- Expand your UK IQ: Quid | Stars and Stripes
- Get a load of the pound sterling
From memory I think the name ‘Quidhampton’ itself comes from a word ‘ceod‘ which means ‘dung’.
Astronomy day
There’s an astronomy event at Sixpenny Handley on the 22nd August:
A blogger in Laverstock
I’ve subscribed to a new-ish blog called ‘Across the Bourne‘, written by an American man who has moved to Laverstock. It’s interesting and nicely written.
Salisbury and Stonehenge – ‘blacklisted’ by Google?
It seems that the salisburyandstonehenge.net website was ‘blacklisted’ by Google for a week or so.
Reading a bunch of stuff on Google over the weekend, the most likely cause of this is probably that I had a couple of hundred links on the ‘sidebar’ which appears on every page.
Google don’t like this – presumably sites with lots of links like this tend statistically to be ‘spammy’ or low quality.
Anyhow, I’ve replaced the list of Salisbury’s roads with the ‘road names beginning with the letter…’ list that you should see in the sidebar now.
I then requested that Google reconsider. This can take months according to Google, but my position in the search pages was restored within days.
This is something of a relief. I enjoy writing the website pages, but it would be a bit demoralizing if I thought nobody would ever be able to find them.
Also, I have now got a couple of different photos indexed in Google. The newly indexed ones are pictures of the Red Lion and the White Hart, which are on the Hotels in Salisbury page.
