Casing Glasgow

As an EFL teacher by trade, and someone who has had intimate contact with many of the world's languages, I am forever astonished at how my own native language, English (and not Gaelic as perhaps it should have been) continually amazes me with its incongruity and its general strangeness. To be sure, you get so used to English that you often forget all about it, but it is quite a marvellous language, especially if you do as I do and dig up its bones from time to time and perform some 'carbon testing'.

Take the verb 'to case' for example. It's almost always collocated with 'a bank' or 'a joint' (a colloquial term for a 'den') signifying 'to have a look around in order to gain knowledge of a premises (more often than not in reference to crime as in how to gain entry, what is there and how to get away). Its etymology is thought to have come from the arena of gambling and the phrase 'to keep cases' referring to keeping a close eye on your tally (the case being some kind of abacus that kept a record of the score). Indeed, just looking at that word 'score' we could easily get ourselves in deeper and deeper. This is what etymology is, really: depth...

Affording us a glance at the source code...

Anyhoo....

A little sketch in praise of cases.... and that wonderful Manhattan style architecture of lower St. Vincent Street.