A fascinating debate is running on the Women’s Studies list about witches – specifically the number executed in the last millennia in Europe, with estimates running from 20,000 to 200,000 – a figure of 9 million that has been floating round has been dismissed (it seems to me sensibly enough) as ridiculous.

One of the most debated books has been Robin Briggs. Witches and Neighbors: the Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. For balance a broadly positive review and mainly negative one.

We were also directed to an online edition (with explanation) of the Malleus Maleficarum.

It is not a subject I’ve got into myself – it seems like such well-trodden ground.

This is the subject of Miss Frances Williams Wynn’s musings today – her particular examples being the Duke of Marlborough and Admiral Barrington.

You can only wish that Robert Mugabe had read them. (Or to be serious, click here.)

Japan is one of the worst societies on earth for rigid gender roles, from what I’ve seen and heard. It is no wonder its birth rate is so low, when women can expect to be left at home with the children while salarymen husbands stay away for 18 hours a day or more. But there are few real opportunities either, for women in the workplace.

So it is pleasantly ironic that the dearth of male births in the imperial family looks set to force a change in the succession law to allow the first empress since 1771. “If the rules are changed, Princess Aiko, Emperor Akihito’s three-year-old granddaughter, could one day become reigning empress.”

There could even be a Thai Queen on the throne at the same time, since the succession law there has also been changed. (And in Thailand the whole situation is complicated because there is no rule of primogeniture – the tradition is that a palace coterie conduct something resembling an election.)

An interesting linguistic debate about the word “sucks”, as a term of insult.

I tend to think of it as a very American usage, but I was surprised that the author found many occurrences in English English:

A Google search of the British newspaper The Guardian Unlimited turned up 1,285 examples of the word in headlines, e.g., “Big Brother series six sucks big time” (June 19, 2005); “Chanel ad ‘sucks’ says FCUK ad man” (Dec. 6, 2004); “Move over Hoover, this robot sucks” (Nov. 25, 2004).

Still, it is still at home in America: “According to the Sept. 29 USA Today, “Boston Red Sox fans wearing T-shirts that say ‘Yankees Suck’ will be asked to turn them inside-out before entering Fenway Park.”

So I guess the opposition can just pick on the spectators with the inside-out shirts …

This I presume is for this mysterious “World Series”, that the world has never heard of.

… thinking of moving to Britain. There are mutterings that ancestral rights of residence (usually the birth of a grandparent in the UK) could be abolished.

(And I regularly give thanks to my great grandmother, who, family tradition suggests, “went back to England to have the baby”. Although now I think about it I’m not sure if this can be true – given the length and discomfort of the journey at the start of the 20th century, and the family’s tradesmen (locksmith) status.)