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Monday 14 September 2020

Spot the Frippet: mansion.

Some of the new flats being built in the cities of the Far East are the size of a parking space. I suppose they must be cozy, and they are by all accounts ingeniously designed, but they can't have the visual impact of a mansion.  

File:Bletchley Park Mansion.jpg

Bletchley Park, England, photo by DeFacto

A mansion would be too big for me, personally - how could one find excuses to put off self-invited guests? - but what fun it is to imagine what they're like inside:

File:The Haunted House Das Geisterhaus (5360049608).jpg

The Haunted House (Die Geisterhaus) photo by Harald Hoyer

 and what fun, too, to be scornful of some of the architecture:

photo by Stilfehler - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88562155

Come to think about it, I lived in mansion, once. Well, in one room of it. It was Tudor, with a Georgian wing. There were holes in the floor of my room covered up by the ancient lino, so that when I got out of bed in the mornings I would sink down three inches towards the ground floor. The bathroom was freezing, too. 

But still, it's fun to look.

File:Burwell house.JPG

The Burwell House, Minnesota. Photo by Ashwin Asokan

Isn't it!

File:Hope End Mansion 1873.jpg

This mansion was called, believe it or not, Hope End.

Spot the Frippet: mansion, This word comes from the Old French from the Latin word mansio, which means a remaining, from mansus, which means dwelling, from manēre, to stay.


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