Gill, Lamb, Bacon and Hogg in this passage?

Right !
Its a play on words for items served in inns or public houses.

I imagine the Chaucer's Head is this place.
I found this on an auction site for old bookseller's catalogues. So Chaucer's Head is a bookshop.

This whole article is a series of puns. In the UK most businesses that end in 'Head' tend to be public houses or pubs. Like this place.


Quite often in pubs you can get food, so the author of this article has mentioned a list of writers who's names are the same as food, although I've never seen gills on the menu in a pub or anywhere else for that matter.

This is the second question of this type by this member. The earlier one referred to The Black Swan and The Ship--both were book shops owned by the gentleman who published Daniel Defoe. I suspected and said as much in that thread that they had previously been public houses, and that they had been purchased by Mr. Taylor who converted them to print shops and booksellers. "At the sign of The Ship" appeared on the title pages of books published by William Taylor, and that sort of thing was common in the 17th and 18th centuries (Taylor died about 1725).

So, yes, the names refer to writers, and they are puns. Mr. Taylor's shops had been inPaternoster Row, well known for printing and publishing for centuries, until destroyed in the Blitz. I don't know about New Street, but i suggest that with a little research, one might find that printshops and booksellers were found there, too.

A gill is a measure (of liquid in this context).

Of course, I wasn't thinking, 1/6 of a gill and all that. I feel a bit daft now.

The nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill, was written at a time when King Charles put a tax on jacks and gills of spring water, honey and beer. "Jack fell down, and broke his crown" was a veiled threat. A Jack is a half pint, and a gill a quarter pint. The earliest printed versions of the song were entitled "Jack and Gill."

My parents live near the village of Kilmersdon in Somerset. It claims to be the home of Jack and Jill, and I drive up the hill whenever I go to see them. As hills go, it's pretty dull.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilmersdon

For as dull as any hill may be, you've not seen anything as dull a completely flat--like Kansas or Nebraska. It's five hundred miles from Council Bluffs, Iowa to the Colorado border, across Nebraska. After the first couple of hundred miles, you'd be delighted to see the dullest of hills.

Does Jack and Jill mean "Jack and His Daughter?"

But aren't you in Canada, Set? I cannot image how the dumb hills of Kansas could make your bored.

Setanta, I did spend some time in Texas, those roads were pretty dull. Oristar, Jack and Jill means just that, Jack and Jill. I always thought they were two children, I never imagined they were father and daughter until you suggested it.

There is what is known as "the Hill Country" north of San Antonio, which is where Lyndon Johnson hailed from. In the southwest of the state, there are some honest-to-god mountains, and the area known as The Big Bend (of the Rio Grande) is a national park with some sub-alpine terrain. Otherwise, though, Tejas is just as flat as Kansas and Nebraska.

I stayed mostly in Houston, my friend worked at the British Consulate there, but we did go as far afield as San Antonio, and I visited The Alamo, which I found quite moving.

I take it, then, that you wouldn't really want to hear about the alleged "heroes" of the Alamo?

You can tell me your take on it if you want to. I promise I won't get upset, I'm not Texan after all. I wasn't expecting to be moved at all, to me The Alamo was just a John Wayne film, but when I was in the darkened chapel, and there was the list of all the dead, I was moved, like at any war memorial.

I'd never heard of The Battle Of New Orleans before I went to Texas, but I met a bunch of idiots like Bill who thought going on about it was banter, the same thinking that reduces WW2 to you saving our 'asses' and nothing more. So it was quite refreshing that at The Alamo there was an acknowledgement of all the different nationalities involved in the conflict.

Naw, that's OK. They make heroes of Crockett, Bowie and Travis in Tejas, but all of them had feet of clay--very "clay-ey" feet indeed. As for the battle of New Orleans (WTF, what the Hell do Texans care about that ? ! ? ! ?), Johnny Horton says it all:



(That video is f***in' hilarious!)

It seems it has another meaning: men and women; boys and girls.

I'm not sure how, when, where to use them to convey a decent meaning.

Jack and Jill is just a nursery rhyme. I think you're reading a bit much into it, if you want to convey more meaning, you need to use more words. Taken completely out of context, Jack and Jill just means two names, a boy and a girl, a man and a woman, or two animals.

Names just convey gender, and not always that, Hilary, Leslie, Charlie and Billy are both names used by boys and girls, although the spelling is sometimes different.

Like the vid, the Battle Of New Orleans was not the only bit of cultural difficulty we had. I played a game of Poole with a bloke with a dollar bet on the side. He won, so I gave him his dollar, he got really angry because I did it in front of a cop. He went on about how I was tyrying to get him arrested because I knew that it was illegal.

I didn't, in the UK betting in pubs over games of skill, (not chance) is perfectly legal as long as the stakes are modest. I reckon a dollar is a modest amount. Strangely enough, even though it's legal we don't usually put money down, we normally play winner stays on, and that's about it, but everyone I played in Texas wanted to gamble.