In the kitchen at work there's a stop-smoking advocacy poster, which starts by listing ‘Changes your body goes through within 20 minutes of last cigarette’. Unfortunately every time I see it I tend to think of ‘last cigarette’ in the context of the one they traditionally give you just before putting you in front of the firing squad, which leaves me with a rather drastic idea of what those changes might be. Still, I suppose it would be a fairly reliable way to stop smoking.

Unrelatedly, it occurred to me in the pub last night that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, claiming as it does that one's basic view of the world is dependent on one's language, surely ought to be described using the soundbite ‘ontology recapitulates philology’.

(Yes, I'm aware that I've stretched a number of concepts in that sentence to within an inch of their warranty limits if not beyond. I plead punster's licence.)