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SUMMARY:Sunnyside - Dr Laura Wright (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20151112T143000Z
DTEND:20151112T150000Z
UID:TALK61736@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:26863
DESCRIPTION:The Oxford English Dictionary’s first reference to eggs sunn
 yside up is 1901.  Sunnyside was the title of a Charlie Chaplin film of 19
 19\, in which Charlie works as a farmhand.  Keep Your Sunnyside Up\, Up wa
 s a hit from the film Sunny Side Up of 1929\, written by Buddy De Sylva\, 
 Lew Brown and Ray Henderson\, as was On the Sunny Side of the Street\, wri
 tten by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields\, 1930\, both depression-era songs
  being about maintaining optimism in the face of adversity.  Sunnyside is 
 a common British house-name\, associated with suburban nineteen-twenties a
 nd thirties semi-detached housing.  The "British Royal Mail database":http
 ://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode available to the public for looking u
 p postcodes (that is\, not to linguists searching for house names) present
 ly returns 14\,703 hits for Sunnyside in the UK.  Yet prior to 1859\, so f
 ar as I can discover\, there were no houses called Sunnyside in London at 
 all.\n\nThere is no scholarly history of British house names.  Place names
  have been studied for nearly a century by the English Place-Name Society 
 (begun by the great Sir Allan Mawer (1879-1942)\, son of a commercial trav
 eller in fancy trimmings from Bow) but the Scottish and Welsh Place-Name S
 ocieties are very new and even the English volumes have included farm name
 s only sporadically.  Writing the history of a house name is therefore a c
 hallenge in that sources have to be found.\n\nMy talk will be about the ex
 traordinary history of Sunnyside\, a seemingly semantically transparent na
 me\, which\, it turns out\, has been hiding in plain sight.  I begin by id
 entifying the early adopters in London\, finding what they have in common\
 , and following those avenues back to earlier users.  Said avenues lead fa
 r away both in place and in time\, to outside the British Isles\, and into
  prerecorded history.
LOCATION:Queen's Building\, Emmanuel College
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