28th May 2011, 04:09 PM
vulpes Wrote:No no no. HER stands for Historic Environment Record. It's not interchangeable with anything.
It's common enough 'round our way' to use HER to refer both to the Historic Environment Record as the database containing the information on the Historic Environment and to the people or organisation that works to maintain it. When someone talks of consulting the HER, it's likely that they will have looked at the records for the area, but also that they will have discussed the site with the staff of the HEAS, whose experience and knowledge is an integral part of any attempt to consult the HER, as many of them are in posession of detailed knowledge that may not have been specifically recorded in any individual site record, but which can be crucial when working in an area. As I said in my previous post, I'm well aware of the technical distinction between the two, and I didn't say that the use of these terms interchangably was correct, I simply said that it happens, in the same way that a vacuum cleaner is often still called a hoover even though it was manufactured by dyson. I also don't think that substituting historic environment advisory service for HER in any of the previous posts would make a substantive difference to how they were read or understood (apart from making them all slightly longer, and as someone who's already struggling under dual charges of verbosity and pretentiousness, I'm happy to avoid this).
I'd agree that this section of the thread doesn't appear to be about anything, or to have any real merit, so for the sake of a quiet life and the fact that I don't intend to spend much of a bank holiday weekend involved in pointless arguments on the internet, I'm happy to say that I completely agree with you, I recant all my previous statements and will head off forthwith to chastise myself for my egregious errors with a stiff beating with birch twigs (which, to be fair, is how I spend all my bank holidays anyway)
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum