I have just returned from a week in Washington, DC, where I stayed at the College of Preachers -- a lovely stone building on the campus of the National Cathedral. The COP is all Gothic and antiques and oil paintings, filled with oddly shaped rooms and little stairways down which one fully expects Harry Potter to come at any moment.

It is an easy walk from the COP to the National Cathedral and I thought myself sufficiently clever to go in one of the side doors, go down to the crypt level, and find my way past the many chapels to the bookshop. In so doing, I got lost several times and passed numerous niches where the bones of the faithful were interred and memorialized. It occurred to me that the route to the bookstore was "catacombious" -- the "b" is silent.