Spinney is a nice word for a smallish gathering of trees, alongside copse, coppice, etc. I'm not aware of a term for one specifically in an open field, though.

Apart from the hole, that could be chicken on a raft, an old Royal Navy dish.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

(Samuel Beckett)

I don't think I've come across that before, but I'd say it depends on what is meant:

• I don't know what that thing is.
• There is a thing, but I don't know what it is.
• There is a thing such that I don't know what it is. I.e., I do not know what all things are.

There may well be some other ones, but I don't know what they might be.

I have a Xerox colour laser printer that I'm very happy with: accepts off-brand toner, speaks postscript, good quality printing, no problems at all. I've also been very happy with Brother laser printers in the past.

Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature by C C Bombaugh, one of my favourite reads, feels like it might be an obscure book.

Swot is a venerable and frequently used word, derived from the word sweat. Neek is what's current with my children's generation (South London): it's a portmanteau of nerd and geek, apparently. Spod may well be regionally and temporally specific, as it's what I used to be called in SW England in the 1980s.

These kinds of insults definitely exist here in the UK too, e.g., swot, spod, as well as geek, neek, nerd, etc. I don't think these are imported from the US, as they've been around for a long time. Perhaps a manifestation of anglo-saxon anti-intellectualism?

It reminds me of Vermeer's Milkmaid. Not Renaissance either, but a beautiful photograph never the less. Accidental Baroque?

That's interesting. I wonder why we're getting different results.

Different versions of xetex, perhaps? I'm using

XeTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-0.999992 (TeX Live 2020/Debian) (preloaded format=xelatex)

A little out of date, as I haven't got around to updating my Debian yet.

Did you try my minimal example? I don't use xelatex, but I've just tried running it on my example code and the output is the same as with pdflatex.

Isn’t that what you get if you use the ’ character for apostrophes? For example:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
My apostrophe's curly. Or is it?
\end{document}