Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome to the Biscuit-makersâ Ball:
Mr and Mrs Gestiff from Wales, and their talented son Dai.
Mr and Mrs Aroon from Scotland, and their celebrated son Mac.
Mr and Mrs Verkerk from the Netherlands and their gifted son Jeff.
Mr and Mrs Malcracker, from the US, and their accomplished daughter Annie.
M. et Mme DâOdgeux from France, and their fils talentueux Jamie.
Mr and Mrs Nutbutter, world citizens, and their up and coming son Pete.
There are family names Tea and Biscuit.
If Iâd had a mother who was a Tea, and a father who was a Biscuit, and been given a double-barrelled name, I would be Rich Tea-Biscuit.
I hoped to come up with a one lion joke. Although itâs nothing you can take pride from.
A BBC article today said âPlaces that were once teeming with the hustle and bustle of daily life have become ghost-towns.â
That hyphen feels wrong. It reminded me of the cartoon below, which I found in David Crystal's book MAKING A POINT, which I highly commend to language-lovers.
A cookie might crumble
A biscuit might break
But a wafer is braver
And it wonât ever quake.Â
X
âThatâs the way the cookie crumblesâ, someone said in the local inn tonight. Iâve said the same thing hundreds of times I suppose but this time I thought and said âOr the way the biscuit breaksâ.
Not sure what cookie crumbling really means, although they might be fortune cookies.
A biscuit might break in a random way.
Another confusion is ginger snaps.
?
A comment on a Times piece suggested that older people are likely to have a âCe la Vieâ attitude towards the possibility of Covid infection. I think âCâest la Mortâ may be closer.
(Edited âleâ to âlaâ. Surprised that âMortâ is feminine, given the word ending. A bit like Le Musee, unexpectedly masculine.)
So âLove and Deathâ would be âLâAmor et La Mortâ.
Why did the lion cross the Serengeti?
To get to the other pride.
Q. Why was the Cassowary thrown out of Birdland?
A. Because it was Ostrich-sized.
Here is a way to sort a series of numbers. Proably not suitable for practical use but rather elegant.
Imagine for example we want to sort 3, 4, 2, 1 into ascending order. We set out some beads like so
3Â Â Â Â o o o
4Â Â Â Â o o o o
2Â Â Â Â o o
1Â Â Â Â o
Then we let the beads in each column drop vertically, and: hey presto
1Â Â Â o
2Â Â Â o o
3Â Â Â o o o
4 Â Â o o o oIt's not obvious at all that (or how) this works but people have proved it always does. Thinking about it does give an intuitive feel but it's good to have some more solid evidence.
They say tomorrow is another day. But so was yesterday, to be fair.
Q. Where do wheels sit down?
A. In wheelchairs.
What positive number is the square root of half itself?
I take my supplements with gin.
And always wonder who will win.
Where does the word âetymologyâ come from.
There was a man in London Town
Who laughingly did say
I wear my scaugh around my throat
To keep the chills away.
When I heard people in the US talking about the right to bare arms, I thought, whatâs the big deal about shirts with short sleeves? Turns out they mean guns.
The sun was gold
But then it fell
And I felt old.
Here's a nice photo my brother Simon took of a yellowhammer.
I loooked up where the bird got its name and there are different theories. All agree about the yellow bit. But what is a "hammer"
I found two suggestions and there may be more possibilities.
Old English amore, a kind of bird (probably the yellowhammer, so that would make it a yellow yellowhammer, or maybe just a bird of the bunting group)
Old English hama = feathers
The first seems to be a common Germanic word denoting a bunting or some similar bird. It's been suggested there is a connect with emmer, a kind of wheat, and indeed grains are part of a yellowhammer's diet. But the OED has a long discussion and I don't think we shall ever know the word origin; it's probably a conflation of more than one source word.
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