Yesterday we went to a Christmas Tree Festival in the village church. There were about 30 trees from various local groups and organisations. Some were actual Christmas trees but others had been put together from various materials. They filled the whole church, and the effect was rather magical.
My Mother was very, cold towards me, but Father was aloofer. He was a bath sponge.
Once upon a time a Hare
Challenged Sooty
To a race.
The Hare got off to a flying start and soon Sooty, being only a glove puppet, was lagging badly. When the Hare looked back Sooty was nowhere to be seen.
So the Hare lay down for a nap.
You guessed it, Sooty came up from behind, passed the Hare, and reached the finishing post first.
In the papers next day the headlines readAn acronym is formed from the initial letters in a phrase, and can become a word in its own right. Scuba is a good example, derived from Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. People like acronyms; they are handy and memorable.
A backronym is the exact opposite. Starting from a word that looks as though it could be an acronym, we reverse engineer an origin, sometimes to be comical, but sometimes because an acronym is suggested that seems plausible and satisfying. And some backronyms are for serious purpose, as explained here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackronymAs an example of the plausible type, it’s commonly said that posh comes from Port Out Starboard Home, in the context to sea travel to India, but I don’t believe there is any reliable evidence for this explanation. It always seemed fishy* to me.
A more modern backronym is rap = Rhythm And Poetry, which seems equally unlikely to be true.
And a really funny one is
* False Information Some Hand You.
Erm, what's the name of that French bread? I baguette.
These amazing plants look like something from a Gaugin painting. They were seen in the Jardín de Aclimatación de la Orotava, Tenerife which dates from 1788.
My Aunt died today.
And I can remember her;
Running across a sunlit field
With we three children in hilarious pursuit
Laughing at the wind in our faces.
Yesterday i stumbled across this expressive word from Yiddish:
shmegegge
meaning baloney, nonsense, rubbish, as in "Don't give me all that shmegegge".
It's pronounced shmuhGEGee. according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Here's the Google ngram. It's quite a recent word it seems, and is a bit less frequent than in the past. But why those high peaks? Was the word in. a film or TV show around those times? I'd love to know.
George Orwell I think it was that said Macbeth is a play about ambition.In this famous speech near the end of the play, Macbeth, facing ruin and defeat, meditates on the ultimate folly of human ambition.
Met a woman claiming to be the Roman goddess of crops. I was like really? You can’t be Ceres.
枯朶に烏のとまりけり秋の暮
on a withered branch
sits a crow
autumn nightfall
Last night I broke into a cheese factory and made away with some curds.
I found this attractive fungus growing at the base of a small fig tree I have in a pot. It's about 4 cm in diameter.
What is it?
I've asked on a couple of forums but so far no definite identification. It might be a wax-cap of some kind but that is a far as I've got.
Can anyone help?
Here's a phot my brother took of a goldfinch
The name carduelis is Latin for something like "of the thistle" I think, because they are so fond of thistle-seeds but this one was amongst some forget-me-nots!
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