Personal Blogs

Anyway I gave it a shot.

“Were they the ones that hung out with the Persians?”, I said.

Apparently this wasn’t the right answer.

Sow.

What?

Notice me, oh! notice me, they screamed.

And yet, I felt, ... not all was as it seemed.

I started a company selling origami. It's making a profit on paper.

A Spoonerism, named for the Rev. Spooner of New College Oxford, who is supposed to have often made this kind of speech error (or maybe he was just making jokes), is when the first letters of two word phrases get swapped, with amusing resuts.

For example Spooner allegedly said to a wayward student: "You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. Please leave Oxford on the next town drain."

I've long wondered if there are any triple spooners. These would be three words for which shifting the first letters of each word in a cycle gives a different set of three words.

These seem quite hard to think of, so today I concocted a computer program to generate them. It generates plenty, but so far none have been all that memorable or funny, and many include very unusual words, so they don't really work.

The best I have so far is this. It's not too bad, although there are probably better ones out there.

A regular newspaper columnist referred to plans to grow watercress in allotments.

Another paper commented on the article under the headline

PRESS SLOT CITES CRESS PLOT SITES

I realise many people think Cats are better than Dogs but to them please let me say,

This verse is proof they are wrong, because it’s doggerel, OK?

Wildflowers are one of my passions. Yesterday I spotted this beauty in a hedge near where I live.

This lovely climbing, or at least scrambling, plant is Solanum dulcamara. Dulcamara = Sweet-bitter (think 'La Dolce Vita', and 'Amaretto'). A common English name for it is Bittersweet. 

Solanum seems to come originally from Pliny but I think he confused it with a different plant¹. Both come from the family that includes potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines, and if you have ever observed the flowers of those plants you will see the family resemblance. Similarities in flower structure are what allows botanists to classify plants, rather than size, leaf and stem structure, habitat and so on.

My mother use to call this (or a very similar plant) deadly nightshade, but although the fruits of bittersweet are toxic, deadly nightshade is Atropa belladonna. Deadly nightshade has a rich folklore and history ², including being used for poisoned arrows, so it was literally toxic, because toxic comes from the idea of poisoned tips, via ancient Greek τοξον toxon = bow.

¹ "The solanum, according to Cornelius Celsus, is called "strychnon" by the Greeks; it is possessed of repercussive and refrigerative properties."

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D27%3Achapter%3D108

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna

I hate air travel. I tried to sleep on the aeroplane, but I just fell off.

Only a rose

But what an only!

If you came under the spell of my glamour that would be quite natural.

Glamour is a Scots form of grammar, which goes back to the Ancient Greek for write, graphein. Think graffiti, graph for other derived words. The Greek verb was the origin of grammata = letters , from which we get the word grammar. The Scots dialect version acquired the sense of bewitchment or casting a spell. 

“As soon as they saw her well far'd face, They coost the glamer o'er her.”*

But casting a spell is connected with German Spiel = tale and spelling is probably related. So if you know your spelling and grammar, chances are you can enchant people. **

* From the OED

** Also see abracadabra

Went out tonight with some

Florentine stucco artists. Well we got p******d!

Urologists. Well we got b******d!

Aquarium specialists. Well we got t****d!

Mining engineers. Well we got b*****d!

Shrimp catchers. Well we got p****d!