It's November, and the Christmas catalogues are slithering fatly through the letterbox, spilling offers for walk-in baths and personalised wine bottles all over the place.
I must say I quite enjoy a good catalogue. I may not want to spend £70 on a model of a bulbous-headed puppy wearing a Father Christmas hat, but it enlarges my experience to know that, presumably, some people do.
(But who designs the things? Is there a special Art School for people with absolutely no artistic sensibility whatsoever?)
But I digress, and the reason I digress is that my subject for today is so horrifying that I don't really want to write about it. I came across it in a Christmas catalogue under the title...
brace yourselves, do...
....ready?...
...Charmology.
See? Foul, utterly foul. In fact it's so horrible it gives me stomach-ache.
Look, ology implies science, and charm implies either mysterious pleasure or even more mysterious magic. You can't have...
...but of course you can't.
It says in the catalogue that the White Howlite bracelet = Guardian Angel. In what way the WHB = GA I cannot begin to imagine, and in fact my head is hurting now, as well as my stomach, so I'm going to go away and stare at true, beautiful things like the clouds until I feel peaceful again.
Do hope you recover soon, too.
Word To Use Today: ology. This is quite a new word when used by itself to mean a branch of science. It was popularised by a British telephone company advert from 1989 featuring Maureen Lipman as Beattie Bellman. Ology is more usually found as the end of a word, where it comes from the Latin word ending -logia, from the Greek logos, which means word.
My favourite example is oology, which, rather neatly, is the study of birds' eggs and nesting.
My stomach is aching in sympathy! How mad and ridiculous. I will eschew such things...
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