Spot the Frippet: powder.

So tell me: if a powder monkey is a boy whose duties formerly involved carrying gunpowder on a warship, then what would you find in a powder room?

Yes, that's right: ladies' toilets.

I suppose the connection between toilets and powder is via a powder puff, which is a thing like a rabbit's tail used to dab powder from onto the face from a powder compact:


photo by Andy Mabbett

But what sort of powder will you spot? Monday is traditionally washing day, so it may be washing powder; or perhaps you'll do some cooking, which uses a whole variety of powders - baking powder, obviously, but also bicarbonate of soda, flour, potato starch, any number of ground spices, and icing sugar (which reminds me of the sort of powder that's good for skiing).

People used to sprinkle their hair and armpits with talcum powder, but that's a fashion which seems to have disappeared, thank heavens.

Then there's the mysterious powder blue:

which is called after the cobalt glass powder called smalt used in washing in the 1600s, an explanation said to be true even though smalt was actually a very dark blue and the idea of using it was to make the washing extra white.

Ah well!

If you still can't find any form of powder then you can take a powder; in Britain this would mean literally taking some sort of powdered medicine, but in the USA and Canada it means to run away or to disappear.

Mind you, how you spot yourself in that case I have not the faintest idea.

Spot the Frippet: powder. This word comes to us from the Old French poldre, from the Latin pulvis, which means dust.