Spot the Frippet: a pou sto.

My pou sto is the loft of my house. It's rather cold at the moment, but only because I'm too mean to put the heating on. It's my pou sto because it contains my computer and my desk.

Someone else's pou sto might be might be a market stall, or a shed, or the cab of a lorry or the counter of a shop.

A pou sto is a place to stand to do something, like a patch of riverbank from which a fisherman operates, or the place a policeman stands to direct the traffic (though it's a long time since I saw anyone doing that), or a look-out's tower.

A pou sto can also be any centre of operations. The really big baddies tend to have rather marvellous ones, if one can only find them.


Blofeld's volcano crater from the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice

When you do spot a pou sto, see how much magnificence there is about the place. 

And then see if you can work out if it has anything to do with the amount of evil plotted therein.


British House of Commons. Photo provided by UK Government

Spot the Frippet: pou sto. This comes from Archimedes, who is supposed to have said that, given a place to stand, with a lever he could move the earth: dos moi pou stō, kai kinō tēn gēn. 

(You can also use pou sto to mean the intellectual or moral foundation of an activity, so the law might be the pou sto of an attorney's business. But obviously no one can spot that sort of thing.)