Nuts and Bolts: the shaggy dog story.

 A shaggy dog story is one which goes on and on for far too long, turns down may dead ends, and finally ends up with either an anticlimax, or with forgetting where it was going in the first place.

There are various stories which are said to be the original shaggy dog story, and, predictably, they are all about shaggy dogs. Many of them involve a competition to find the shaggiest dog, and one involves a hunt for a lost shaggy dog, but at the end of them all the dogs in question fail to win the prize, or be claimed as the lost dog, because the dog is either not shaggy enough or else too shaggy.

Yes, you might think, but doesn't this mean that shaggy dog stories are just...rubbish?

Well, yes, most of them are, but a really good story-teller can make even a ramble to more or less nowhere quite fun. This is usually done by inventing a narrator of the story and giving him a frustrated audience as a focus of our sympathy and laughter.

An example of a shaggy dog story might go like this:

Did you hear about the man we called the murderer? Well, he lived along Goodman Terrace, where my Aunt Alice used to live - she was a strange woman, used to keep hens, they used to drive her neighbour's cat mad just looking at them - it was a fine cat, mind, and a good mouser, but it used to hate the coal man something terrible. The coal used to come by lorry, and they used to have to carry the coal right through the kitchen. Anyway, this man, the murderer they called him, he was a nice little man. Used to play the fiddle. But I don't know why he was called the murderer, because he never killed anyone that I heard.

(I am desperate to finish that story properly by making it so that what he was murdering were the tunes he played on his fiddle. It would make such a good children's book. Hm...I might even write it, one day...but then, of course, it wouldn't be a shaggy dog story.)

Word To Use Today: shaggy. This word was sceacga in Old English, related to the Old Norse skegg, which means beard, and skōgr, which means forest.