Lovely and fantastic: a rant.

Good grief, I'd only phoned to book a table.

Prue? Could you spell that for me?

For you? Well, it seems a little early in our acquaintance for you to start asking favours, but, yes, I can certainly spell it.

That's lovely.

Prue? Lovely? No it's not. Prue is weird and unlikely. Bethany Honeyblossom is lovely; Estella Bunnynose is lovely. Sally Prue sounds like a cheap Country and Western singer.

Now, can you just confirm your address for me?

No, I can't, because I haven't told you it in the first place. But I can tell you it.

Fantastic.

Fantastic? My address? So, is it 36 Unicorn Avenue? 16 Goldilocks and the Three Bears Drive? 173 Blue Beard's Coming To Get You Mwa-ha-ha Crescent?  Nope. Nothing like that at all.

Oh, but this woman is so nice. She's cooing at me like a love-stricken dove who's just got back from the advanced customer satisfaction course. So do I point out all the frankly ridiculous things she keeps saying to me? Or do I answer her questions politely and leave her to drive all her other customers to distraction?

Well, why do think I'm still fuming?

I was fantastic and lovely, of course.

Word To Use Today: fantastic. This word started off in English in the 1300s as fantastik. It came from the Greek phantastikos, capable of imagining, from phantazein, to make visible.

Nuts and Bolts: being blue.

Blue, says my Collins dictionary, is a colour which has a wavelength from 490 - 445 nanometres.

I have no real idea what that means from a practical point of view, but I know that a Russian speaker wouldn't agree with the figures because to a Russian what I call light and dark blue are completely different colours.

A Turkish, Mongolian, Italian or Hebrew speaker won't agree with the figures, either, because those language make similar sorts of distinctions.

A Vietnamese speaker will be puzzled, too. To him xanh is the colour of both the sky and the leaves on a tree. Kurdish does the same sort of thing with şîn.

To the Chinese qīng can mean what we call blue, or it can mean green, or even black.

A Welsh speaker has the word glas, which can be the colour of the sea, or of the grass, or of silver. (Irish uses glas, too, but that colour is the green of plants.)

The Japanese describe 'go' traffic signals as ao, which also is used to mean what I call blue; and, just to confuse things further, in Arabic poetry the sky is sometimes called samā’, which means the green one.

How about that?

Every language leading to a different world.

Magic.

Word To Use Today: blue. Blue comes to us through French and various Germanic languages and is related to the Latin flāvus, which means yellow.

Thing To Do Today: shimmy.

Is a day complete without a bit of a shimmy?

I hardly think so.

Flappers in the 1920s did it, in Britain and Canada anyone wanting to climb a flagpole will do it (though why anyone should wish to climb a flagpole...), Russian gypsies do it; and so do bellydancers, badly maintained vehicles, and of course the inimitable Jeeves.

The 1920s dance was a vigorous shaking sort of thing (one of the first shimmiers, Gilda Gray, claimed to be shaking her chemise, geddit?), and the idea of the similar gypsy dance was to rattle the ornaments on the dancers' clothes. (Russian Gypsies called this shimmying dance a tsyganochka.)

A shimmying car is also shaking, probably because its front wheels or steering are faulty. That sort of shimmy is also known, worryingly, as a death wobble.

But shimmying needn't be energetic or undignified. The most dignified man on earth, Bertie Wooster's gentleman Jeeves, quite often shimmies into a room. In this case to shimmy seems to mean to appear silently, as if by magic.

If you manage to make people utter a squawk of terror when they discover you at their elbow then you'll know you'll have got it just  about right.

On the other hand, if you fancy something a little more active:

 

Have fun!

 

Thing To Do Today: shimmy. The word meaning a shaking dance may come from chemise, which means blouse and has sometimes mistakenly been thought to be a plural. Mae West claimed to have invented this dance, but probably didn't. There was a 1917 song called Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble by Spencer Williams which may have been the source of the name, too.

 

 

Spot the frippet: ukulele.

Here's something cheerful to light our way to school and work:

Yes, it's a ukulele.

And if you're thinking, a ukulele's of no use or interest to me, then how about this:

Yes, it's a moustache ukulele. It's called a moustache ukulele because it illustrates all the moustaches of the world (there are more on the back). Now, who can say that's not useful? It was made by Andrew and Michele at Xylocopa.

Ukuleles were deveoloped in Hawaii after Portuguese immigrants from Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands introduced a small guitar called a machete.

Ukuleles usually have four strings, but those with six or eight are called taropatch ukuleles.

If you happen to be in a sad place where there is no ukulele to be found (and they sometimes come in groups:

(this is the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain)

then there's always this:

Do watch it. It will amaze you. Honest.

Spot the frippet (even if only on YouTube): ukulele. The word ukulele is from Hawaii, is probably from the word 'uku, which means flea and lele, which means jumping. This may because of the movement of the player's fingers, but there's a story that it was the nickname of the virtuoso ukulele player Edward William Purvis (who was small and figetty).

On the other hand, according to Queen Lili'uokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch, the name means “the gift that came here,” from the Hawaiian words uku (gift or reward) and lele (to come).

Sunday Rest: Word Not To Use Today: umami.

Here's a young word.

Umami.

It sounds like an race of evil extra-terrestrials with a propensity to smother whole settlements in surges of warm voilet-tinged mud, but it's okay, it's not. It's something you love.

The word umami is so young it's not in my 2010 Collins dictionary...so perhaps that means it isn't even English, yet. But it will be. Unfortunately.

Because although umami isn't yet definitely English, it is definitely already a scientific term. It's been a scientific term since 1985, when they held the First Umami International Symposium. In Hawaii.

Hm. Can I re-train as an academic, please?

Anyway, umami is a taste. It's a meaty, savory sort of taste that isn't bitter, sweet, sour or salty. I know the thing sounds a bit dubious, but we do have special receptors on our tongues to detect it, so it does exist - in our brains, if nowhere else.

The Roman sauce, garum, which was made of fermented fish (eeergh!) was apparently humming with umami. So are cured meats, some mushrooms, ripe tomatoes, cheese and soy sauce.

But as for the word itself - well, it sounds more like a groan of indigestion than a sigh of delight to me.

Word Not To Use Today: umami. This word comes to us from Japan. It was made up in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda from umai, which means delicious and mi which means taste.

I'm sure the word sounds much more elegant in Japanese.

Saturday Rave: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

What is there to say about Jane Erye?

Nothing, of course, because Charlotte Bronte said it all when she wrote the book.

Jane Eyre is poor and plain, but she believes with all her soul that she has a right to love, freedom, and respect.

But Jane lives her life surrounded by people who can't see past her poverty and plainness.

There is the man who tells Jane:

"you are formed for labour, not for love"

and claims to:

"want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death"

There are also the aunt who hates her, the cousins who bully her, and the rich man who deceives her.

But Jane knows her chief duty is to herself - and to her best possible self, too.

And she's not going down without a fight.

Word To Use Today: love. This word comes from the ridiculous Old English lufu. It might have something to do with the Latin word lubēre, which means to please.

Word To Use Today: wombat.

Wombat?

Well, why not? It's such a lovely word.

And such a lovely thing, too:



That's a Common Wombat, but there are also Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombats and Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombats, a fact which almost makes me swoon with joy.




This is a Southern Hairy-Nosed Wombat.





And this is a Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat.

All wombats are about a metre long and eat vegetables.

And they're wonderful, too.

To start with, they have their pouches on backwards (with the opening at the back) so as not to throw earth at their babies when they dig.

A wombat's poos are famously cube shaped.

Wombat bottoms are made out of cartilage (the stuff your nose is made of) so predators can't catch hold of them with their teeth.

If a predator follows a wombat into its burrow, the wombat may let the predator get above it and then crush the predator's skull against the roof of the tunnel by pushing upwards.

See? Wonderful!

Word To Use Today: wombat. This word comes from the language of the Aboriginal Darug People, who used to live in the Sydney area. The word was first recorded in English in 1798 by John Price and James Wilson.