Thing Not To Do Today: squint.

I have been exiled from my desk in the loft because a man is coming to do something to the radiators.

Instead of the tops of the trees I can see...well, not much, actually, because the sun is shining in my eyes. Hang on, I'll draw the curtain.

Ah, that's better.

I don't want to have to squint.

Squint is a well-designed, if not a lovely, word. I mean, you can hear the effort and strain involved in it. I spent a lot of time squinting as a short-sighted child, and was always being told it was bad for the posture and the avoidance of wrinkles.

On the other hand, it was good for avoiding falling over things and being hit by trucks.

To squint can also be to take a sideways look, perhaps because the eyes aren't aligned conventionally, or perhaps when pretending to look the other way.

A squint in a church follows the sideways meaning by being a narrow opening so that people at the sides of the church can see the main altar, and a squint antenna is one where, by design or because of some technical anomaly, the signal does not reach it along a straight path.

Of course, if someone asks you to have a squint at something it would be rude to refuse, but as squint in this sense means a quick look, you don't actually have to squint.

Unless the sun has moved round and is in your eyes again.



Doh!

Thing Not To Do Today: squint. This word is short for asquint, which perhaps comes from the Dutch schuite, slant.

Spot the frippet: shed.

 

The physicist James Clerk Maxwell had a shed until he shed too much hair.

Now, exactly how much smaller is a shed than a barn?
 
No. Exactly how much smaller?
 
The answer, of course is 10 to the 24 times smaller.
 
Yes, that's right: exactly 10 to the 24 times smaller.
 
The reason of course is that both a barn and a shed are units of nuclear cross section. A shed is 10 to the minus 52 square metres, and a barn is 10 to the minus 28 square metres.
 
Yes, I know they're both much much too small to spot, I just thought it was interesting.

Anyway, so where does that leave us?
 
Well, in clover, really, because there are sheds are all over the place, whether they're small flimsy buildings for holding flower pots, chisels, or men seeking peace; or whether they're large working spaces designed for holding railway locomotives or sheep in need of shearing (by the way, anyone in the shed in New Zealand is at work, even if they're not actually in a shed).
 
Also in generous supply are shed tears, hair, blood, light, leaves, skin, and lorry-loads.
 
To make things even easier, in Scotland a shed is a parting in the hair.
 
So. No need to shed sweat over this one, then.
 
Spot the frippet: shed. The nuclear physics shed is so called because it's smaller than a barn (which is so called because it is relatively roomy in nuclear physics terms); the building sheds come from the Old English sced, which is probably connected to the word shade; and the dropping-off sort of  shed comes from the Old English sceadan, and is related to the Old High German skeidan, to separate.

Sunday Rest: flotel. Word Not To Use Today.

What do you think a flotel is?

Yep, that's right, it's some sort of a hotel-type thing.

And, yes, that's right, too, there's a floating idea going on as well (an alternative spelling of flotel is floatel, but that's so ugly I hardly liked to mention it).

So, you're thinking white-jacketed stewards, a setting sun turning a cocktail into a gleaming beacon of rapture, and stiff icy napery on the captain's table, right? Basically the same thing as a cruise ship.

Yes?

Er, no.

A flotel doesn't cruise. And it's not a ship, either.

Neither is it a hotel.

As for the floating thing, well, flotels do their business in the middle of the sea, so they do float sometimes. But not always.

A flotel (ouch!) is an oil rig or boat used as accommodation on off-shore oil rigs. They were used as accommodation during the Mexico oil-spill clean-up, too.

It caused a strike.

'If I wanted to be in prison, I would break the law and go to jail,' said one 'guest' in a flotel, where the cabin walls consisted of curtains and the lack of space made guests nervous about the spread of disease.

I suppose you have to give the coiner of the word flotel marks for humour, though.

Even if it is of the most ironic kind.

Word Not To Use Today: flotel. This word is one of the horrors the 1950s inflicted upon us.

Pneumonia rhymes, OK? Saturday Rave.

What makes a good rhyme?

Yes, that's right, it has to rhyme.

And it's not that easy in English.

Everyone who's ever tried to write a rhyming poem (which is, of course, all of us) will have discovered that, although English is by far the biggest language in the world, whether you want to write about an olive, a wolf or a penguin, you're in trouble.

No, really,:there's no rhyme in the language for any of these words.

Poets, desperate, will torture words quite ruthlessly in order to force a rhyme, and if the poet is a genius he'll come up with something that'll give a sort of wincing pleasure to generations.

Such a one is the great lyricist Hal David. Here's an extract from I'll never fall in love again. It was written for the 1968 musical Promises, Promises. It could hardly be less my sort of music, but for me it's redeemed by that gorgeous rhyme. 

What do you get when you kiss a guy?
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do, he'll never phone ya
I'll never fall in love again

Pneumonia/phone ya.

A thing of joy forever, as far as I'm concerned.

Word To Use Today: pneumonia. This word is New Latin from the Greek pneumōn, lung.

 

 

Word To Use Today: miscible.

Words, like the rest of us, arrive with baggage.


The Bland brothers by Beatrix Potter.

Sometimes a perfectly innocent word can be doomed simply because of its sound.

That's one of the terrible things about being called Pogner. It emits whiffs of pig, pong and Bognor (not that Bognor isn't a delightful place).

And that's if you've never heard of Wagner or a Meistersinger.

Luckily the baggage-thing works the other way, too, and what with the word Pogner is a vast metal trunk bearing the sign DANGER OF DEATH BY FLATULENCE is with the word miscible no more than a red-spotted handkerchief tied with meadowsweet.

Miscible: I don't know about you, but I'm getting sweet little mouse, scampering, mischief, a small hint of runcible and an after-taste of little old ladies in lace caps and mittens, knitting on their doorsteps in the weak spring sunshine.

And, after all, what more could anyone want?

To know what it means? All right, then. Miscible means mixable, as with whisky and soda, laughter and tears, or sunshine and showers.

And luckily we can all manage to carry a red-spotted handkerchief with us, can't we.

Word To Use Today: miscible. This word has been delighting English speakers since the 1500s. It comes from the Latin miscēre, to mix.

 

Ultimate rest: a rant.

How do you fancy a trip to China?

I'd love to go. My responsibilities here mean it's unlikely to happen, but I do like to look at the brochures.

Travelsphere, for instance, have a 15-day escorted holiday to China from £2149. It looks great: Beijing, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the Divine Road. On Day 5 you go to Xian, where you...

...hang on, look at this!

DAY 5 XIAN

Fly to Xian, once the capital of China. You will be transferred to Han Tombs before moving on to your hotel for some time at leisure.


A Han Tomb in the Luoyang Ancient Tombs Museum.


Good grief. I've heard of someone going to their long rest, but that's a heck of a long way to go to get it.


Word To Use Today: tomb. This word comes from the Old French tombe and before that from the Latin tumba, burial mound, and is related to the Latin tumēre, to swell and the Middle Irish tomm, hill.

 

Nuts and Bolts: shaggy dog stories.

A shaggy dog story is one that meanders on for ages being mostly boring and irrelevant, and then goes and has an ending that doesn't resolve anything.

There may be jokes along the way, but the main joke is on the audience.

The origins of the term shaggy dog story are disputed, but this is the one told by the great Eric Partridge.

A rich and aristocratic London family offers a huge reward for their lost shaggy dog, upon which an enterprising American brings a very shaggy dog all the way across the Atlantic, only for the butler to shut the door in his face with the words "but not so shaggy as that, sir!"

Of course a shaggy dog story that's been cut down to a single sentence isn't a shaggy dog story at all (although as that story is about a shaggy dog I suppose it must be) but there are plenty of shaggy dog stories about.

Think about it: long, dull, largely irrelevant, and without a proper ending...

Yep. Nowadays, often as not they go by the name of literary fiction.

Word To Use Today: shaggy. This word is from the Old English sceacga, a thicket, and is related to Old Norse words for beard, tip, and forest.