Tag Archives: vocabulary

Fish, Chips and Thunderstorms

We had fish and chips on Monday night. We needed some bottled water for Julia (we were going to freeze it overnight so it stayed cold all day) and the chip shop was the closest place that sells it now all the local shops have closed down. Well, all the useful local shops. We still have a pawn shop, three hairdressers, a double glazing shop and two accountants, but actual useful shops are rare. We have two supermarkets within walking distance (for Julia) but it was a clammy night and the return journey is all uphill.

It seemed silly not to have fish and chips if she was going that way. It also seemed silly not to have mushy peas and a pickled egg, as fish and chips are a rare event these days. They aren’t cheap these days, and they are fried, which, in diet terms, puts them on a level of popularity shared by Covid, Beelzebub and Boris Johnson.

As she thought of going out the sky turned grey, a cold wind whistled in and one of the “scattered thunderstorms” that had been forecast settled over our house and lashed it down for fifteen minutes. We weren’t the only ones. Next morning on the way to work there was still a lot of standing water by the roadside.

It’s lucky she didn’t leave five minutes earlier or she’s have been caught in it. It’s also ironic that we had been discussing heat and thirst only moments before a deluge. We have quite a few words for rain when you think about it. Deluge, as used a few words back, cloudburst, downpour, storm, squall, shower being just a few of them. At one time I would have said that this shows how much the British suffer from rain. However, as English is also spoken in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, which are not noted for their propensity for precipitation, this probably won’t hold up to scrutiny when comparing us to the Innuit and their snow vocabulary.

Sorry, that was a digression sparked off by use of the word deluge.

The pictures are fish and chips with mushy peas and a pickled egg. To describe me as a foodie would be inaccurate.

Fish, chips, mushy peas (a bit too dark for my liking) and a pickled egg.

Vicissitude, Vocabulary and Victory

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Why is it that I can spell vicissitude, a word I seldom use, but I struggle with accommodation, cemetery and success? I use them all the time, so they should be second nature. They aren’t. I always have to think about them. There are others too, but I can’t call them to mind just now.

When I was 16 and coming up to a couple of years of exams (we needn’t discuss the results – the fact I ended up working on a farm rather than carving out a brilliant academic career is all you need to know) I started to read a dictionary – improving my vocabulary and my spelling. If you were to examine my vocabulary and spelling using modern forensic techniques, you would probably find that they are stronger in words beginning with A to H. There is, frankly, only so much dictionary you can read.

Similarly, at that time, I read a number of Shakespeare’s plays to increase the breadth of my knowledge. They mainly went over my head and passed into oblivion. There is only so much you can take in if you are simply reading something. I now realise that in the absence of a teacher I should have at least bought some notes to help me through the work. The only plays of Shakespeare that I know much about were the ones we studied at school and plus Henry V and Romeo and Juliet. The former is courtesy of Kenneth Branagh and the latter is from my watching of Shakespeare in Love.

When you look at my academic career from this point of view it’s hardly surprising that I ended up failing to shine.

However, now I mention academics, I am reminded that I was going to write a post on politicians and skit notes. I will start that in a minute so I don’t forget.

It’s nearly the 11th November, so the header picture is the 2021 Jersey “Masterpiece Poppy” coin 5 ounces of silver and a poppy made using metal from a Spitfire that flew operational sweeps over the Normandy beaches, army mess tins dated 1945 and a Landing Craft that actually landed tanks on D-Day.

Jersey 2020 Poppy Masterpiece Coin

This is the 2020 version – the poppy medallion is made from metal left after Spitfire PM631 had a major restoration. It was one of the last Spitfires in service (until 1957 with the Meteorological Flight) and one of the first planes in the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. The penny gives an idea of scale. It seems to be quite fashionable, and lucrative, to make souvenirs from bits of wartime scrap.

Apologies for the title, I was stretching a bit to obtain alliteration.

Burbling Boris the Blonde Buffoon

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I was thinking of other alliterative terms too, but good taste prevents me from using them.

The long-awaited speech from the Prime Minister on TV tonight turned out, after two days of leaked snippets, to be pretty much useless. It wasn’t so much a speech as a succession of vague mumblings, and very short on detail. It did verge on the Shakespearean in being told by an idiot and signifying nothing, but there was a sad lack of sound and fury.

Shakespeare – British Library

As a result, I am none the wiser about the way forward, but I do have a feeling of deep gloom. I didn’t have much confidence in the Government before lockdown, and I have less now. The only time I’ve been reasonably happy with the conduct of the Government coincided with the period the Prime Minister spent in hospital.

We don’t have a plan, it seems, just ‘the shape of a plan’.

It reminds me of Churchill – ‘ this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

It is not a plan. It is not even the beginning of a plan. It is the shape of a plan.

Sadly, Boris Johnson, in addition to being no Shakespeare, is no Churchill.

Churchill

Forgive my underwhelming response, but I now have to plan for going back to work.

This starts tomorrow, or Wednesday, or the first week in June. It’s even more non-specific if you work in a pub or restaurant.

They would like me to walk, cycle or use my car because public transport is going to be limited due to the need for social distancing. That should quickly undo all the gains we made by staying at home for six weeks.

And there was no mention of masks.

Although we are allowed to do a bit more mixing they are going to beef up the police powers by doubling the fines for breaches of the regulations. If severe punishments worked I’m sure we’d still be hanging people for stealing handkerchiefs, but try telling a politician that.

That never looks correct in writing, but I checked it up and dictionaries seem happy with either handkerchiefs or handkerchieves. The spellchecker isn’t, but that’s life. The strange thing is that I pronounce it handkerchieves, but spell it handkerchiefs.

I’m just watching a programme about Ladybird books, which is why I’ve missed my deadline. It seems that a child only needs a vocabulary of 12 words to start reading. One of them appears to be ‘dog’ but ‘cat’, it seems, is not necessary. Adults, they claim, have a vocabulary of 20,000 words. I am dubious about that. I honestly doubt that I use 1,000, but I really can’t be bothered to count them. I do know it’s possible to get by with eight words on my drive to work. These eight don’t feature either ‘cat’ or ‘dog’.

I just went looking for a vocabulary test to see how large my vocabulary is. Instead, I started to do a quiz about how long I’m going to live. Based on diet, lifestyle and various other quasi-scientific mumbo-jumbo I have 6 years 293 days and 32 minutes. That’s a bit less than I calculated in a previous post. (2,483 compared to the previous calculation of 2,920). That’s a nuisance as I was planning on using those 500 days to write my memoirs.

A Man with No Plan

A New Day, A New Life

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Today is the first day of the new regime. I have celebrated this by using a picture of dawn from the free photo library. It was easier than getting up early to take a less impressive photo.

Smaller portions, more exercise and earlier rising are three key points in the new way of life and have just been forced to add another – no internet quizzes. I’ve spent the last 20 minutes pitting my wits against Merriam Webster vocabulary tests and once again, my wits have come second. I’m good for my age, according to the calculator, but rarely make it to the heights of the top ten. Part of the trouble is that my computer is a bit slow, which loses me points. Leaving that excuse aside, the main problem, of course, is that I get words wrong. It’s amazing how many words I’ve never heard of. This sounds like a continuation of yesterdays post, but it isn’t meant to. It’s a lot less surprising to find a new word than to find a new idiom.

I’ve also given up doomsurfing, which was one of M-W’s new words for today. I started it a few weeks ago and gave it up last week. This week I learned the new word for it.

There is a fine line between keeping informed and wallowing in bad news. I started spending too much time looking at news and statistics and this invariably affected my outlook. This may or may not be linked to the way I lapsed into becoming a TV fixated jellyfish, sitting staring at the screen most of the day. However, in the few days since I stopped looking at bad news, I have felt better.

Going back to the second paragraph, 20 minutes of internet quizzes is 20 minutes away from productive work. There is no point in replacing uselessly staring at a TV screen with uselessly staring at a computer screen.

I am now going to check up on the word “doom”. M-W covers it, telling us that it originally meant judgement, but it doesn’t talk about the church wall paintings. Like so many things, I’ve always meant to search some out, but never got round to it. I’m fascinated by them , and by all church wall paintings. In fact, by all wall paintings. I have, more than once, had tea in Newark by a wall that was still decorated with Elizabethan wall paintings (though I believe that tea room has now closed). I like the idea that something has survived for hundreds of years. This is particularly true of the church paintings as they were targeted for destruction during the Reformation. I find the whole story of the Reformation and the rediscovery of the paintings under coats of whitewash, to be fascinating.

Doom painting, from St Thomas’s Church, Salisbury

And for my Suffolk readers – the Doom from Wenhaston Church, which, as the link shows, has a very interesting story.

Two New Words

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I have a Word of the Day sent to my email every day, and don’t normally open the message as they aren’t often new words to me. Yesterday I got the word canicular. I wasn’t familiar with it so I clicked to read. It means “of or relating to the period between early July and early September when hot weather occurs in the northern hemisphere”.

So that would be “summer”.

I’m not sure I can think of a use for canicular. Apart from the sentence “I’m not sure I can think of a use for canicular”.

That might be the last time I use it unless I need a rhyme for funicular and have already used particular. That is, realistically speaking, an unlikely scenario. For several reasons.

I do have another new word if you want one – shitsuren. It’s Japanese and it means “broken heart”, “unrequited love” or “disappointed love”. It’s probably as useless as canicular, but much more fun to use. And if I ever write my Limerick cycle on the US Presidents, I will have a rhyme for Martin van Buren.

More Planters

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We managed to get one of the waste bins partially dismantled, which gives us the basis for a planter trough.

There were eight screws on the hinge and five came out easily. Two came out less easily. And the final one wouldn’t budge. I applied my jemmy. It still didn’t budge. Eventually I had to drill the head of the screw, which finally worked. Only two more to go, plus a bit of internal remodelling.

Wastebin – conversion to planter

Planter – first stage

I feel a bit retro using the term jemmy, it’s one of those words from the world of pea soupers and mysterious foreigners in Limehouse, along with rozzers, darbies and petermen. A lifetime of reading classic crime has certainly broadened my vocabulary.

It’s an on-going process, and we’re going to have a bit of work to do yet, but it seems a shame to throw them out.

Knowledge, wisdom and an anagram

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Someone once told that if you learn a new thing every day you will end up as the wisest man in the world.

As we’ve discussed previously, (notably in relation to the dik-dik episode) there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. It’s likely that you may end up as the most knowledgeable man in the world, but wisdom may still be beyond your grasp.

Anyway, unless you are Stephen Fry or a quiz champion there isn’t necessarily any money in knowledge. Quite honestly, if the price of riches is becoming Stephen Fry I’m not sure the price is worth it. Same goes for quiz champions – I really don’t want to cram my head with sporting trivia and I’m quite happy with my patchy knowledge of the Kings and Queens of England. Having a few gaps in the list is a human failing I can endure, and knowing that Louis VIII of France was also briefly King of England (a fact overlooked by school history books) gives me a slight tingle of smugness.

So what have you learned today Simon? I hear you ask, knowing full well I am setting you up for something.

I have learnt the meaning of the word sempiternal. I take no pleasure in knowing it as I will probably never use the word, but will have to leave it on a mental shelf alongside rictus, jeremiad and obfuscate. All fine words but not really usable in 2015.

It’s also a bit embarrassing because it’s used in T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding (a poem I have read and a village I have visited) and I hadn’t bothered to look it up. That doesn’t look good for a man who likes words and learning things. However, I was a teenager and I have changed since then (perhaps even improved).

Talking of T. S. Eliot, did you know that his name is an anagram for “toilets”?

My father-in-law (who wrote light verse and had a reasonable facial resemblance to Eliot) never tired of pointing that out. In fairness to my father-in-law, who might be seen as coming off second best here in intellectual terms, his verse may not have attracted the critical acclaim of Eliot’s, but he did read on stage with a number of well-known performance poets and he did always put a smile on your face.

On top of that, with my father-in-law, having been a physiotherapist all his life, was a sound man to consult if you had nagging joint pain.

I’ve never felt that Eliot would have offered much comfort once the damp weather drew on and your knee started to creak.

As for tomorrow’s learning – I need to find out how to grow coffee plants and why we need the word sempiternal when eternal looks like it will do the job just as well.

Has anybody out there in hotter places grown coffee plants?

Now I’m merely simmering…

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OK, no more ranting, I’ve been comprehensively lectured on being nice by my wife, I’ve filled up on tea and I’ve just bought the bacon for my breakfast sandwiches so I’m in a mellow place. I’m far from booking my place at the Pollyanna School of Business Management but I can now type without shouting at the screen.

It’s also, accidentally, well over a day since my last post, which is good for calming down.

We had 62 kids making pizza yesterday (amongst other things), which isn’t easy. It called on all my depths of calmness, particularly as the final group seemed to contain the most irritating children of the day. At that point you have to remember that they are only young, and that to say what you really want to say to them would probably result in another complaint from the parents…

After we waved them off and had a welcome cup of tea I reflected on a day spent standing uncomfortably close to four fan ovens blasting out 200 degrees C. Maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself and not told my wife and another colleague that their day spent out in the open air prodding bees and flowers was easy compared to my day with washing up and timings and an edible end result to produce. At least the resulting atmosphere allows me to use the welcome word “frosty”.

Then the explosions occurred.

The first one was quite small, more of a bang, and the electricity went off.

The electricity returned and we were just saying “I wonder what…” when the big one happened. My wife nearly fell off her chair and the poultry started making a commotion. It occurs to me that I’ve lived all these years and I don’t actually know the word for the noise a flock of agitated chickens makes. Then again, there are lots of words I don’t know, though I can’t tell you how many, as I don’t know them.

Outside on the lane the box on one of the poles was producing sparks like a Roman candle.

Generator and jump leads – high tech!

And that was why I had no electricity to blog until I got home. When I did get home I had to go shopping for the Wednesday evening visitors, a process made more complex by the failure of the freezers in my local supermarket. Then I had to eat ice cream. It was only at that point that I was able to power up the netbook before falling asleep in my chair.

So that is why the blog is late and I have calmed down since that last one.

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Life after the Care Farm