The Frumplingtons

Our Christmas shopping schedule has just suffered an unforeseen setback caused by the intrinsically humorous qualities of — would you believe it? — chocolate.

It surprised me, too. Chocolate is, after all, a serious business, a staple diet of millions in our part of the world. It’s even available deep-fried north of the border. Round here, though, we’re a bit more genteel; we like our choccies individually wrapped and with little charts giving names and brief descriptions of each one. Last year we had Quality Street, so this year Shana thought it was time for a change.

“Do you like Woses?” Shana asked, taking a look at what was on offer at our favourite online supermarket. I knew she meant Roses, but I couldn’t figure out why she was aping tv presenter Jonathan Ross’s characteristic pronunciation of the letter ‘R’. I decided to reply in the same manner and so, mimicking Shana mimicking Jonathan Ross, I answered,

“No. I prefer gewaniums.”

For some strange reason, Shana and I then collapsed in a prolonged fit of the giggles.

“Abandon shop!” cried Shana, logging out and almost falling out of the office chair in the process.

Normal shopping service will be resumed in due course.

Funny how the mind works, isn’t it? Shana had only to say the word ‘puzzled’ in conversation yesterday and my brain was away on tangents entirely of its own devising.

From ‘puzzled’ in just under a nanosecond I’d arrived at ‘enigmatic’. Natural enough, I guess. Wouldn’t raise too many questions in your average session of free association on Freud’s couch — except that what popped into my head straight after that was ‘enigmatic drill’.

Enigmatic drill?

Seems I’d invented a totally new machine.

Or had I?

What I suppose I’d meant to think about was pneumatic drill. Those old rattlers have been around for years, though; nothing pneu about them any more, is there? But could this be a simple case of confusion, of thinking about one thing when I meant another. Or was there more to it? Let’s see:

I have a theory about pneumatic drills. I reckon they’re really anti-gravity devices. Think about it. Picture the burly workman outside his red-and-white striped tent at five minutes to midday. It’s not quite lunch break — not officially anyway — but there’s no time to dig up any more of the king’s highway. So what’s he to do? Easy. He’ll just lean on his drill for five minutes. And the drill is the only thing that stops him from falling over. Ergo¹, it must be an anti-gravity device.

Gee, I could win the Nobel prize for nonsense at this rate!

But this doesn’t answer the question, does it? What the heck is an ‘enigmatic drill’ anyway? (Or as they might ask in some parts of deepest Lincolnshire, ‘what the hell’s an enigmatic drill when it’s at home²?’)

I think I’ve figured it out. It’s a drill owned by a reluctant home handyman. Being reluctant, he’s not likely to buy it himself, is he? No, he usually acquires his enigmatic drill as a present from either a spouse or partner who is hoping, by their show of generosity, to shock or encourage him out of his shyness about shelving or his resistance to Rawlplugs. When he gets the drill, he can see quite clearly what it is, but is often heard to say something along the lines of ‘What’s this supposed to be for?’ — hence the ‘enigma’ epithet. The principle can easily be applied to other power tools, so, for example, we could have the enigmatic angle grinder, or (if the bloke in question is a reluctant gardener) the enigmatic rotavator³.

Men frequently seem puzzled by other items of heavy plant such as steam irons or vacuum cleaners. However, neither of these things is, strictly speaking, ‘enigmatic’; in these cases, the man’s puzzlement is, alas, genuine.

References:
¹ Tip to budding writers: always include some Latin. It sounds more scientific — even if you don’t know what you’re on about.
²  Is this expression peculiar to Lincolnshire or does it occur anywhere else?
³ The enigmatic home-brew kit, however, does not exist.

The USA has some wonderful place names, and I discovered a new one while checking this blog’s visitor statistics (a grim but necessary task) this morning — King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

In Britain, you can work out something of the history of a town just by looking at the last letters of its name; names ending in -thorpe, for example, are usually places where Viking invaders settled in the 8th and 9th centuries. By contrast, in the States names often seem to have been made up on the spot, almost on a whim. So how on earth did King of Prussia get its name? Like all desperate researchers, I turned to Wikipedia for the answer. Turns out that 18,000 people live in K of P and it has the most biggestest shopping mall in the whole of the USA — so there! Oh, and it was founded sometime in the 18th century by a couple of Welshmen. But anyway, the name, the name; how did it get the name? Here’s what the Wikmeister told me:

[King of Prussia] took its name in the 18th century from a local tavern named “The King of Prussia Inn”, which was named for Frederick II, King of Prussia.

Er, right. They named it after the pub.

Lucky we don’t do that sort of thing over here in Blighty, then, isn’t it? After all, even if you like your drink, would you really want to live in a town called Rat and Parrot?

At GenderAnalyzer they use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to figure out if your blog is written by a man or a woman.

As you can see, AI isn’t yet an exact science.

“Confused or Confucius?” was a feature that I started a long time ago on an old blog. Heaven only knows why I haven’t the sense to leave it languishing in the archives, but I have nevertheless decided to revive it as an occasional feature on this blog.

At least it has the virtue of being sort of educational.

So here goes, with the first C or C posting…

The suffix ‘let’ is frequently used to signify something which is small, or a smaller version of something bigger.

For example:

• Piglet = a small or juvenile pig.
• Playlet = short, possibly one-act play.
• Rootlet = a small, secondary root on a plant.

All is clear so far. But then we come to:

“Pamphlet”. One of my favourite words.

But what the dickens is a pamph?

An idea popped into my head this morning (never a good sign, that).

“I’ve just thought of a really funny nom de plume and a book title to go with it,” I announced gleefully. “‘How to keep fit, by Jimmy Quipment’. Get it? Jimmy…Quipment…Gym equipment.”

Shana was speechless, presumably due to admiration.

“It’s brilliant, isn’t it?” I said, blowing my own trumpet for all I was worth and finding someone had stuffed a towel down the loud end.

“Of course,” I added, realising a little humility might not go amiss, “someone somewhere must have already had the idea of ‘Jimmy Quipment’, so I suppose you could say I’m a bit like Isaac Newton.”

“Why?” asked Shana. “Did an apple fall on your head?”

“No,” I said. “But it’s like when Newton invented calculus. Some say he came up with the idea first; others say it was his German oppo, Leibniz. But in the end it didn’t really matter, because they both thought of it independently.”

A quick search of the Internet revealed that, as expected, only two Leibnizes had gotten there before me. And one of those was on m-y-s-p-a-c-e, so it doesn’t really count. Are the Frumplingtons comic geniuses or what?

For firm proof that some people just don’t get all that rap and hippity-hop music, here’s what Shana recently asked me:

“What, exactly, is a ‘Gangsta’s Pair o’ Dice’?”

Aw shucks! I’ve no idea. Sorry.

The Scottish nanny state government has come up with an ingenious way to stop people smoking. (And before you ask, no, it’s not the old fire extinguisher trick.) They are going to take cigarettes off display in shops and they are going to hide them underneath the counter.

Displays of cigarettes in shops are set to become a thing of the past as part of the Scottish Government’s continuing drive to stop smoking and make Scotland healthier.

source: Scottish government press release.

What a brilliant idea! So simple, yet so effective. Don’t you wish you’d thought of it yourself?

When you think about it, that must be why Britain (and Scotland in particular) doesn’t have a chronic problem with drugs and drug-related crime: because drugs are not on display in the local newsagent’s.

Compare the Scottish idyll with what’s going on in England and you’ll see where we’re going wrong. In England it’s booze that’s the cause of all our woes:

Hospital admissions linked to alcohol use have more than doubled in England since 1995, an NHS report shows. Alcohol was the main or secondary cause of 207,800 NHS admissions in 2006/7, compared to 93,500 in 1995/96.

There has also been a 20% rise in the number of GP prescriptions for treating alcohol dependency in the past four years, the NHS Information Centre said.

source: BBC News (Hospital alcohol admissions soar)

So, why not cure our ills with the Scottish solution? Simply take all alcohol off public display. Mind you, Bargain Boooooze and Teskbury’s off-licence section are going to look a bit empty, aren’t they? But who cares? If it works, let’s do it.

While we’re about it, let’s cut knife crime (get it? ‘Cut’. ‘Knife’. Aw, please yourself…) by taking all the cutlery off all High Street department store shelves.

In fact, we could go one better than Johnny Scotsman. A lot of English pubs use plastic glasses instead of, well, glass glasses. So why not make everyone get rid of their knifey knives and switch over to rubber ones instead? That would also reduce the number of accidents in the kitchen, so it’s good news all round, isn’t it?

What other problems does Britain have? Football hooliganism? Easy solution: hide all the footballs.

Next!

Obesity epidemic? We could solve that one overnight. Just hide all the food.

Yes, as you can probably tell, we are experts on daftity and we sure as dafty heck know a daft idea when we hear one. In fact, that could be our motto: “The Frumplingtons: tough on daftness, tough on the causes of daftness”.

And the Scots’ idea of hiding the ciggies is about as daft as they come, hoots mon!

Shana’s latest attempt to rewrite the dictionary and explore the human condition was as follows:

“If someone is afraid to go out in public wearing a fluffy sweater, does that mean they suffer from angoraphobia?”

Ever seen one of those mystery thrillers on telly, where someone, a spy for instance, is ransacking an apartment or rifling through someone’s drawers? Suddenly, they hear footsteps and have to find somewhere to hide in a hurry. They often choose to hide behind the full-height curtains. What then gives them away is the tips of their shoes sticking out from underneath.

Well, that’s sort of what happened to us this morning, only with one or two differences: our curtains don’t reach the floor and there was no actual intruder. Apart from that, though, the scenario was exactly the same. You can only imagine how unnerving it was to see our bear Snodgrass’s feet protruding from behind one of our sofa cushions. Gonna have to keep a close eye on him from now on, I think.