The Frumplingtons

Our copy of the Harrod horticultural catalogue arrived in this morning’s post, and I was soon lost in vivid descriptions and colour photos of such wonders as walk-in fruit cages, wooden obelisks and long-handled forks.

This catalogue is a daydreamer’s delight. It’s educational, too. If it teaches you nothing else, at least it’ll prove whether you’re an optimist or not — and it looks as if we are; after all, we don’t do much gardening at the best of times, and yet even in the middle of winter, when the slugs have all turned to ice cubes and the ground is as hard as a fishwife’s stare, we can still fantasise about what we might do outdoors this coming summer. (Most likely, it’ll be our three usual gardening jobs — mowing, weeding and grumbling.)

We might even treat ourselves to a pair of Swiss army secateurs. The tagline on one Felco ad — ”most professional’s favoured brand of tool” — caught my eye first: it’s probably not most professionals’ preferred choice of where to put an apostrophe. Having said that, a good pair of secateurs will do a much better job when it comes to pruning (or even to chopping of bacon into small pieces in readiness for the occasional omelette, for that matter) so we’ll just have to overlook that apostrophical howler for now and concentrate on choosing the best tools for this year’s gardening jobs. Unfortunately, secateurs remain fairly low on my list. The number one garden tool this year, I predict, will be a hammock! Gotta go now. If anyone wants me, I ‘ll be in the garden having a snooze.

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.

As a fan of amusing typos, I was delighted to find this little error in today’s online version of the Boston Standard. In fact, you could say I was made-up! The screen shot of the story is, however, not made up at all. It is, alas, only too real. ‘Rouge operators’? I ask you! I’ll bet some poor overworked typist was blushing at that, eh?

This sign at Lincoln hospital is a good example of bad grammar. I’ll ignore the randomly capitalized letters and concentrate instead on the main problem.

The ‘Improperly Parked Vehicles will be Wheel Clamped’ part at the end is clear enough. The use of ‘or’, however, suggests that the sentence has at least two subjects, and this is where things start to go wrong, because ‘Failure to Display a Valid Parking Ticket / Permit’ might qualify as a subject for the ‘will be Wheel Clamped’ bit — except for the fact that it makes no sense.

I mean, how can you put a wheel clamp on ‘Failure’? I’d love to see that!

Maybe the writer should have split the sentence in two, using active rather than passive voice to give the first part more emphasis. Something like this:

All vehicles MUST display a valid parking ticket or permit. Improperly parked vehicles will be clamped.

But whatever you think of the sign’s wording, if your car does get clamped, don’t try arguing that you didn’t understand the parking instructions. After all, you can’t really miss the white ‘No Parking’ on the red background at the top, can you? If you can’t see that, perhaps you really shouldn’t be driving at all!

Try asking for a bite of the reality sandwich and see how far it gets you. (Answer: slung outta the door, most likely.)

It’s surprising what reading the back of a Horlicks jar can teach you…it says that in Shakespeare’s day, as mattresses were fastened on with ropes, they had to be tightened. Hence the phrase ‘Good Night, Sleep Tight’.

We can’t let such statements pass us by, so we boldy ventured onto the interweb to see if we could verify the statement. Many sites appear to disagree with Horlicks, The Phrase Finder quotes the following as a possible source:

The phrase actually isn’t very old. The first citation found is from 1866. In her diary Through Some Eventful Years, Susan Bradford Eppes included:

“All is ready and we leave as soon as breakfast is over. Goodbye little Diary. ‘Sleep tight and wake bright,’ for I will need you when I return”.

However, according to the 7 Ages of Manchester Festival 2006, the phrase does originate from Elizabethan times;

There are some common sayings we use today that have their origins in Elizabethan Times. The “sleep tight” part of “Night night, sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite” refers to the fact that the base of beds were made of ropes strung together. As the nights passed those ropes would get loose and it was the servant’s job to tighten them to ensure a good night’s sleep. The bed bugs biting were a fact of Elizabethan life!

And here is a picture of a 16th century rope bed with curtains, recreated at Weald and Downland Museum (source)

If you want to make one for yourself, like the one pictured below, then have a wander over to House Greydragon.

Next time remind me not to read the back of Horlicks’ jars!

Shana had a cheese and onion roll for lunch. After three bites, however, she declared it ‘horrible’. After that, she ate a dictionary instead. Yes, I know it sounds unlikely, but how else do you explain Shana’s later performance in our afternoon Scrabble game? I managed a couple of bingoes (UNRUSHeD at the start of the game, and HERRIES at the end), but Shana chalked up an impressive three seven-letter words: AcTIONED, InFORMAL and SlEEVING.

For stats addicts, Shana’s final score was 443, and mine was 369. Despite my having all four of the ‘big’ letters (Q, Z, J and X) I found myself held back by too many consonants or too many occurrences of the dratted U on the rack at once.

I blame the ‘Scrabble fairies’. They shuffle the letters at night when no-one is looking, you know.

Top Scrabble score of the day: HAZIEST. A bingo plonked right on top of a double-word-score square, so it was.

That was Shana’s word, by the way; not mine.

Oh, and the Z was on a treble-letter-score square as well.

Still, it was only worth a measly 136 points. No big deal really, I guess.

It’s not as if Shana needed the points anyway, seeing as she eventually beat me by over 200…aw, shucks, I think you get the gist…

This weekend we set another record for highest scoring ‘bingo’ (seven letter word), with BURNISH netting Shana a goodly number of points — 116, to be precise — as her word straddled two double-word-score squares as well as making up another double scorer with ARCH.

I’m just pleased we weren’t playing for 10p per point. That would’ve been all my pocket money for a whole month!

Pictured below is my biggest Scrabble error to date. There may be others in the future, but this one will take some beating.

The words FIX and WILT were put on the board after my little faux pas, as indeed was the S of VIMS. My original gaffe was to put the V and the I down to make VIM. I was thinking that if Shana had a P or an S then she might be able to make a big score off one of the treble word squares nearby. My intention was, naturally enough, to stop her from getting too far ahead. I had, however, forgotten that the top end of the board was already choked up with the other V and a Q close by.

In our picture, my rack is on the left, and Shana’s is on the right.

For the record, I was behind at the time I made the fatal error, despite having scored a 95-point bingo with ROUGHENS (the E being the blank); Shana had also had a bingo with YEASTED down at the bottom left.

Under the circumstances, I graciously conceded the match. However, if you think you can solve the stalemate, we might just be able to continue later this evening. Suggestions may be left, in the usual way, via the comments.

Update: I’ve just noticed, from the photo, that Shana had another bingo — NEARING — sitting on her rack. So that explains why she was less than chuffed at what happened.