The Frumplingtons

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.

Only one game of Scrabble today, but what a game it was. Three seven-letter words, although one of them was really an eight: U-N-T-r-E-A-D-S. The lower-case ‘r’ means that letter was already on the board and the seven letters were placed around it. However, it still counted as using all the letters on the rack, so Shana, who put it down (as the last word of the game, no less) bagged 68 points and won by a comfortable margin.

Earlier, Shana had also scored a bingo with E-A-S-T-E-[R]-N. Here, the ‘R’ in brackets indicates a blank tile that Shana designated it as an ‘R’.

My own (and only) seven-letter word today came early in the game and was G-I-B-L-E-T-S.

One thing we sometimes do to wind down from the hour-long adrenalin rush of one of our Scrabble sessions, is to make up humorous sentences using various words on the board. Today, we both agreed that “EASTERN GIBLETS” would make an excellent name for a food processing company in what is often referred to in the pages of Ptomaine Monthly, as ‘the meat sector’.

Hmm, I wonder if Eastern Giblets have any vacancies…

We’ve just spent the last hour enjoying a game of Scrabble™.

It’s surprising though, how, even in this most gentle and cerebral of games (haha, that ain’t the way we play it, Buster!) the demon Paranoia can creep in without you realising it. READ MORE >>

Proof yet again, if proof were needed, that The Frumplingtons have little hope of a lasting career in stand-up comedy. We don’t care: we prefer sitting down anyway.

TEACHER: Give me an example of a sentence with the word ‘auspices’.

PUPIL: If your auspices on my lawn again, I’ll set my dog on him.

Ha. I’d like to see how Google Translate copes with such sophisticated wordplay. Face it, GT: you’re lightweight.

Chris

If you want to watch grown men acting like spoilt children, both Match of the Day and its ’sister programme’, Match of the Day 2, are essential viewing. Tonight’s MoTD2 featured the customary montage of name-calling and shirt-tugging incidents, including one unfortunate player pillock who was sent off about five seconds after coming on as a substitute. Adrian Chiles’s running commentary was the perfect blend of contempt, derision and astonishment. That dry Brummie humour never fails to entertain.

When the camera cut back to the studio afterwards, Chiles turned to one of his co-presenters: “You’re no stranger to touchline rumpuses yourself,” he said. “Or should that be ‘rumpi’?”

“That Adrian Chiles is far too educated for Match of the Day,” I said to Shana. “He’ll be after Paxman’s job on University Challenge next.”

Strangely, although I knew Chiles had only been joking, I still found it hard to resist checking the etymology of ‘rumpus’. And this sort of thing seems to have been happening more and more over the past year or so. If it gets any worse, I’ll be spending all day looking up ‘the ‘ and ‘and’. I might even insist on reading the dictionary at the dinner table, although I’m not sure that Shana would approve of my propping it up against the tomato sauce bottles.

Why do I have this sudden urge to investigate words I know perfectly well? I have joked that it might be due to what I vaguely refer to as ‘early-onset….’ The ellipsis is quite deliberate. Shana and I both tacitly understand the full phrase to be something along the lines of ‘early-onset stupidity/daftness etc’, as if it’s something I’ve caught from the local yokels since moving to Lincoln several years ago. This could quite possibly be true. But further tests are needed.

Chris