posted by sooyup
on
Daily trivia,
Pictures of Emm
In addition to my primary obsession (pictured left) I have always been fascinated by words. And English, with its penchant for hoovering up words from other languages (pyjamas, bungalow, penchant) has a wide enough range of fascinating words to keep any dilettante happy. Take the word taghairm for example which I first came across in a cryptic crossword. I forget what the clue was but basically, the definition is “to lie under a Scottish waterfall, wrapped in a steaming ox-hide, prophesying the future.” Be honest, didn’t you always know we would need a word for that? Given this love of precision, the strange thing is that there isn’t also a word meaning “to lie under a Welsh waterfall, wrapped in a steaming ox-hide, prophesying the future.” And so on ad infinitum. Or so on at least until we reach a word for “to sit on a sheep-skin looking pretty and without a thought for the future.”
In addition to my primary obsession (pictured left) I have always been fascinated by words. And English, with its penchant for hoovering up words from other languages (pyjamas, bungalow, penchant) has a wide enough range of fascinating words to keep any dilettante happy. Take the word taghairm for example which I first came across in a cryptic crossword. I forget what the clue was but basically, the definition is “to lie under a Scottish waterfall, wrapped in a steaming ox-hide, prophesying the future.” Be honest, didn’t you always know we would need a word for that? Given this love of precision, the strange thing is that there isn’t also a word meaning “to lie under a Welsh waterfall, wrapped in a steaming ox-hide, prophesying the future.” And so on ad infinitum. Or so on at least until we reach a word for “to sit on a sheep-skin looking pretty and without a thought for the future.”
