Something Rhymes with Purple - Archipelago

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

This week's episode is coming to you from the back of a London Black Cab! Gyles kept calm and carried on to deliver the purple people today's episode on maps! We embark on a captivating journey through the history of maps, uncovering the hidden stories behind the words we use to describe these navigational tools. Join us as we delve into the etymological roots of cartography and discover how maps have shaped our understanding of the world. We love hearing from you, find us @SomethingRhymes on Twitter and Facebook, @SomethingRhymesWith on Instagram or you can email us on our NEW email address here: [e-mail] Want even more purple, people? Join the Purple Plus Club by clicking the banner in Apple podcasts or head to purpleplusclub.com to listen on other platforms' Don’t forget that you can join us in person at our upcoming tour, tap the link to find tickets: www.somethingrhymeswithpurple.com  Enjoy Susie’s Trio for the week:  Retrogradation: a backward movement. Latrogenic: caused by a doctor or medical professional. Fantods: There is an indescribable complaint, which will never allow a moment’s repose to mind or body; which nothing will satisfy—which allows of no beginning, and no ending—which wheels round the mind like a squirrel in its cage, ever moving, but still making no progress. Gyles' poem this week was ‘The Goldfish That Died’ by Gyles Brandreth (the shortest poem in the history of world literature, and features in the Guinness Book of World Records!) ‘O, Wet Pet’ A Sony Music Entertainment production.   Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts     To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail]  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up y'all it's your man Mark Strong Strizzy and your girl Jem the Jem of all Jems and we're hosting Olympic FOMO your essential recap podcast of the 2024 Olympic Games in 20 minutes or less every day we'll be going behind the scenes for all the wins

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amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, Other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to another episode of Something Rhymes with Purple. Now, this is a podcast all about words and language. And traditionally, I would be sitting, well, I am sitting still in my little cubbyhole in Oxford, and Giles would be in his dungeon or his basement in London, and we would be talking to each other on Zoom. And it's a tiny bit different today, Giles, because I can pretty much just see your nose and you don't look to be at home. Where on earth are you? I'll tell you where I am.

I've tried to move the camera a bit away so you can see where I am. I'm in a London black cab taxi. This was my first mistake, except he's a very nice driver. But I should have either walked or found a tube station and then taken a bus to get back to my home and my basement studio. But I've had rather a long day and I've got two suitcases with me. Because last night I was doing

my show, Charles Branforth can't stop talking, in Yeovil, which is in Somerset. And to get from Yeovil to London, I had to take quite a slow train this morning from Yeovil, which is in Somerset. And to get from Yeovil to London, I had to take quite a slow train this morning from Yeovil by all sorts of beautiful places, including Salisbury, to get to London. I then had to go to, well, I won't give you too much detail, a variety of bookshops to sign copies of my new book, Elizabeth, An Independent Portrait.

And I had much excitement, particularly at Hatch Arts, when I signed the books on a table where Oscar Wilde in the 1880s signed copies of his books. Pretty exciting. Oh, that is exciting. Then I walked to the

Grosvenor House Hotel where I met up with Rory Stewart. Do you know who I mean by Rory Stewart? Oh, I'm a huge fan of Rory Stewart. People are. I have to say, I wish he had become the leader. Oh, and I think he does as well. I think'm a huge fan of Rory Stewart. I have to say, I wish he had become

the leader. I think he does as well. He talked a lot of sense. Yeah. He would like to have become prime minister. I think he still has ambitions. Anyway, he's a very interesting and amusing person. But he's so knowledgeable. He's very knowledgeable. Very knowledgeable. And we had a fun time together. And then I said, I must go now because my friend Susie Dent is waiting for me. And he said, oh, you know Susie? I said, I know Susie. Anyway. If you knew Susie like I knew Susie.

Yes, he will never have heard of me. I went down and I got into a cab and I said to the cab driver, how long will it take to get to my address? And he said, oh, you'll be there in 40 minutes you'll get there just at the time we were due to start our recording i said thank you in i get and then we get to somewhere called parsons green and the traffic comes to a standstill and it's still to standstill i'm waiting to get across something called putney bridge right so this is going to

be our first literally the something rhymes with purple roadmes with Purple Roadshow. I'm on the road. You're in the studio. Do you know what? You actually sound better than you do quite often at home. I don't know what it is, but the acoustics are very good. I can see people walking past far more quickly than you seem to be going. I mean, this is, I've just come up the King's Road, Chelsea.

It's a lovely part of town. And it's a warm day. I mean, what I should really do is get out and just walk home, which I could do in about half an hour. But I've got these two cases. Because during the show last night, I take on my props and my sound equipment and a variety of jumpers to wear in the show.

So I'm rather burdened. And also, wait for this. I went to the Groven House Hotel and look what they gave me. This is a box of lovely park room scones for me to take home to my wife. Oh, you definitely can't take those out into the stifling heat. Oh, how amazing. I'll tell you, I'm lost, really. I'm lost.

Which is appropriate because you suggested this week's subject should be maps cartography etc yes yes shall we do a purple episode on the move let's kick off because i'm not completely sure where you are on the map um and so as you say it seems entirely fitting what should i tell you about the word map itself please that is uh i mean obviously we we have been making maps since the beginning of time. I mean, the history of cartography, it's the kind of development throughout human history. And maps have been probably one of the most important human inventions, I guess, for millennia. And so we're not completely sure when the earliest maps were made, but some of the earliest surviving maps, in fact, I think the possibly oldest surviving map was

engraved on a mammoth tusk can you believe that which dates back to 25 000 bc which was in the czech republic which is incredible and i say all this as a backdrop to the fact that map actually is a word is is fairly recent from that perspective early 16th century. And it is from the medieval Latin mappa mundi, which means sheet of the world. And by sheet here, they mean a sort of big sheet of paper and mundi, as I say, of the world. And cartography is the writing of cards, I suppose, if you take it in its most literal sense sense and that card goes back to the latin charter which was a papyrus leaf and as you know i love the beginnings of these kind of things i love the beginnings of well paper itself comes from papyrus book comes from a germanic word

meaning a beech tree you know all of those i just think just think it's so wonderful that we still preserve their history in those words. But yeah, map, surprisingly recent. The mapamundi was abbreviated to, there was a mapamundi, a map of the world. But map as map on its own is a contraction of mapa. And that's 16th century, that's around the time of Shakespeare. Exactly. And as you say, there was the Mappa Mundi, that was the famous 13th century map of the world that's now in Hereford Cathedral, I think. And it's round. And it's quite typical of maps of the time because it's got Jerusalem at its centre, that map. And again, you know, a bit like language itself, actually,

maps are wonderful preservations of how the world was viewed. And you can see how maps and language intersect there because ocean, for example, looks back to a Greek word that meant the sort of outer sea because they thought that the world was kind of girdled if you like by a very large stream almost that encircled the earth's disc and they thought the mediterranean was in the middle of the earth so mediterranean middle of the earth so you know that language and maps intersect here in terms of how we viewed our geography when did the noun a map become the verb to map quite quickly 1589 so not long after actually 1527 map as a noun 1589 first record as map as a verb did you have i mean i was i was obsessed with globes when i was little and in fact when i left oxford university press to join countdown full time that the program that i now work on that the parting gift was not a golden handshake

or a golden watch or anything it was a beautiful globe and it was just the loveliest present and of course atlases also were just wonderful these physical atlases which I'm not sure children have so much now did you love them I love a globe I was at a boarding school called Bedales in Hampshire where they had in my day and they have to this day, in the beautiful library, which was an arts and crafts building created

100 years ago now, they had at the end of the library, which is all beautiful oak beams, this huge globe, about three foot high, on a stand, and you could stand by it and twirl it around. And it was lit from within. So at night time, in this library, as the light was falling outside, inside was this glowing globe. And I think when I last visited the school library,

they'd kept the globe from my day, from the 1960 so it was still the soviet union uh countries in africa had different names from the names they have now and i love that because as you say an old globe gives you the story of what the world was like once upon a time exactly and what about atlases because i remember pouring over this color atlas that i had that just that was just one of my all time favorite books together with the britannia britannica not Britannia Britannica encyclopedia and also Pears encyclopedia of medicine those those are my three books yes you were a little bit of a reference you were a reference book girl that's fun you mentioned the word Atlas there now Atlas is a character and was he the character who carried the globe on his shoulders is that why Atlas is? Yeah, so he was a titan or a giant in Greek mythology,

and he was punished for taking part in a rebellion against the gods, and his punishment was to bear the weight of the world upon his shoulders. And the atlas, or the collection of maps, is called an atlas because the early ones were printed with an illustration of atlas bearing the world on his back on the title page so the atlantic ocean also gets its name its name from atlas the atlantic actually originally referred to the mountains before it referred to a sea and we have the atlas mountains in morocco and it's i love i love the sort of idea of this the atlas mountains were

thought to be so high that they were imagined to be holding up the sky isn't that beautiful when I was a little boy there were in newspapers and magazines advertisements that you would send off to get a kit to turn you into Mr Atlas in fact I think they were advertised by a character called Mr Atlas who had huge biceps and was a muscular figure. And I wrote off for one of these kits, which I found the other day. And my wife said to me, oh, and there was a similar kit for girls. She said, mine was to build my biceps. And then she began saying a phrase from her childhood where she said, there used to be a sort of slogan, I must and must improve my bust.

Oh, yes. Do you remember that? Yes, yes. And you used to do these kind of exercises which I'm now showing you on Zoom, where you just arch back your arms. Yes. I only remember that from carry-on films, I think.

That's where I remember that phrase from. So Mr. Atlas was a sort of predecessor to the British Mr. Motivator, was he? Yes. And there was also Mr. Universe. Oh, yes. I mean, basically, these were strong men. And if you were like me, a weed, I was a weed,

a sort of concave-chested weed with no arms of any kind. I aspired to be this gorgeous, muscular figure, but it never came to pass. Have you ever done weights at all? No, I'm useless. I'm now reaping the whirlwind of not having done those exercises when I was young. I'd like to become an old Mr. Atlas. So Atlas gave his name to the Atlas. We have maps, we have atlases, we have the Atlas Mountains, we have the Atlantic Ocean. Continue taking me through this cartographer's dream. Yes.

Well, we have globe, which we've just talked about. And that simply goes back to a Latin word. And it's all about spherical objects. Oh, forgive me. Did the globe exist when people thought the world was square? Because there was a time when people thought you'd get to the edge of the world and fall off. Well, yes, that's very true. Let me look again.

If I get the OED and we can try and map it literally to its history. 1450, a spherical or rounded body. And then in early astronomy in the 16th century, it was the sphere occupied by the sun, the moon, or a planet. So it was a planetary sphere rather than the whole earth and then 1542 a spherical representation of the earth with its map on the surface so yeah the globes and you could teach actually to teach geography was known as teaching the globes which is quite nice so yeah we're looking at 16th century here and then of course you also get the golden orb that is part of a king or queen's regalia so yeah so that all goes back to the latin for a rounded object which also obviously

gives globule and that kind of thing the oldest surviving terrestrial globe is something wonderfully called the erdapfel so the erdapfel I mean, if you were to take that name in modern German, it means potato. But it's not related to that because potatoes hadn't yet been brought from America to Europe. So this was produced from 1490 to 1492. And it simply means the apple of the earth. And it's obviously so known because it was drawn on paper and then pasted on a layer of parchment around a globe and the americas aren't included in that interestingly enough so it shows a really huge eurasian continent and then an empty ocean between europe and asia which is quite nice it is fascinating isn't it i i wish i i wasn't very good at geography at school but i can see

the romance of cartography and the history of cartography. I just think it's quite magical. The thing that confused me at school, but I loved when I was a school boy, a film was made of the Jules Verne story around the world in 80 days. And I never quite understood the end of the story because he arrives in back in London. He sets off phineas fogg from the reform club and he's got to to win the bet he's got to travel around the world in 80 days and he arrives back on what he thinks is the 81st day but because he's passed the equator or something in fact it's still the 80th day i don't understand that do you understand that not really but i do

know that it was quite a good series with David Tennant quite recently. So we could always go and watch that. I did actually watch the first one and then had loads of writing to do, so I missed the rest. But yeah, I love David Tennant. I can tell you a little bit about various words. I mean, we have topography, which is the arrangement of the physical features of an area and that goes back to the greek topos a place we have a toponym which is a word named after a place and we have utopia as well which sir thomas moore in 1516 he coined that word utopia because it was

an imaginary island with a you know know, perfect social and political system. But the name is really telling because it implies that this place doesn't exist because he got utopia from the Greek, a Greek prefix meaning not, and the topos meaning a place. So there's no place. It's nowhere. So utopia is a non-existent place. So you're looking for your utopia in fact it will never

exist by definition exactly and and i can tell you a little bit about i don't know the latitude and the longitude i mean well latitude simply from the latin meaning broad longitude obviously long nothing too exciting to say to say there but we have meridian and the use in astronomy of meridian is due to the fact that the sun crosses a meridian at noon because it goes back to the latin medias meaning middle and then dies meaning a day so we have that we have a hemisphere which is half you know half the celestial sphere if you like we have the equator which is from medieval latin it means to make equal we have a scale which cartographers talk about quite a lot so that the word scale that has well three three main meanings i think and two of them share an ancestry so

the scale of fish and reptiles has the same root as the scale that's used for weighing believe it or not and are both related to shells so that's quite uh quite a family and then the scale that's used in music and measuring that goes back to the latin scala meaning a ladder and ultimately it's from a verb meaning to climb and you will find that in ascend, descend, condescend. All of those came into English from skandere, meaning to climb, but it also gave us the scale that cartographers use, which kind of, I suppose, climb up the map. And is this the same as the musical scale?

Is La Scala the opera house? It must be. Musical scale, yeah, because it's ascending, descending. It's all about climbing, which is quite lovely. Should we take a break while you're in the car? Are you moving? How are you getting on? I can't.

Well, we're hardly moving. I'd say just to keep listeners attuned and abreast, so far this podcast has cost your listeners £61.40. That's what's on the clock, but we're going to put on the driver and i until we get there because um i'm hoping he takes cards because i haven't got that sort of cash but let's let's take a break and i fear after the break you'll still find me where i am by the way i want to say this will interest you i've been told recently that in television and radio now they're no longer saying take a break we We've now got, no, we've got now sort of seamless listening. So the idea is if you say the

word take a break, people think it's going to be an ad and they avoid it, or they change to something different. So now what we have is suddenly people hear an advertisement in the middle of nothing. So if listeners in weeks to come on our podcast, you don't hear us say, let's take a break. That's because the producers have decided, oh, we're into the world of seamless broadcasting now. And you just merge the program with the advertisement. But with most television programs I watch, the advertisements are better than the programs anyway. So I love the ads. So what's it like to buy your first cryptocurrency on Kraken?

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Well, we are back to the back of the taxi with Giles, who I can see on my Zoom feed is, wouldn't even say crawling to be honest because the same red building has been behind him for the last 10 minutes and i am in somewhere much more boring i am in a very static place in my little study and about half an hour ago suzy because it would take normally only half an hour to get along the whole road i've come from sloan square along the King's Road in Chelsea in London, and I passed a part of the road that's known as World's End. And when I was a little boy living in London, I loved coming to World's End because I thought it was World's End.

I thought it was the end of the world. I think it was probably named after a pub called the World's End, which is in this area. It's a lovely idea. I know there's a World's end in edinburgh isn't it isn't there as well and you've just come back from edinburgh but in chelsea it was it was a slum at some point and i'm sure you're right i'm sure there was a um a pub there but no but maybe also maybe it was because it was once squalid maybe interesting in this part part of London, there was wealth and squalor living side by side. As you know, I'm an enthusiast for Oscar Wilde. And he lived in a house not far from where I am now, in Tithe Street in Chelsea.

And his house, there was a house, a street of houses, a lot of artists lived in that street. But they were quite respectable houses. They were quite grand houses. But literally, at the back of these houses, so only one street away, was a street of poverty with people living in slum conditions with their pigs and their chickens, those who were lucky enough to have a bit of livestock. So side by side in London in Victorian times was wealth, prosperity, and dire poverty. So maybe the world's end was because, oh my goodness, this place is so grim. It's like the end of the world. I don't know.

That's very sad. Well, if people actually listening to this do know, we've got a new address. There is a new address. You're absolutely right. It is purplepeopleatsomethingrhymes.com. And we love hearing from people we're going to do i think a little bonus episode um on some of these but i'm just going to tell you one of my all-time favorite well two favorite etymological facts if i may to do with geography before we get to the correspondence one is the word archipelago because an archipelago is a sort of group of islands isn't it but actually originally if you

take it all the way back to its greek roots it means chief sea because it was actually originally used as a proper name for the aegean sea and the current scent arose because the aegean sea has a large number of islands so that was quite a big shift. And talking of islands, I love this fact. You know how I love how English often evolves by mistake. We, or rather Renaissance scholars, thought that it would be nice to show the classical heritage of English by taking some of the old spellings and mixing them up and inserting some letters which were always silent and have remained silent just to show off the latin heritage and island is one of them okay so they took the word island which it was spelled in various ways but including i l a and a and d which is quite simple and they thought oh no but this goes back to the latin insula so we're going

to stick an s in there we may not pronounce it but we're going to stick an S in there. We may not pronounce it, but we're going to stick it in there. And so spelling and sound, you know, I mean, they divorced quite a long time ago, but it was part of that kind of rift. But actually, they got it wrong because actually it goes back to a Viking word, not a Latin word. And by rights, we should be talking about an eagland that we live live on, an eagle land, not an island at all. And it was just purely a mistake because they thought they knew their Latin better than anyone else. So I love that. Anyway, should we go on to our correspondence? Yes, please do.

But I've loved learning all about the world of cartography, maths, and thinking about the good old days. And I aspire to be Mr. Atlas. Oh, there's so much more and any cartographers out there will be banging their head saying but why didn't they mention x y and z in which case please do write to us because i know there's a lot more we can say it's purple people at something rhymes.com well who's been in touch this week i haven't got the correspondence with you because i'm sitting in the back of a london black cab okay um cab is short incidentally for cabriolet yes it's short for taximeter cabriolet so if you want me to unpick that a little bit so taximeter is I mean obviously

it's there because it actually has a a meter in it and the cabriolet it kind of got it got a little bit jumbled along the way because um people thought it had something to do with a goat which in latin was c-a-p-e-r gave us caper for example and capricorn and capricorn and they thought that the carriage's motion of those original ones were a bit like a goat's kind of leap which is quite nice. So a cabriolet was a light two-wheeled carriage, wasn't it, with a hood drawn by a horse. But that's still appropriate to me because the taxi meter part, we've got up to exactly 66 pounds. And the cabriolet, we are jerking forward a little bit like a goat with whooping cough. We don't move and then we sort of jerk forward an inch or two. Who's been in touch? So our first note is from Joe in Geelong. Is that how you spell

it? Geelong in Australia. Yes, it is. I remember that because I think our present king, King Charles III, when he was a teenager, had to go to show, as it were, interest in the Commonwealth, a commitment to the Commonwealth. He had to go to a school in Trilo. So I feel I've known that name for many years. Okay, along with Wanganui, wasn't there in New Zealand? I think quite a few people in the royal family went there. Anyway, this is from Joe, who says, Hi, Giles and Susie, can you please help with something

that popped uninvited into my head? I have that experience all the time. Okay, lust, lusty, lustful, lusting, luster. Wait, what? Does luster have anything to do with lust? And she very swiftly says that the podcast is one of the highlights of her week. So thank you, Jo. I think I really wanted them to be connected, but I sort of knew that they weren't. But, you know, they are so similar that you're completely forgiven for wondering. So, lustre, first of all, as in, you know, that silver gives off a beautiful lustre. That is from a Latin word lustrare, which simply means to illuminate. So, if something is lustrous, it radiates, it is illuminating. Lust, on the other hand hand is simply the german for want so you use it quite

often in german without any sense of sexual desire so you say i have a lust of chocolate i fancy some chocolate but the fancy bit is really quite innocent i have i have a lust of i would like i fancy a glass of red wine i would like a glass of red wine. I would like a glass of red wine. I want one. But we took it and kind of gave it a bit of oomph and transferred it into sexual desire. So the German and the English here are quite different, but I'm sorry to disappoint you, Jo, they're not actually related at all. It'd be wonderful if they were kissing cousins, quite literally, but they are not. And the second one I'll ask, because I know you can't see this one either, is from Colleen in New Hampshire. I mean, honestly, so global, our audience, we love it. So Colleen says, I hear and read the word chuffed in British words, but I don't think there is a true American synonym. I don't think I've ever heard or read chuffed in an

American work. It seems like a softer form of proud when do you use that that word and again there's lovely things about the podcast so thank you Colleen I would say if you're really pleased or you're satisfied you are chuffed I really use it often and often when I'm sort of pleasantly surprised by something so I'm really chuffed to see that so-and-so read my book or I'm sort of pleasantly surprised by something. So I'm really chuffed to see that so-and-so read my book, or I'm really chuffed to read that. You know, it's usually about sort of something that gives you pleasure. It's quite a sort of personal thing rather than I was chuffed to see that Giles met Rory Stewart, for example. So I think it is about personal pleasure and it actually goes back to only to the 1950s, but its root is much older. In fact, 300 years old.

And that's an English dialect word, chuff, meaning plump or pleased. But just to confuse matters, in the mid 19th century, a completely different use of chuff came about with the opposite meaning. It meant surly or gruff. So actually for a while to be chuffed was also being used to mean disgruntled so that is confusing but that one thankfully died away it's one of those rare occasions where we hung on to the positive rather than the negative is there a bird called a chuff i was i was thinking exactly that and i was thinking is it a chuff or is it a chaffinch but i can't find it in a standard dictionary i can find the chaffinch? But I can't find it in a standard dictionary. I can find the chaffinch.

I can, you have a train chuffing along, don't you? And that's the sound thing. That's the puffing sound, chuff, chuff, as it goes along. Oh, yes. As in a train, the noise a train makes, the chuff, chuff. And I also might say to you, Giles, if you didn't have your two suitcases, get off your chuff and walk because it can also mean buttocks in slang um but i can't find and i'm just going to double check again use of chuff as a bird because i had exactly that

thought ah there is okay and this is embarrassing for me not you um it is spelled c-h-o-u-g-h that is the chuff that is a black e Eurasian and North African bird of the crow family. And it is probably imitative. So I don't know if that's imitative of the sound it makes, presumably. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. And I should have known that spelling was different. So there you go. Two very good questions.

And I will remind you that it's now time for my trio. I want to hear your trio. And the nice thing is, feel free to let it take as long as you want, because my driver is smiling, already up to 70 pounds 60, and he's learning so much at the same time. Can you remember a poem off by heart for us in a minute, do you reckon? Well, that's going to be the challenge. I'm trying to think.

There may be a short one I can muster. i'll give it again in a moment all right uh okay so my three words today uh the first one i don't know if you're feeling this charles the fan towards if you've got the fan towards you are just it's a kind of indescribable feeling of uneasiness. So you just can't rest. And there's a lovely description of it in a US magazine actually from 1835, which the wonderful dictionary Merriam-Webster mentions. And it's like this, there is an indescribable complaint which will never allow a moment's repose to mind or body, which nothing will satisfy, which allows of no beginning and no ending, which wheels round the mind like a squirrel in its cage, ever moving but still making no progress. It is called the fantods. I love that word, to have the fantods. That's my first. The second is hopefully never going to be useful to

anybody, but should you go to the doctors or the hospital and come out with something that you didn't go in for such as an infection or a you know something that was inadvertently caused by a doctor or a medical professional that is laterogenic didn't even know that word existed so you might have a laterogenic complaint which means it was caused by a doctor but very rare thankfully and the second one is well I tweeted the other day it was one of those days where i may or may not have been commenting on uh topical events but also i was feeling that it was that kind of day for myself i was arsling a-r-s-l-i-n-g which means shuffling backwards rather than

forwards but if you want a posher word for that it is called retrogradation a backward movement a retrogradation that kind of day so a retrogradation, that kind of day. So those are my trio. How are you doing with the memory? Well, I tell you, I was going to tell you today, and I will still, about my Poetry Together project. Do you know about this? I talked about this before. You talked about this last year, I think.

Well, it must be the same time again. This is a project that I started a few years ago where we get older people, people in their 70s, 80s, 90s, even somebody over 100 being that involved, and younger people who are at school. Yeah. We get them involved to learn poems by heart, and then they get together and have tea, cake, and a bit of a poetry slam. and a couple of weeks ago this christmas well it starts now and goes on till christmas this year's poetry together called poetry together 23 was launched uh queen camilla came to fielding primary school which is an ealing in london for for the launch and we had older people and younger people perform poems and then this very week we went to the british library uh and you know the british library well don't you well not that well but i know it yes oh well you must it's it's a fantastic

place and they keep improving it and they've just redesigned their knowledge center there and it's a wonderful place to be the rich library because you know that the bridge library has literally every book ever published i know it's like the bodley in in oxford um and also they have wonderful people like a friend of mine johnny robinson working there who's the kind of curator of all sorts of things relating to language they have brilliant exhibitions there so we had a special day there where we got again older people and younger people together over poetry. So if there are people listening who have a school that they know, either that they're at or their children may be at, or their grandchildren, or they know older people who might be interested in taking part in this because they live in a care home or just are the grandparents of people, you can find out more about it by going to our website.

or just are the grandparents of people. You can find out more about it by going to our website. You simply Google www.poetrytogether.com poetrytogether.com and find out all about it, how you can get involved. It happens all over the world. It's not just in the UK, but about 800 schools and old folks' homes in the UK are now taking part.

Anyway, remember this one? Tell me. It's the one about the goldfish that died. Oh, no, tell me, tell me the one about the goldfish that died. Oh no, tell me. Tell me. I had a goldfish that died, and when the children were small, our children were small, and the goldfish died, and it was actually eaten by Oscar the Cat. Oscar the Cat

was called Oscar because he was wild. We had another one called Thornton who was wilder. Anyway, Oscar the Cat ate, spot the goldfish, and we couldn't have a funeral because there were no mortal remains. So we had a memorial service in the garden, and we all gathered around, and I performed a poem. Now, am I right that an ode, how would you describe an ode, O-D-E? Is that a poem that's in honour of or as a memorial to? What's the definition of an ode?

It's usually a form of address to a particular subject and it's usually quite lyrical i would say and actually goes back to a greek word meaning song um because they originally sung yes so they particularly the classical poems they originally intended to be sung good well i wrote this ode and i think it does qualify as an ode so it's real poetry you could sing it in fact it's an, and it is rhyming. This is a poem that rhymes. It is also the shortest poem in the history of world literature, and is featured in the Guinness Book of World Records as a consequence. So this is a record-breaking poem. The introduction is far longer than the poem itself. In fact, the title of the poem,

which is Ode to a Late-Lamented Goldfish, is also longer than the poem. Actually, the word late, when did the word late means deceased, dead, doesn't it? As well as being orata, late for something. When did those two words get merged? I don't know. While you tell me your poem, which I imagine is going to take 10 seconds, I will look it up. My poem won't even take 10 seconds. That's why I'm building up to it.

But listeners to the Purple Podcast across the globe, pin back your luggles because I'm about to perform the shortest poem in the history of world literature, certainly the shortest one written in the English language. It's an ode to a late lamented goldfish. It rhymes and it goes like this. Oh, wet pet thank you that's it that's it that is that's the poem that's my poem for today so if anyone comes up with um a poem that is just two

words long they will have ousted yes but mine is only seven letters okay that's because some people claim that the uh long shortest poem is a poem written i think in victorian times called fleas f-l-e-a-s as in the creature and that poem simply goes like this adam adam you see adam yeah four letters adam apostrophe a d apostrophe e m so that's yeah but that mine is shorter i think yes mine's seven and that's eight so i've beaten adam adam by one letter so i'm still maintaining it's the shortest poem ever written that is incredible and just to say i've looked up late as in the sense of happening after the expected time is from old English. So over, you know, well, very, very old, over millennium old, whereas late in sense of time and recently deceased is from the 15th century. So yeah, 1422 is the, you know, so it's actually, you will often find the late

lamented and that kind of thing. But yeah, the person who was alive not long ago, you will find late from the 15th century. Do you know, I've so enjoyed doing this podcast in the taxi. I think we might do the next one in the taxi too. But I ought to keep listeners up to date with the price of this. We're up to £77 on the register. Okay. But I'm going to reassure the driver, I will add a tip to this because it must be very frustrating for him

moving so slowly. Yeah, no, it must be. But he has the benefit of listening to you, Susie Dent. Thank you to you for making the effort to come online and thank you to everybody who's listened. It means a lot to us and do please keep following us. You can also follow us on social media. And for more Purple,

there is also the Purple Plus Club where you can also follow us on social media and for more Purple there is also the Purple Plus Club where you can listen ad free Something Round with Purple is a Sony Music Entertainment production it was produced by

Naya Dio with additional production from Naomi Oiku Hannah Newton Chris Skinner Jen Mystery and there at the helm

thankfully hooked you up from your cab it's Richie and can we give a shout out what's your driver's name oh driver what's your name so we can give you a shout out on the podcast anis anis the driver thank you to anis well i don't know how long you're going to be there but maybe next week's podcast will might also be from the back of the cab we'll see i could live in a cab this is the style