Something Rhymes with Purple - Cobbler

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

It’s time to take a trip to the bakery Purple People where we will run into Lords and Ladies, horses and testicles as we explore the shelves of bread.    Come discover why the upper crust really is better, what bread rolls and parchment have in common, how lumps and humps gave name to Nubbys and Cobs and why having butter with your chip butty is essential.   Gyles shares his latest ‘Oh Crumbs!’ moment and Susie tells us about her Sourdough Bread making adventure.    It really is the best thing since sliced bread…    Purple People, Gyles and Susie want you to share your nicknames and slang terms for bread, find us @SomethingRhymes on Twitter and Facebook, @SomethingRhymesWith on Instagram or you can email us here: [e-mail]   We currently have 20% off at the SRwP official merchandise store, just head to: https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple   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:    Overmorrow - The day after tomorrow  Roucoulement: The gentle cooing of doves  Yesterfang: That which was caught or taken yesterday    Gyles' poem this week was 'The Mower' by ‘Philip Larkin'  The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found     A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,     Killed. It had been in the long grass.   I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.     Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world     Unmendably. Burial was no help:   Next morning I got up and it did not.  The first day after a death, the new absence     Is always the same; we should be careful   Of each other, we should be kind     While there is still time.     A Somethin’ Else & 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

Hello and welcome to Something Rhymes with Purple, a podcast for the purple people all about words and language and how it really matters, but sometimes not in ways that you would expect. Because we're not pedants, are we, Giles? We certainly aren't pedants say the word carefully. Pedant is that word it's something to do with feet is it pedantic? No well actually the first very first meaning of pedant and I think you'll find it defined this way in Samuel Johnson's dictionary is a schoolmaster. So it was somebody who sort of taught and because of I suppose the association of school teachers with being a stickler for a fact or sticklers for facts, it kind of moved slightly. But that was the very first meaning. But we do very much celebrate the evolution of English whilst having our own views on whether, you know, we have our own bugbears, of course.

And today, Giles, I would love to tackle one of my favourite subjects, because as you know, I love collecting local language. And there are very few subjects where as much vocabulary has been collected as this one, because it's bread. It's bread. And do you know what inspired this? Tell me. You can be my pedagogue. That's a word for teacher, isn't it? A pedagogue. It is. And I will be your pedant too. I don't know if you remember relating the story, have you went into your local artisan bakery, which I imagine had, you know, wonderful sourdoughs and rustic seeded loaves, etc. But you asked for a cobbler. I did indeed. And completely discombobulated me of the sourdough because i bought sourdough there from before because i suppose it's supposed to be so fashionable i get it home and it's lovely on the first day but by the second day it's gone rock hard oh yes you have to toast it oh yeah well

i'm not sure about that and then it's still a bit hard anyway i did i went in and asked for a cobbler i think i'm a crusty cobbler And you didn't seem to be amused. What had I done wrong? I think you had possibly confused or conflated a cobbler with a cob. So a cobbler is normally a pudding. So you might have an apricot cobbler, for example, which is absolutely delicious. It's kind of a sort of pie that's baked in a pot. There's fruit and is lined with sort of dough. It's absolutely delicious.

It's also a drink, I think, with wine and sugar and lemon and various things. So definitely not bread. I think, as I say, the term you were looking for is cob. And there's a lovely fact, often repeated, that basically you can go about 40 miles within Britain to find another word for a bread roll. It's one of those subjects around which local words absolutely sort of collect like nothing else. So there are lots of different themes. Well, I say there are a lot. Jonathan Green, the slangmeister of Britain, once said that the waterfront of slang is narrow, but it is very, very deep. And I think it's the same for dialect too. Lots

and lots of words for a sort of slightly narrow number of subjects. Don't go away from cob for a moment, because I would think of cob as a kind of horse. Is there a horse called a cob as well? Yes. So for a three-letter word, it's a remarkably industrious little word, cob. So the main images are of something stout. So as you say, it can be a kind of horse, it can be a stack of corn, it can be a nut, it can be the testicles, it can be an apple dumpling, it can be lots and lots of different things. But it's the idea of something usually round or humped or something that like the head stands on top of something. So it can also mean a tuft of hair on the forehead. But I think it's probably as bread as it is best known. And that falls into the rounded category, which gives us the cob loaf. So it's a small loaf of bread or a small cake

that's made of the very last piece of dough from a baking. This is where I went wrong, you see, cob loaf, cobbler. And I can see there is a link between cobbler and cob because you just tell me cob can be a word for a testicle and cobblers as we know is rhyming slang isn't it yes for cobblers being a shoemaking tool yeah being rhyming slang for balls exactly good but the cob we're going to talk about is this roll made a little knob a little knob of dough that becomes a cob? It's a round loaf. And actually, there are cobs in Shakespeare, believe it or not. There's a reference in Troilus and Cresta to a cob loaf.

So it's been around for a very long time. It's used chiefly in the north of England, although it's kind of spread a little bit in recent years. You'll find it in the Midlands as well. I'm just realising as we go through this that actually we must ask the purple people from right across the globe to give us their nicknames and slang terms for bread because we're going to be mostly concentrating on the regional terms within Britain.

Well, can you give me some examples of walking 40 miles from you where we get something that isn't a cob but also is another word for a bread roll? Yes, well, there's also a bap. I think I would quite often use a bap, would you? So I think... I think of a bap as a soft roll. I think of a cob as a hard crust, a little knob of a roll. And I think of a bap as a soft roll, cut in half.

I think you might serve a hamburger inside a bap. You might well do. Although originally, I think bap was simply another word for a bread roll. So where I grew up in Surrey, for example, it would definitely be a bap rather than a roll. And that could also mean those sort of crusty, small, wonderful rolls that you can get. And in fact, in Scotland, I think it's any small loaf and made of various shapes and sizes. So it depends where you are really as to what the meaning of all these words are, which is pretty fitting because they are so regional.

Where does the word BAP come from BAP? So BAP is essentially a mysterious one. So we don't actually know where it comes from. It has different meanings in slang where you might talk slightly misogynistically about a woman's BAPs, but we don't know where it comes from. For me, it kind of, I think it might have something to do with the sound. I don't know if you would agree a bap is something sort of small and round, but who knows? We haven't got to the

bottom of it. Bap is my kind of bun. A bun? What is the origin of bun? A bun? You see, that's really interesting. So a bun, for me, would only be a sweet bun. I don't think I would ever have a bun that is savoury that I would put cheese in. So for me, it's a kind of cake. And I think that's pretty much where it began. So in France, particularly in Lyon, I think it was a speciality. It meant a sort of fritter. And it might well be a relative of beignet.

So if you've ever had a beignet, it's a French donut quite often filled. I was telling this story on Countdown actually the other day, very often filled with that sort of rich, sweet creme patissiere that you can find in French pastries. And I foolishly had one on a school trip before going on a hovercraft. We went to Calais for the day i you know greedily bought brought one of these beignets from the french patisserie and then regretted it for the entire trip as did my friends oh don't yes you now evoked the smell of beignet i can see the sort of the hot uh the dip the the beignet into yes smelling good so So we've had bap. There's a bit of a tongue twist here.

Bap, bun and bap. Bap. Is there a bap as well as a bap? I'm inventing bap. I don't think it's a bap. Bap is a dance, isn't it? Bap is a dance. So we have a bun, we have a bap, we have a cob. Do we have a balm? Yes, we do. What is a balm cake? You will find that mainly in the north of England. Again, it's a small loaf shaped like a bun, but it can also mean a muffin or a hot cake. So lots and lots of different things for balm. And for me, I just love the origin of it because we've talked before about how when you describe someone as being balmy, you're talking about them being originally a balm pot. And balm was something which was very much involved

in fermentation and in the brewing of beer. And it produced that sort of classic head on a glass of beer, that classic froth. So if you were balmy or a balm pot, you were sort of, you know, frothing in your head. You weren't clear and hence you were probably a little bit mad. That was the idea. in your head. You weren't clear and hence you were probably a little bit mad. That was the idea. And I think a lot of balm cakes and balm rolls were also produced through fermentation, through a sort of special process involving the yeast. So that's the connection there. So the balm cake, probably from the north of England? Yes, you will find that in the north of England for sure. I don't think it's moved that far as that far further south actually

what's definitely universal in my world is the butty um but is that really a roll or is that you have a jam but what is it it's a sandwich isn't it yeah so one of the great classic british specialities is a chip butty uh so originally it was a slice of bread that was spread with butter sometimes another topping but now it's usually a sandwich. So it definitely involves bread. And it's actually a shortening of buttery. So butter was pretty crucial. But you can have a jam butty, a bacon butty, as I say, a chip butty.

It goes back to the 1800s, that word. Please, would people from North America let us know what they call a chip butty in Canada and the United States? Because they don't have chips. They have fries, don't they? Do you think they call it a fries butty? No, I don States because they didn't have chips. They have fries, don't they? Do you think they call it a fries butty? No, I don't think they do. No, I can't imagine that.

There's also a mansion. Have you heard of a mansion? Oh, in my father's house are many mansions. He loved a butty. Yes. What is a mansion? This is spelt slightly differently. So M-A-N-S-H-O-N.

You find it again in the north of England where all of these words proliferate, but also in the southwest, especially Cornwall. And they are small loaves shaped again like a bun and they are, well, you'll find lots of different spellings in the English dialect dictionary, but it may come from a Norman French word, manchette, which meant a double cuff on a sleeve because it was used quite often to describe a ring-shaped cake of bread. So that's what we think. Alternatively, the flour made to use it would be sifted through some kind of narrow bag, which in French was called a manche,

a sieve or a sleeve or a strainer that was used for filtering that high-grade flour. But you'll like this because Edward VI, I think no Edward the fourth is recorded as eating mansions for breakfast oh good man so it's the only word that refers specifically to a bread roll before the word roll did and how typical of royalty to have that bread roll called a mansion I'll have a mansion now my man and the court jester can have a nubby what's a nubby yes nubbies nubbies are very much cornish and you'll find them in the southwest as well they're plain yeast buns i've never tried a nubby and it comes from a dialect word nubbock meaning a lump but they look absolutely delicious if you

look at an image of them back to the northeast we have a stottie which is a slightly larger bread roll often called a stottie cake or a Stottie bun. And you will often find them sliced and filled with meat or cheese and very popular in Newcastle. So any bread that isn't a Stottie there is called a fadge, which means it's fully risen with a round top. Fundamental to this, of course, is the roll. fundamental to this of course is the roll and i assume it's called a roll because you roll the dough together to make it or when it's created it's round you can roll it along the ground is that the origin of roll and how long do we have the word roll it is so the first meaning of roll as you would expect was a piece of parchment that was rolled up it's also where we got volume from

from the latin volume and meaning the same thing So we still talk about the role of honour, don't we, and the role of fame and that kind of thing. We have roll calls. Then it could be a small quantity of cloth or wool that was rounded up in some ways. And then, yes, we get to an item of food that is rolled up, especially around a filling. And that's 1393. So it's been around for a while. And there are all sorts of rolls, aren't there? There's jelly roll.

There's a spring roll. There's a Swiss roll, sausage roll, fig roll, egg roll. I mean, lots. I love a roll. I love a roll. But I tell you what I like most of all on bread is a good thick crust. Now, crust is interesting as a word, because as well as it being the meaning I'm thinking of, and you can explain the origin of that, we've moved into the other territories. You have somebody being upper crust. You have somebody having a lot of nerve. You've got a lot of crust. Someone who's ill-tempered is a bit crusty.

Crusty. Take us back to the root of crust. Where does that come from? Oh, it's interesting. Obviously, maybe there's a slight generational thing here because if someone's crusty, for me, they're a bit fogey-ish. So it doesn't necessarily mean they're cantankerous it means more that they're sort of just

kind of old oh so but i can look in the oed and see whether that is just me which quite often it is i mean that's the way language works isn't it we appropriate our own meanings for things right looking it up now as you can hear and i want to know too a crust can be all sorts of things it can be the earth's crust can't it it can be the crust you know after a wound recovers that you grow on your skin yes yes but the kind of crust i'm intrigued by today is bread crust but where does the actual what's the first use of the word uh well just to go back to being crusty, we were both right. So it can be harshly curt in manner or speech or old and a bit decrepit. So there you go. We were both right.

Sometimes I manage both of those in the same morning. The first mention of a crust of bread as opposed to a crusty part of the body, let's not go there, is 1830. His loaves which are crusty and his temper which is not. So, yeah. There you go. It's a play on words there. Yeah, very nice. Who was that from in 1830?

Intriguing. It's someone called M.R. Mitford, but as this was in 1830, it wouldn't have been one of the Mitford sisters. No, maybe one of their forebears. Mary Russell Mitford. She was an English author and dramatist born in Hampshire,

best known for Our Village, a series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters based upon her life near Reading and Berkshire. There you go. Good. Let's hear it for Miss Mitford. Well done, Anna. I hope she earned some dough out of this, or a crust. See, we talked about crust as money and dough as

money, but of course, I suppose it means having enough to buy a crust or to buy some dough with which to make bread yeah that would put it on a par with salary wouldn't it because people believe that this was an allowance of salt to Roman soldiers or alternatively money with which to buy salt but dough is one of hundreds of terms within the slang lexicon for money but I think it's just because it's an essential of life bread is an essential for life as is money and so the two came together and we haven't talked about upper crust actually which you mentioned if you go around the ancient buildings of britain you will find wonderful tourist guides who do a fantastic job but as i've said before in

the podcast sometimes there's quite a lot of folk etymology and urban myths when it comes to expressions thrown in and they will tell you that in the kitchens in these old houses one of the methods of baking breads in an oven was to heat it by burning dry to heat the oven by burning dry twigs in it and then the ashes were raked out and the bread dough was put in to bake and the bottom of the loaf was over baked because it was sitting on that hot oven floor and the ashes which would make it a little bit inedible or at least not particularly savory whereas the upper crust was properly baked free of those ashes and was more desirable so that's where and you know there's a lot of truth to that and there's probably a lot of truth to the fact that the nobles and the aristocracy were given the best bits of bread.

But in truth, the stress here is simply probably on upper and so upper class rather than the crust bit. Dough, a bun, a crusty bun. D-O-U-G-H is the mixture with which one makes bread. What is the origin of that word as dough? It's, when you have it as a doughnut in America, it is spelt simply D-O, isn't it? I'm not sure whether in North America they spell any kind of dough with the D-O. But we're not completely sure, but it might go back to an old Sanskrit word meaning to knead or also to kind of plaster, really.

meaning to knead or also to kind of plaster, really. So I think the idea is just sort of a thick, malleable mixture, whether it's of plaster or whether it's of flour and other ingredients used for baking into bread. And that's been around as a word since Old English, so since Anglo-Saxon times. Oh, crumbs, since Anglo-Saxon times. Oh, crumbs. Oh, crumbs.

Yeah, a crumb. We know what a crumb is. Is it an old word? It sounds as if it would be. We know exactly what a crumb is. I actually don't know when we first got the crumb. I can tell you why we say O'crumbs, because it's one of those many,

as what we call minced oaths for Christ, essentially. And it was when we said O'crumbs, it was first of all written as O'crumbs, C-R-U-M-S. So whether or not they were referring to actual crumbs of bread is debatable. But it was simply like all those other oaths that we've talked about, gadzooks and gallblimey and zounds, God's wounds and what else? A euphemism for saying O-Christ. Yeah.

So 10th century crumb has been around for a small particle of bread. So fairly long time. And O'crumbs, we've been saying that much more recently, I imagine. Yes. Yeah. So O'crumbs, well, not that recently. It would have again been one of those medieval, I think, oaths that just, as we said in our swearing episode, the big taboo in those days was religious profanity and perceived blasphemy rather than parts of the body or bodily functions as we have it today.

And a crumb is a small particle of bread because it's crumbled. I love the way your mind works. That would never have occurred to me at all because I've genuinely, and this is why when people say, don't you know everything in the dictionary? I say, no, I really don't, because there are some everyday words where I actually genuinely don't know. So crumble to break down into small crumbs. You're absolutely right. But I suspect that crumble came after crumb rather than the other way round. And yeah, we don't actually know where it comes from. That's always reassuring because hopefully that's why I don't know it.

Well, on the few occasions when I have baked bread, I remember the pleasurable part was kneading the dough. I'm always kneading the dough, which is why I'm still working. But that's kneading with an N. Kneading is with a K, isn't it? To knead dough. K-N-E-A-D. That's Germanic borrowing.

And if you remember with those Germanic words, we did pronounce the K. So it would have been, the German is Kneten, and we would have talked about Kneding, which I love. And we wouldn't have pronounced it exactly like that in Old English, but we would have pronounced the german is canadian and we would have talked about canadian which i love and we wouldn't pronounce it exactly like that in old english but we would have pronounced the k and i'm so sad that those drifted away because we thought they were too hard to pronounce but yeah canadian in german is to need and we we must also just talk about loaf and bread because those have got surprising histories too do you want to do that now or should we take a quick break? Yeah, because I wouldn't mind getting myself a sourdough sandwich. Yes, with your cobbler. This is Something Rhymes with Purple.

And well, we're in the bread basket this week. We're talking about words associated with bread in all its many shapes and forms. And you are going to explain to us, having done kneading, what we're going to tell us about. Well, just loaf is quite interesting because bread only came about, another Germanic borrowing, they have Brot and Brötchen for a role in German. So it's a borrowing from them, but we didn't really talk about bread until around 1200s of the 13th century and the universal word for bread before then was chlaf which is a bit like our modern loaf that's the the predecessor but if you take that a little bit deeper you'll find that the meaning of the

word lord was a keeper of bread because the old english term for a lord was chlaf ward, keeper of or warden of the bread. So it's from early forms of loaf and then ward. And the corresponding female form was chlafdige, which meant needer of bread. And that chlafdige eventually gave us lady. So lord and lady were all about bread goodness wow i know i remember when baking the bread having kneaded the dough i was supposed to prove it which i think involved putting a couple of pinpricks in it what is the proving of bread why is it so called to prove originally meant to put to the test so to sort of demonstrate something or to judge it or inspect it and you know the phrase the proof of the pudding is in the eating originally that was from the sense of proof to test it but now of course we understand it as evidence really so

not the act of testing it to get the evidence but the evidence itself and I don't know whether you've got a bread maker, but I have definitely toyed with the idea of getting a bread maker because I love bread and I love warm bread. And I don't particularly like the sliced bread that we get from the supermarket. And as you say, the wonderful artisan loaves,

I don't eat enough of it and it just goes a bit stale. And also the price, the price of sourdough. Why incidentally is it called sourdough? Because you need a starter for sourdough, don't we? And it's all again about fermentation. So you need, I actually, thanks to my daughter, have a starter on my windowsill that has been there for ages. And at some point it's going to be the beginnings of a sourdough, but I'm not quite sure how it's going to be left there. But yeah, I'm quite keen to get a bread maker once I don't have my daughter making

it for me. Have we got time to rattle through a few of the phrases that one thinks of as being associated with bread? Some of them are very obvious, like... I think most of them are actually obvious. Yeah. I mean, if you're a breadwinner, it means it's to do with actually putting bread on the table. Bread being the staple of life. Bread being the staple of life. Exactly. If you're the breadwinner, not as entertaining as bringing home the bacon, which you've talked about before, but that's another story. You've got the greatest thing since sliced bread. I think that was...

How long has that phrase been around? When did sliced bread come into being? It's not been around as a phrase for that long, actually. I think, if I remember rightly, it was the 1950s when someone said that part baked bread was the biggest thing since sliced bread is a bit of a joke, which suggests that it's been around for a little while. But yeah, 1950s is the first evidence that we have of that kind of thing. When I was a boy at school, I used to make sandwiches out of white bread and brown bread. I just took two pieces of white bread and put a piece of brown bread in the middle and squashed them together and cut them up into little squares and ate them. Delicious.

You were years, years ahead of that sort of half and half bread that they produce these days. Oh, that's now a thing, is it? Oh, half and half is definitely a thing. So you have the fibre of, I don't quite know what is left. I suppose it's less processed, but you still have the taste of I don't quite know what is left I suppose I suppose it's less processed but you still have the taste of white bread that's the idea separating the wheat from the chaff that in a sense has a sort of bread root because we need wheat yeah and chaff is chaff is useless wheat is good I mean exactly chaff is the stuff that you discard wheat is the sort of more valuable of the crop so that's the idea of separating it from the chaff and it came about in 1666 so it's been around for a while well

i'm encouraging people to let us know what their favorite sandwich is do you have a favorite sandwich do you know what as we speak my daughter has just come in my youngest and i thought she was going to give me a sandwich but actually she brought me something better, which is a smoothie, which is very nice. Thank you. I thought she was going to bring you something even better, good GCSE results. That's what we really want.

Not that far yet. Oh, she's muttering in the background. Oh, yes, that's perfect. Thank you so much. So what have you got? What have you been given? Okay, so what's in here, Thea? Mango.

Mango. Okay, mango. And this sounds like a very posh smoothie. Of course, you're a very posh person. Mango smoothie. I like a posh sandwich in that I do like a traditional cucumber sandwich. Thin white bread, butter, possibly a little touch of mayonnaise, thinly sliced cucumbers, a bit of salt.

That's marvellous. Also tomato sandwiches, they're really good. Well, when I was a child, that was my comfort eating. When I came home from school, my mother had a glass of cold chocolate Nesquik waiting for me and two rounds of Marmite and tomato sandwiches oh brown bread butter marmite sliced tomato pressed down the two sides of bread pressed down quite hard cut into quarters oh how lovely anyway shall we invite people to get in touch with us to tell us about bread in their part of the world and maybe to share with us their favourite rolls, baps and the like. I agree. It's, if you want to communicate, purple at somethingelse.com.

Do send us an email or even a voice note. Keep in touch. Who's been in touch with us this week, Susie? Oh, well, we have someone from very far afield, from Adelaide in Australia. We have Bridie and Lisa, who said to us they've had a little look online but they can't find anything at all about this question so they thought maybe we could help a friend and I says Bridie were talking about someone being condescending to us and she said it was like being taught to suck eggs in the sense of being told how to do something that you clearly already know how to do is obvious there's a very dubious australian accent creeping in there bridie sorry about that she says can you tell me why people say this and what does it actually mean because i for one have never sucked an egg and cannot even imagine how

or why anyone might so uh she says that she's consistently telling everyone she meets all the fascinating things she learns from the purple podcast so thank you for that bridie so yes teaching your grandmother to suck eggs is essentially the phrase that we mostly have in britain isn't it giles totally yeah and it's a very odd expression and it's one of many similar expressions that arose in the 18th century which suggests that sucking eggs even though those are the that's the bit that survived wasn't particularly paramount when these were first coined, I suppose, because you will find, don't teach your grandmother to steal sheep

and don't teach your grandmother to milk ducks. Oh, goodness. And the milking ducks thing suggests that this is just entirely fanciful and illogical and not something that's likely to happen. But that said, sucking eggs was apparently a trick of thieves who broke into farms they kind of surreptitiously suck the contents out of eggs on the spot rather than take away and maybe risk breaking them so the idea anyway behind don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs is that an older person knows a lot more about cunning dodges

or other things than a young one because their longer experience brings wisdom. So a little bit, it's the opposite, I suppose, to you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Well done. And thank you very much for being in touch from Adelaide, Australia. Fantastic. Yeah. Wonderful.

Adelaide, I imagine, named after Queen Adelaide. Interesting. Anyway, that's by the by. Wherever you come from in the world, if you've got a question that we can answer, it'll probably be Susie who gives you the answer and then you can rely on it. Do just get in touch with us. It's purple at somethingelse.com. And we can rely on you, Susie, every week for coming up with three words with which we may not be familiar, but we would like to be. What is your trio for this week? Well, I think one of them I've mentioned before,

but it's such a favourite. And do you know what? I think we were talking, weren't we, Giles, about the Queen celebrating her life and mourning her loss. But it's a word that I think would be part of her philosophy when she said, take the long view. And it's overmorrow, which means the day after tomorrow. So not only is it a beautiful, pithy rendition of the day after tomorrow, but it's also always look to the overmorrow and how you might feel about something then, which I just think is beautiful. There's another really lovely one, recoulement. It would be in French and in English, I guess, recoulement. So it's R-O-U-C-O-U-L-E-M-E-N-T. In English dictionaries, historical ones at least, and it means the gentle cooing of doves.

Recoulement. Wonderful. Recoulement. Very nice. And if you took a selfie yesterday, if you caught a fish yesterday, in fact, if you took or caught anything yesterday, you can say that that is a yesterfang.

So again, sort of slightly Germanic influence, but yesterfang means caught or taken yesterday. People may not know that we have this thing called the Purple Plus Club. This is a kind of extra, a kind of extra room. It's a club, it's a members club. You have to join and it costs you a little bit to join, but it's fun. You get all the usual episodes ad free and you get bonus episodes as well. And we try to do one of those every week. And we did last week, as Susie alluded to there, we did a special episode marking the death of Queen Elizabeth II and talking about poetry,

particularly about a poem that I came across that was by Elizabeth I. And we also began to explore a poem by Ted Hughes, a poet laureate in this country. So do discover more. I think to know about the Purple Blast Club, you have to simply go to wherever these things are found out, press a few buttons and bingo, you're in the Purple Blast Club.

That is right. You get three words from Susie Week and you get a poem from me every week. And this week, thinking not simply of the Queen, Elizabeth II, who has died, but also of other people who have died, I'm going to read a poem that is often read at memorial services and funerals. And it was read the other day at the funeral of my elder sister. I have come from a large family. There were five of us. And two of my sisters now, they were considerably older than me, have died. Not that they were older than me when they did die. One of my sisters died when she was

only 61. And I had a brother who died when he was only 51. But my elder sister, Jennifer, a remarkable individual, she died recently. And there was, yes, it's very sad. She was ready to go, actually. She'd not been well. She was ready to go. She'd lived a good, long and useful life, a life of service. She'd been a probation officer. She was a caring individual, an interesting individual, and very individual. And the great thing is that her children, her three children, they organised a wonderful funeral for her. I must say, I sat there reflecting on the fact that if nobody knew what my sister was like, if they saw her children, they must think she was a remarkable person, because the children were so remarkable. And at this service, my brother-in-law read this poem by Philip Larkin. It's called The Mower.

The Mower by Philip Larkin. The mower stalled twice. Kneeling, I found a hedgehog jammed up against the blades, killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world unmindably. Burial was no help. Next morning I got up up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence is always the same. We should be careful of each other.

We should be kind while there is still time. Gosh. Part of the stuff, isn't it? Philip Larkin. So sad. So we do list somewhere all the poems and who wrote them so that people want to dip into them. I've done an anthology of poetry called Dancing with the Light of the Moon, in which a lot of these poems appear.

Susie has got a new book out, which has got so many amazing and marvellous words. Actually, we should do an episode all about your new book, actually, and the way you play with words. Anyway, this is where you have fun with words if you love words. It's called Something Rhymes with Purple. Yes, and do please keep following us wherever you get your podcasts. Recommend us to friends and family if you've enjoyed us. And you can find us on social media at Something Rhymes on Twitter and Facebook or at Something Rhymes With on Instagram. Something Rhymes with Purple is a Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment production. It was produced by Harriet Wells and Sophie King

with additional production from Chris Skinner and Jen Mystery and Jay Beale and, well, once again, he's not here, Giles. No, he's away with the cobblers. Or is it the cobs? Anyway, he's my kind of bab. Oh, crumbs. Oh, crumbs. Oh, crumbs.

We forgot somebody. We did. It's Teddy. A new member of the team. Teddy, I wonder if that's an abbreviation of... Gully. It usually is. Do you think so?

What an abbreviation of Gully. His alter ego. We've got our own Teddy boy here. We have. Thank you, Teddy.