Something Rhymes with Purple - Elementary

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

It’s a smokin’ hot episode today people as we delve into the world of Smoking.  We’ll run into Colombos, Hamlet and Charles Dickens as we uncover why we have pipe dreams, why stogie cigars are linked to wagons, how pipes and musical instruments are connected and that the original meaning of blowing smoke up someone’s arse is very different from today’s..  Susie will make sure our understanding of smoking idioms is up to snuff and Gyles shares tales of an icon of his that is synonymous with the pipe.  We love hearing from you, 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:  Twithought: A fleeting thought Potgun: Something that makes a lot of noise but that is ultimately irrelevant. Holy Willie: hypocritically pious person Gyles reads ‘Fall’ by Connie Bensley When you’re falling Expect a split second of thought before you hit the stone, stair or ground   How to use it? Worrying about the dog? No Regretting your ancient underwear? No Cursing the car which is careering towards you? No   Use this tick of time to turn your head in such a way that your teeth avoid the primary impact   This will enable you to smile at the first responder When he bends to lift you with his big hands out of the gutter 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

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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It's to remind you that the subject I'm going to talk about is not good for you, except in linguistic terms. It's interesting to talk about. It's not a good idea to do. Susie Dent, you're there, aren't you? I am here. I have got over my cough, actually, I'm pleased to say. But yes, I am here and I will gladly step in when you have to have a drink of water. But yes, we are talking about smoking and tobacco today. We are. Because, as you say. And I come from a smoking family. None of my current family smoke, but my father did. And that's why he died young.

He died aged 71 of cancer. And he was a smoker. People of his generation were. If you look at, he was born in 1910. And if you look at films made in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, everyone is smoking. If you look at television from the 1950s, everyone is smoking. They do chat shows, the people are smoking. During the Second World War, my mother, who didn't smoke, thought maybe it would be a good idea to take up smoking to calm her nerves.

During the Blitz, when the bombs were falling, people said, do smoke. And I think the governments of the day during the First World War, and I think during the Second World War, gave the troops cigarettes because they thought they were a treat, a luxury, and maybe were good for settling the nerves. But actually, I think smoking was actually endorsed as a health habit, wasn't it? I think it was actually, that was particularly mental. Have you ever smoked? Yes, I have for my sins. I used to think it was very cool to smoke Kent cigarettes, which are all white. And what put paid to that was just trying to be cool as a student and putting one in my mouth and realising I was lighting the wrong end. And it just all went very wrong from there. But no, definitely not a smoker now. And actually, I've run a mile from it. I was on a plane the other day. I hadn't been on a plane for such a long time, years and years and years, and remembered what it was like when there was smoking allowed on aeroplanes and people would sit at the back and people from the front would go and stand at the back, smoke their cigarette and then return to the slightly cleaner air at the front. But I mean, slightly cleaner, because obviously this air was circulating round and round. I mean, that seems extraordinary. Cinemas too.

Oh, indeed. The cinema, to make it helpful, certainly in the 1950s, you could only smoke if you were sitting on the right-hand side of the cinema. So there are a lot of films that I didn't see, because I went with my father and sat on the right-hand side, and we just saw the film through a haze of smoke. So I had to go and see the same film again with my mother, sitting on the left-hand side of the cinema, where there wasn't so much smoke. I mean, you couldn't smoke on that side. I've never even had one puff of a cigarette.

Have you not? That's very good. In school plays, you used to be able to get sweets that looked like cigarettes. Do you remember? Yes, I do remember those. And then a little red tip at the end. So chalk came out as well. You could breathe in.

Honestly, talk about a health hazard. You would inhale, exhale, and a sort of puff of chalk would come out. Back to tobacco, though. We ought to have a look at the history of tobacco, the history of nicotine, which I think we have possibly covered once before, so we shouldn't linger too much on that. But it's been, as we said, hugely influential, hasn't it, tobacco? Well, it's been all right. When did it start? When did it smoke? I mean, tobacco, what is the word? We're supposed to be talking about words and language, etymology. Tobacco, where does that come from? Yes. Okay, so let's go back to the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.

So Christopher Columbus, we remember, he crossed the ocean blue in 1492. And where did he land? Was it Cuba, somewhere like that? Yeah, so he observed the custom of the Taino people. So this is an indigenous people inhabiting the Bahamas, the greater Antilles. And it's a very sad ending because they suffered a real decline as a result of diseases brought by the Europeans and they had no resistance to them. So very sad but anyway columbus saw them making this rough roll of dried leaves from a plant he knew not which and they kindled the end and then they inhaled the smoke now as it turns out this practice wasn't exclusive to the teno people and it probably originated you know a millennium earlier if not more with the mayans Mayans. But anyway, the Spanish took the Taino word,

tabaco, T-A-B-A-C-O, and applied it to this plant. So what's quite interesting, though, is that Columbus dismissed these as weeds. So he thought, oh, I don't know what this is. And he says in his journal, here in the new country, there are men and women with a half-burned weed in their hands, being the herbs they are accustomed to smoke. And what he did with them tell me he threw them

overboard oh how interesting but of course he had a moment of realization because he realized that actually this was so prized and such an important habit uh to the the um indigenous peoples that he then bartered with them and used that as leverage and then took them himself and often bestowed them as gifts when he returned. And it's that really that led to the kind of real popularity of tobacco, which spread through the 16th century. I'm interested that he uses the phrase, they are accustomed to smoke, that he makes to smoke a verb. Because I would have thought in his time, the idea of smoking, you'd smoke a fish, you'd lay it out and, as it were, cook it by having smoke coming through it.

But he's using it in the sense of, I assume, of drawing on the smoke. Or are they inhaling the smoke through their nostrils? Do we know what they were doing? Or are they smoking it like a cigarette? I think they probably were, actually, because they're lighting the ends of these things and then breathing out. And I'm just looking, okay, 1617 is the first reference that the OED has to inhaling and then expelling the fumes of tobacco from a pipe or cigar or cigarette. Ah, well, there you go. And in those days,

so he brings it back, he brings this prized position back to Europe. And it's Columbus who introduces it. We can blame him, can we? For its popularity, but as I say, this was a custom that dates back easily as far as the Mayan people. But certainly Europeans took this up by the second half of the 16th century. The courts of Europe were discovering this tobacco. It's interesting 1617, because the dates don't quite work with the OED. But anyway, that's for a different discussion. In the early days, certainly from the

sort of drawings that one sees, you think of the tobacco being smoked, not in a cigarette, we'll come on to where that originates, but in a pipe. So certainly in the English court, I think this is what the Europeans were using. I think they were using the pipes and they were experimenting with pipe smoking. And there's a description of England from 1587, which talks about contemporary life and customs. And someone called William Harrison wrote, in these days, the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herb called tobacco by an instrument formed like a little ladle whereby it passes from the mouth into the head and stomach is greatly taken up and used in england and just quickly i mentioned nicotine we have talked about this before because it's an eponym as you know jean nico in 1560 he

was the french ambassador to portugal he sent some tobacco seeds to catherine de medici and i think he thought it would be a good cure for her migraine. But in Nico's honour, the French gave the tobacco plant the new Latin name Herba Nicotiana. And it's from there that we get the derivative nicotine. And that's the kind of horrible alkaloid obtained from dry tobacco leaves. My father used to call Lady Nicotine his mistress. She is my mistress. And he was absolutely hooked on her until the cancer developed. Then far too late, he gave it up. Oh, dearie me.

But my father smoked cigarettes, which is a cigarette, I suppose, a little cigar. So maybe you should take us through the cigar first and then give us the cigarette. And when you're ready, give us the origin of pipe. I will. Yes. Well, let's come to all of that. So I'll start with the cigar. Now, this is a good example of how in the course of just a decade, really, etymologies are further looked into, the detective work goes on and they change. Because I remember distinctly looking at

the origin of cigarette and cigar in the Oxford Dictionary and seeing that actually they thought it came from cicada, you know, the word for the cricket like insect. Because if you look at a cicada, a rolled up bit of tobacco or cigar looks exactly like that. And I remember thinking, this is just incredible. But no, this has changed now, actually. And we think it probably goes back to a Mayan word meaning smoking, which was cigar. And as you say, cigarette was a little cigar, and that's the mid 19th century. And a pipe simply,

it's a pfeiffer in German, which I absolutely love. And it's simply describing the shape, because much as our water pipes, you know, or our wind instrument pipes or whatever are long and cylindrical, so is a pipe in some way, but also it channels something in this case. It channels smoke and tobacco. Good. And a cigarette is just a little cigar then? Cigarette is a little cigar. A stogie, which is a kind of cheap kind of cigar, I think. That goes back to Conestoga in the US because the cigars were thought to have been smoked

by the drivers of Conestoga wagons. And these were large wagons that were used for long distance travel. Conestoga is a town in Pennsylvania. And a cheroot? A cheroot is from Sri Lanka, actually, originally. Southern Indian Sri Lanka and a word meaning a roll of tobacco. So you can see how almost exotic tobacco seemed because it kind of, its roots extend to so many different languages and so many different countries.

I have to say, one of the things that I greatly enjoyed doing while I was prepping for this was watching an old Hamlet ad because I was thinking about Panatella and a Panatella is a long thin cigar. And then I thought, wasn't there actually a brand called Panatella? And then I looked it up and it took me straight to the brilliant, brilliant Hamlet ads. And obviously they couldn't run now, but the slogan was happiness is a cigar called Hamlet. And it basically rescued whoever was the subject of the story from a particularly sort of painful or embarrassing situation. Do you remember? I do. I do remember. I'm trying to remember the cigarette brand it was.

Something tastes good, like a cigarette should. It was extraordinary. And people lent their names to cigarette brands. My father used to smoke Olivier cigarettes. I can see the white boxes and the cigarettes came in, the beautiful gold and blue writing. Laurence Olivier, who was a keen smoker in those days, gave his name, as did the actor Gérald du Maurier, to du Maurier cigarettes. So people, you know, were pretty...

Oh gosh, and you look at a packet of cigarettes now and all you see is a pair of charred lungs. Oh. It's how things have changed, and rightly so. And people still buy them. I think fewer and fewer people are smoking, which is a good thing. Well, that's a good thing.

Much more worrying, and this is clearly something that we won't linger on because it's not really language, but it's the rise of vaping, particularly amongst the young, because they are... Although vapes were intended for people who were trying to give up smoking, it's now being, they're sort of being sold in lovely, bright, colourful canisters to teenagers. So that's kind of really worrying phenomenon. But anyway. Well, that word, and give it a stick to the language, is to do with vaporising, isn't it? It is. And I remember when it came into the Oxford Dictionary, actually,

which was not too long ago, It was the word of the year. So we're talking about 1999, but it really came in properly in around 2009, vaping. My sisters used to smoke. One of my sisters, again, I'm afraid she died of cancer, smoked heavily. And she died, my father was 71. My sister was only 61. And she had smoked so heavily. I mean, she would open a pack of fags, as she called it.

She woke up and she was a nurse. And if she was on duty, she would wake up early to go and be on duty. And before she put in her contact lenses, in fact, oh dear, she kept her contact lenses in the cigarette packet. eyes and then she could see the cigarette back and this is all happening in the dark so she would light her first cigarette in bed at 6 30 in the morning in the dark but she always called them fags f-a-g-s why is a cigarette called a fag uh well you think that the fag end came after the fag but actually fag is a shortening of fag end and a fag end was essentially the last part of something the remnant of something especially the kind of dregs if you like so the fag end of cloth was a bit that was left over after you had cut it for your garment also the fag end of a period of time was the the sort of you know the trailing end of it or the far end of a place as well first mentioned in 7 the 17th century right at the

beginning so you know pretty old and of course, applied to cigarettes because originally a fag was the last remaining bit, the stub, if you like, and then it was applied to the whole thing. One of the sad things about this is that in the past, heroic figures in fiction and drama were depicted smoking cigarettes. It made them look cool. That was the reason that you did it. But also people used to smoke pipes in dramas. Think of the most famous pipe smoker, probably literature, would be Sherlock Holmes. Of course. This is a three-pipe problem, Watson. But he smoked opium as well, didn't he?

Yeah, he did. He used to get lost in the opium dance. His private life does not bear too close to inspection. And what was the type of pipe he smoked? It wasn't a briar pipe, was it? He smoked a Meerschaum. A so that that's very good actually i've forgotten about meerschaum it sounds like it might be an eponym but meir is uh sea in german and schaum is kind of foam yeah sea foam and so called from the notion that this material was formed from solidified seafoam.

That's interesting. It is interesting. Okay. Yeah. When you were a little girl, or rather when you were an early teenager, who in the world, in the real world or in the fantasy world of fiction, who did you want to be in your dreams? I read lots of books about being an orphan, whether it was The Secret Princess

or whether it was Noel Stretfield's Thursday's Child. So yeah, I didn't want to be particularly glamorous. I just, for some reason, loved the romanticism of being kind of out in the world on your own. Well, I wanted to be one of two people. One was a real person, and we talked about last week, Mark Twain. I thought it would be wonderful to be Mark Twain because when I was

a little boy, I read abridged versions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. And I learned about Mark Twain and how he had this invented name, Mark Twain, and how he looked and also how he was supposed to be so witty and amusing and brilliant. So I wanted to be Mark Twain and I also wanted to be Sherlock Holmes. And this is partly because we had a flat in Baker Street that overlooked what was supposed to be the address of Sherlock Holmes, 221B. And I used to take one of my father's pipes and not smoke it, but have it in my mouth when I was pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. And I think, because I had a book that was supposed to be a biography of Sherlock Holmes, or even an autobiography.

It wasn't, of course, because Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. Sorry to upset people who may not have realized that. But on the cover of this book was a photograph of an actor called William Gillette, who was an American actor who played Sherlock Holmes on stage for many years. I think he wrote the plays he appeared in, and he played them in London and in America. And he was a huge international star, William Gillette, playing Sherlock Holmes. And he smoked a pipe that I think was a calabash pipe. And that's one of the reasons that people think of that kind of pipe being smoked by Sherlock Holmes and the stories. But it was actually smoked by the actor who played him on stage. Calabash, do we know the origin of that, by the way? Yes. So the calabash was a tropical

American tree, an evergreen tree, and it produced these large round gourds. And a calabash pipe had this particularly beautiful, I think, bowl to it. And that bowl was quite often made from the dried hollow shell of a gourd from the calabash tree. Well, look, we're going to be on stage. Maybe I shall come when we're next on stage, quite often made from the dried hollow shell of a gourd from the calabash tree. Well, look, we're going to be on stage. Maybe I shall come when we're next on stage, if I can find the pipe, holding the pipe and being, I mean, oh, to have been William Gillette playing Sherlock Holmes. Oh, I'm sure. Well, our next show is on Sunday, the 15th of January at London's Fortune Theatre.

And all the while, Giles, while you've been talking, I've been feeling very guilty for saying that I wanted to be an orphan. I should just say this has nothing to do with the quality of my parents who are absolutely brilliant and remain so. But I just loved the romanticism of it. Well, that is the point of the game, as it were. I didn't want to be Sherlock Holmes, really, nor Mark Twain. I've been quite content with being who I am. But it's a kind of fantasy that one has during those interesting years that my wife thinks I've never left behind. Interesting years. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Has that phrase been around a long time?

Yes. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. That has been said to people since the 1820s, and Charles Dickens used it in the Pickwick papers as well. So I should just say that another theory for pipe, by the way, is that it goes back to the Latin pipare, meaning to squeak. And from there, it was referred to a simple tube-shaped wind instrument. So it was all about the sort of playing of music. So that's interesting. And a pipe dream, of course, going back to Sherlock Holmes, something that's a fanciful hope, that does go back to a dream experience when smoking an opium pipe. Oh oh it's very good and

we should take a break very soon actually but we can also talk briefly about the hooker the water pipe that's the tobacco pipe with the tube you know that draws the smoke through water in a bowl yes i that seems to be acceptable there's a restaurant near where i live where people sit outside with water bubbling away and they smoke it through a hookah. And of course, there's a famous illustration in Lewis Carroll's, one of his books, of the caterpillar who is sitting there smoking through a hookah. I know, still smoking tobacco as far as I know. And that's from an Arabic word meaning a casket or a jar, referring to the bowl. And then in Qatar during the World Cup cup a lot of the commentators were

reporting from shisha bars and shisha that's tobacco for smoking in a hookah and it's mixed in with flavorings such as mint and things that is from a Turkish word again just describing that very function oh we haven't talked about snuff maybe we should have a break shall we and then yes then we can put a little pinch of snuff on the back of your, well, you can remind me what that part of the hand is, where it sits. You can tell me that. You can look that up during while we take our little break. Okay. What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic? Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anubi! Hi, I'm Nick us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anime!

Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show. With the best celebrity guests. And hot takes galore. So join us every Friday wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on

Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. Hi, I'm Jesse Tyler Ferguson, host of the podcast Dinners on Me. I take some of my favorite people out to dinner, including, yes, my Modern Family co-stars, like Ed O'Neill. I had friends in organized crime. Sophia Vergara. Julie Bowen. I used to be the crier. And Aubrey Anderson-Emmons. I was so damn bad for them at one Miranda when I was like eight. You can listen to Dinners on Me wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. This is Something Rhymes with Purple.

I've been trying to demonstrate via Zoom to Susie Dent, who is in Oxford while I'm in London, the part of the, well, how would you describe the part of my hand? And is there a word for it? I'm holding up my hand for you to describe to the public. Yeah, it's the pearly cue, that bit, that fleshy bit between your forefinger and thumb. And that's where your snuff would nestle. What is snuff? Why is it so called? Well, do you remember, we've talked before about how so many words to do with noses begin with the letter S-N. And most of them go back to the Middle Ages. So you've got the snout, you've got snooty, because snooty people have their noses stuck in the air. You've got snot and snuff in the early 1500s meant to inhale

through the nostrils before it was applied to the powdered tobacco that you inhale through your nostrils. So a lot more snuffle and snore and snivel and all sorts. And why is something described as being up to snuff? Well, you will find that in, I've often talked about the classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, if you remember, but up to snuff originally, sorry, it was part of a much longer expression, which was up to snuff and a pinch above it. And so it essentially means, it's about the stimulating effect of taking snuff so it was incredibly well thought to to really improve the sharpness of your mind but it was also incredibly expensive and it was kept in

these very elaborate boxes so up to snuff meant actually being quite superior in lots of different ways please don't blow smoke up our arse and jars before we finish with this i had just it is a familiar phrase um Where does it originate? Well, it originates really centuries ago when blowing smoke up someone's backside was an actual medical procedure. So 18th century, this was particularly used when someone was unconscious after nearly drowning. And what happened was a tobacco enema was used to revive this person so they would take a tobacco filled pipe insert it into their backside and blow smoke up there and strange as it may sound apparently the first time this was used by a husband on his wife

the hot embers of the tobacco leaf did jolt the wife back into consciousness. And from there, it became a really popular method, not just for drowning victims, but also for colic, for hernias, for all sorts of medical ailments. And it is from that that we get the idea of blowing smoke up someone's arse. So we think, I mean, I have to say it's a bit of a leap to go from doing this as a medical procedure to actually flattering someone and deceiving them by blowing hot air or smoke. So who knows where they're actually originated with tobacco enema, but I did just have to tell you that it once had a very literal meaning. I think that's completely wonderful. People have been writing. What have they been writing about? They have. Well, a brilliant one here from Helen Stile. And Helen

is here in person. Hi, Susie and Giles. I walk with a lovely old gentleman each week called Basil, who's originally from South Africa. Today we got caught in the torrential rain and he was telling me that there's a phrase called a monkey's wedding which in South Africa is when it's raining whilst the sun is shining. I wondered why if you know it's called a monkey's wedding. I haven't missed one podcast since you started. Feeling smug and proud. Thank you, Helen Stile. Well has she got style? I mean that's fantastic isn't it? That is amazing, gosh thank you. I know there are regular countdown viewers who haven't missed an episode, but to have someone who's listened to every single podcast, that is lovely. What a purple person. And monkey's wedding is such a

strange idiom. And what's extraordinary about it is that there are variations on it throughout the world, really. So many different cultures and languages languages as diverse as you can possibly imagine but a lot of them have animal associations so in English dialect not used nowadays really it's a fox's wedding so they have animal associations but often to do with marriage as well so in Arabic the term is the rats are getting married the Bulgarians like to speak of bears getting married. In Portuguese, it's a vixen's wedding. And an ancient Spanish saying apparently has it that when it rains and the sun shines, the snail mates, and so on and so on. Which is really strange. But why a sun shower should be called an animal's wedding? Honestly, we just don't know. We can't explain it. And I wish I could. I mean, maybe the idea is that you take two fantastical ideas and put them together,

like a fox getting married or a vixen getting married or whatever. It seems wildly improbable, much as sun and rain together is, you know, I mean, it's not improbable, but it's a sort of more infrequent event, I would say. There's a lovely phenomenon in Polish, actually, from a nursery rhyme, which I really like as well, which translates as, when the sun is shining and the rain is raining, the witch is making butter. Isn't that great? But I don't really, I wish I did have a proper answer for Helen, but I don't. But I can tell you that whatever the answer is, clearly it is spread globally. And, you know, either that or each culture has come up with the same idea, but we just can't discover the original thread. Ethan O'Mara has been in touch.

I was out for lunch the other day and me and my friends began discussing the term zebra crossing. While some of us use zebra, others use pelican crossing. I think they're different. Anyway, a quick Google search told me that pelican actually stands for pedestrian light-controlled crossing. But I wondered if this was just an example of a backronym. If this is the case, where does the term pelican crossing originate? Also, which do you prefer to use, pelican or zebra? Keep up the good

work, Ethan. Well, I think they're different phenomena. What do you know? What have you discovered? Now, I think so too. Well, the zebras came first. So, the zebra crossing is a pedestrian crossing that's got the light and dark stripes that run across the road. And did that come about at the same time as the Belisha Beacon, named after Sir Leslie Hoare Belisha, Minister of Transport in the 1930s? Certainly mentioned in the Hansard from the House of Commons in 1956, where they talk about Hoare Belisha Beacons

and zebra crossings and how their partial adoption will add to the danger of the streets. So that's an interesting take. So I'm with you. So I don't know whether zebra crossings always have lights, do they? I guess they must do, but not traffic lights. They always have those. Well, I think, no, don't they always have a belisha beacon attached? Maybe

they don't any longer. I don't think they have traffic lights, but they, yeah, that's the difference for me, I think. Pelican certainly, as Ethan says, is an acronym, pedestrian light controlled crossing. Well, the bit of an acronym. It is an acronym, pedestrian light controlled crossing. Well, the big acronym. It is. I think he may be right because of the success of zebra crossing. Everyone calls it a zebra crossing because it looks like the stripes of a zebra across the road. They thought, is there another animal?

And then they suddenly came up with this. So first record, 1966 and the evening standard. It says, we hope the ministry will install pelicans in the town. Pelicans would be safer than zebras and easily understood by the public. The pedestrian just pushes a button which operates red, amber and green lights, telling motorists when to stop. Yeah, so that's the traffic light. But what I'm going to do just to put this to bed finally is look up the,

that was from the Oxford English Dictionary, the historical dictionary. I'm now going to look up in the current dictionary and I will tell you exactly what the difference is. So zebra crossing is defined as an area of road painted with broad white stripes where vehicles must stop if pedestrians wish to cross. And a pelican crossing is a pedestrian crossing with traffic lights operated by pedestrians. So that's the difference. We were right. They are different. Yes. Very, very good. Thank you. Do keep in touch with us. This is a new year. We want to hear from old friends and new friends with any queries you may have, any thoughts, any bits of name dropping that you can offer. Can you rival my, oh, maybe there's a new word. What is the word for being an inveterate name dropper? Agiles. We need one. I don't know. Come up with a word. But if you want to get in touch with us, it's purple

at somethingelse.com and something is spelt without a G. We're starting the new year. Are you going to give us three new words for the new year? Are you going to do something different? Yes, I am going to give you, first of all, something that particularly besets me during the merineum, if you remember that period between Christmas and New Year, which we always talk about, where basically your mind goes blank and you lose all sense of time and i think this has been one of my trios before but i am afraid i can't get rid of the twi thought and a twi thought is something that comes into your head and you think oh i'll definitely remember that and then it immediately goes out again so you don't even have time to make a note of it it is so fleeting a twi thought

caught between two states i love that one then let's avoid the pot guns this year. This is a metaphor for something or someone that makes a lot of noise, but that is ultimately irrelevant. So I quite like the pot gun. And finally, we were talking about holy smoke and holy mackerel and things. There was just quite a nice insult that Robert Burns gave us in 1787 in one of his poems. And that is a holy willy. And a holy willy is a hypocritically pious person. I like that. Very good indeed.

A holy willy. A holy willy. What about a New Year poem for us? I've got a New Year poem for you, and it harks a little bit back to last year. But I want to share it with you because it's an original poem written by Connie Bensley, distinguished poet, a friend, a neighbour of mine. And she noticed how last year I fell over and how I broke my arm, you may remember. I broke my humerus, not funny.

And I'm still, in fact, having physio. And my real thing is not just to get my arm fully working again, but also to learn not to fall anymore. So I'm trying to improve my gait and my posture. And my excellent physio, Finn Lola, is helping me with that. So this poem is called Fall. And it's by Connie Bensley, who's the same sort of vintage as me and I think writes with some sympathy. Fall. When you are falling, expect a split second of thought before you hit the stone, stair, or ground. How to use it? Worrying about the dog? No. Regretting your ancient underwear? No. Cursing the car which is careering towards you? No. Use this tick of time to turn your head in such a way

that your teeth avoid the primary impact. This will enable you to smile at the first responder when he bends to lift you with his big hands out of the gutter. It's a clever poem, isn't it? That's perfect for you. Yeah, it's perfect for me. Not this year, Giles. Neither you nor Michelle. We're not going to fall over this year. Maybe we're going to write a poem this year. Maybe I'm going to do some painting this year. What are you

going to do this year that's new, Susie Dent? You've not done before. Relax. Have you never relaxed in all your life? No, maybe. Well, I have, but not for a long time. So I'm going to learn the art of saying no. Learn the art of saying no and relax yes and relax um well we would love to hear the resolutions of the purple people and the ones that they probably won't ever keep because let's face it most of us never do thank you so much for listening and for following us and please do recommend us to friends and family if you think that they would enjoy us too please Please don't forget the Purple Plus Club where you can listen ad-free

and get some exclusive bonus episodes on words and language too. Something Rhymes with Purple is a Something Else and Sony Music Entertainment production. It was produced by Harriet Wells with additional production from Chris Skinner, Jen Mystery, Jay Beedle, Teddy Riley and someone who probably doesn't even know

that the new year has passed. He's gully.