Something Rhymes with Purple - Grok

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Postman Purple is back with his big sack of Purple People correspondence!  You heard it right folks, Gyles and Susie are diving into the mail bag where we are going to explore what connects airports and kitchens, what happened when Susie tried charcoal toothpaste and we have some Purple People theories on your ‘Aunt Nels’ (spoiler: includes shells and elephants).  We also venture into the world of the extraterrestrial and - perhaps a purple first - learn some language of the martians. Gyles takes us on a dangerous and sadly fateful voyage with a Flawed Horny Well Worn Ghost (Gyles will reveal all!) and also coins a new term we are sure many of you will relate to, as he acknowledges himself as a ‘dent-o-phile’. - to be submitted to the OED imminently.  Yours faithfully, The Purple Producers  A Somethin’ Else production.  We love getting your Purple Post so please email [e-mail] and you might be hearing your question in your Aunt Nels in the upcoming weeks.  TRIO  Plangent - A loud and resonant sound  Dendrology - The scientific study of trees Wegotist - Someone who overuses the royal ‘we’  To buy SRWP mugs and more head to.... https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Something else. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Hello, Giles here. And knowing that we have a family audience and the Purple People often include some very young people, just to say that today's episode does include some language that some people may find uncomfortable or offensive. Hello, and welcome to another edition of Something Rhymes With Purple. Because something does. It's the word herple. And is it a Scottish word, Susie Dent?

It's a dialect word. So you will find it in various parts of Britain. You'll find it in Lancashire. I think it's been recorded in Warwickshire. Yes, it does sound Scottish. I'm sure you will find it in Scotland as well. But I don't think it originated as a Scots word. But it means to walk with a limp. Yes, to walk with a limp. And that's what we call our podcast. And it's about words and language and the joy of language. And Susie Dent and I, we meet each week, these days, mostly on Zoom. And we talk about words. And people around the world are generous enough to listen to us. And when I say people around the world, I really do mean global. I mean, we have listeners all over the planet.

And we're thrilled. And you call yourselves the Purple People. We think of you as our friends. So thank you very much indeed. And today today we thought because we've had so much correspondence we've got a backlog of it we try and deal with some of the questions the queries the points that have come in uh how have you been though Susie have you how's your August been because traditionally it's the month of holidays have you been away at all, I did manage to get away to the beautiful county of Lincolnshire. And I have to say, I don't think I'd really been there before. I think I'd once been to Lincoln itself, which is beautiful, obviously, with the cathedral, etc. But I stayed in Louth. Louth? Louth or Louth? Louth. Louth, yes. And it was absolutely lovely. And I know Dave Myers, who if we have British listeners,

which hopefully we do, they will know that Dave Myers is one of the wonderful hairy biker chefs who go around Britain looking at the sort of, you know, the produce from different places. And he had recommended various places in Laos. In fact, he said it was a food mecca. And so it proved. So it was just brilliant, beautiful walks and just stayed in a wood cabin far away from it all. How about you? Well, I decided to take some time off and I did. And I decided for my holiday to go down the road. That's all I did. Okay. On your bike? Well, I thought, on my tricycle, I thought I would just explore the part of the world where I live. I live in Barnes in West London, and I went on a pilgrimage, starting with literary figures associated with Barnes.

I'm a great admirer of the works of Henry Fielding, the man who wrote, most famously, the novel about the adventures of Tom Jones, made into a great film in the 1960s with Albert Finney. And his country house was in Barnes. And I went to visit the house. And then I discovered that Dodie Smith, the person who wrote 101 Dalmatians, she lived in a block of flats near Hammersmith Bridge. So I went up to her. How amazing. Dodie Smith is the one who captured the castle, didn't she? Oh, which is a wonderful story. I mean, that is one of the childhood classics,

isn't it? It's a childhood classic and a delightful film with Romola Garai made about 20 years ago. I really recommend it. Dig it up if you can. Okay.

Why go away? Why not discover where you are? So that's what I've been doing. No, I think that's an excellent idea. But I have still been sending people postcards

saying, wish you were here. Do you send people postcards? Do you know, to my shame, I can't remember the last time I sent anybody a postcard. There's a brilliant Terry Pratchett quote about postcards, which pretty much sums me up. He says, not for the first time in the history of the universe, someone for whom communication normally came as effortlessly as a dream was stuck for inspiration when faced with a few lines on the back of a card. That is me. It's just, what do you write that's not incredibly cliched and that

you don't mind the postman or postwoman reading? When I left my prep school when I was 13 years of age, the headmaster of the prep school sent every child a postcard to wish them well. And my postcard simply read, keep that Latin accurate, C.L. Stocks. That was the entire message. Keep that Latin accurate. And he was a great stickler for precision. Do you still have it? I do. I have kept everything because another of his postcards that really has influenced my whole life, he sent me another postcard simply saying, busy people are happy people. Be busy, be happy. C.L. Stocks. And that's, in a sense, informed my whole life. Busy people are happy people. You don't have time to think how dreadful things are. CL Stocks sounds like a name that you'd absolutely have to have on the front of

some grammar book from a few decades ago. It's a brilliant name. But we're talking about postcards because actually we wanted to devote this to the purple people, didn't we? This week's podcast. And they don't send us postcards. They tend to send us emails. Purple at somethingelse.com is the address. Purple at something without a G, somethingelse.com. Or they get hold of us on Twitter. And well, let's dive in and see what all the questions have been. What's the first one we've got? The first one that we have is from Phil Giles. His surname is spelled with an I rather than a y as you spell yours he was watching a movie about an airport where someone had run out onto the apron and he asks is there any connection between this and the garment that you wear to protect your clothing

and the apron is what most of us think of as the tarmac, isn't it? It's the paved strip around airport hangars and terminal buildings where aircraft park, essentially. And this meaning of apron, I did a little bit of digging into this, came about around 1925. And it was one of so many extended meanings of the very literal meaning of an apron, which is the thing that you tie around your waist to protect yourself from food splatters, etc. And one of its meanings was a platform, usually a planked platform, that you would get at the entrance to a dock, for example. And if you scroll through the Oxford English Dictionary, the link between all of them seems to be the shape of an apron. So either a kind of expansive flat something or other, like as you have an expansive flat cloth on the front of an apron, or a strip. So those two aspects of an apron have spawned

all sorts of different meanings. And I think it's the flat surface that is being referred to here. But there definitely is, Phil, a link between the apron that we do still wear when cooking. is, Phil, a link between the apron that we do still wear when cooking. And that itself is a bit of a classic for etymologists because it began as a napron. If you remember, we've mentioned this before on the podcast, and a napron or a napperon, as it started, was a small tablecloth. It comes from the French nap, and in fact, napper in Latin, which was a napkin. But because we said a napron, a napron, a napron, a napron, a napron, the N kind of migrated and joined the A, so people thought it was an apron or apron as it was first pronounced. And there are many, many examples like that, which we have covered before, whether it's

an adder, which was a nadder, an umpire, which was a nonpire, a non-peer so many many of them are all due to the fact that when we speak quickly letters often migrate from one word to another by the way do you say napkin or serviette the whole you non-you debate i grew up calling them serviettes but at some point i obviously wanted to be a bit posher and now call them napkins. So same with settee, sofa, lounge, drawing room, all of those. I don't think I did it consciously, but I obviously did migrate, but I definitely started off in the non-you field. How about you? Yes. I mean, I'm so totally middle class, not upper middle class. My sisters weren't debutantes or anything like that, nor lower middle class. We did say napkin, not upper middle class. My sisters weren't debutantes or anything like that,

nor lower middle class. We did say napkin, not serve yet, but actually bang in the middle, middle class. So I said napkin. And by the way, we were discussing air travel, of course, last week, but I don't think apron came up then. But if people want more words all to do with the world of the skies, the lingo of the heavens, tune into last week's episode. Okay. Yes. On we go. Grok.

Oh, Grok. That was the name of a great circus clown, Grok. Oh, I hope next week we can get back to circuses. Anyway. Yeah, we didn't finish circuses, actually. We do need to return. We got distracted by funfairs. So we'll go to return we got distracted by funfairs so we got the we will go to the big top next week but immediately a question from steve mcgough i think it's how you pronounce

it and what does he ask us hello purple people i'm a software developer and a word that i've heard with increasing frequency is the word grok i assumed it was yet another tribal acronym but a cursory internet search revealed to my surprise that it is in fact an actual word. Is this a word you've heard before? I'd be interested to know if it's used at all outside of the software development community. Have you heard grok? Never heard of that. No.

No. Okay, so it's quite like grok, which is one of the favourite words that I mention often on the Purple podcast. To grok, if you remember, is to look longingly at someone else's food. Very useful for dogs and humans quite often as well. But grok is very different. It's spelt G-R-O-K. So it immediately looks a bit strange and a bit bizarre and a bit outlandish. And that is very relevant because it may be the only English word that derives from Martian. Good grief. Yes, that is the language of Mars, because it was introduced in Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Now, I'm pronouncing Heinlein in the German way.

I have a suspicion that that may not be how it's pronounced in real life and in the sort of Anglophone community. So apologies if I've got that wrong. I'm not a great sci-fi reader, I have to say. But the book's main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human who's been raised by Martians. And he comes to Earth as an adult, apparently, and brings with him words from his native tongue. And grok apparently can mean so many different things if you read the novel. So it's much, much deeper than the meaning that we tend to give it in everyday slang, including in the software development community that Steve's talking about. And in our sort of general sense of the word,

it kind of means to just understand something instinctively, to really grasp it and to just to get it if you grok something you absolutely just suss it in your mind and you understand it completely but as i say in the book it's associated with lots of different meanings water drink live life so quite sort of quite a lot of figurative meanings but if you look in general dictionary which i'm doing now it says to understand something intuitively or by empathy and also if you grok someone, you establish a rapport with them. Well, the great clown Grok definitely established a rapport with people. He spelt his name differently, G-R-O-C-K. And I happen to have his autobiography. It's called Life's a Lark. And we'll tell you more about Grok the Clown next week.

Born 1880, died 1959, known as the King of Clowns. He was Swiss. He was empathetic, but it's not the same word as G-R-O-K. Thank you, Steve, for that interesting inquiry. Mint. Excellent. This is a question from Cheryl Heppenstall. And what does she have to say?

Excellent. This is a question from Cheryl Hebbenstall. And what does she have to say? So Cheryl is wondering about the various different words of mint and whether their origins are linked at all. So she wonders whether the origins for the herb, financial terms, as in, or he made a mint, or indeed the minting of coins, or to say something is mint, as in good,

or in mint condition, are they linked? And she says, side note, mint is easily the most impressive herb good in cocktails chocolate ice cream sweets in a salad and the only mainstream toothpaste flavor coincidentally we actually had a toothpaste flavor taster on countdown the program that i work on, very recently. So his job was to taste new flavors of toothpaste and to give them the thumbs up or down. Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that. Mint is still the prevailing most popular taste, as Cheryl points out, but there are lots of other ones that they come up with. I have no idea where you can buy them. I do remember trying some charcoal natural toothpaste and the result was a complete

disaster in terms of black teas, as you can imagine, and also absolutely disgusting taste. I was probably not doing it right, but not for me. Should I give you the answer? Please. Okay. So if you go back to the Roman goddess Moneta, she is the person who is the source of both mint and of money, in fact. So she was in charge of the sort of Roman, the Roman mint, if you like. She was also a goddess of lots and lots of different things and was incredibly important in Roman times. So she was identified, I think, the goddess Juno, but the sort of pre-Roman name was Moneta. And that came

down to English as money and also as mint. Incidentally, I always think it's quite appropriate that Moneta itself is probably based on the Latin monere, to warn, as if money also, you know, carries a warning sign with it because it is quite a risky thing in so many different ways. Anyway, that is Moneta. So she gave us mint, etc. She gave us in mint condition because that is like a newly minted coin. It's new or as new. People have made a mint, goes back to the same thing, is a great deal of money. The mint that refers to the plant used as a flavouring though is entirely different. And for that we have not Latin to thank but Greek and their word mintly which also lies behind menthol so that is very different it would be lovely if the herb was somehow linked to Monet to the goddess but we don't think it is and if

something is mint as in it's great I think that probably just refers back to something again shiny and ace as a newly minted coin. Very good. The expression mint. Mint also is a term of flattery. Oh, you know, he's mint or she's mint. Is that quite recent? Yeah, it is quite recent, but I think it's simply back to the same idea of sort of in mint condition. In other words, it's really good. So if someone's looking really mint in their new clothes or they're really mint, it's the idea of a shiny shiny new coin i've got something for you i have a question which i couldn't possibly answer but as the poetry expert not just on this podcast but in britain i would say i think you'll be able to answer this one this is

from brian harney from dublin he says his mother has always used the expression the wreck of the hesperus to describe someone or something that looked a bit disheveled or messy for example if i appeared downstairs on a sunday morning with aover, she would say, you look like the wreck of the Hesperus. Could you please explain the origin of this? She says she got it from her mother. That's a great etymological explanation that she got it from her mother. But Giles, I think you may have to go further. We have to go further back. It is indeed a familiar turn of phrase to people of a certain generation, looking dishevelled, looking, as it were, washed up. You look like the wreck of the Hesperus. This goes back to a poem written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. During my gap year between school and university, I went to America and I taught English at the Park School in Baltimore.

And one of the set authors was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Great name. Makes a great anagram. You can rearrange the letters in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and come up with flawed, horny, well-worn ghost. Anyway, that's something I remember. How much did you spend on that one? Quite a few. That's what one did in the 1960s between classes. Anyway, he was a famous poet, wrote a particularly famous American poem about the ride of Paul Revere. But this poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was published in 1842, written in 1840. And it is a poem, and there were many poems written at this period like this, that was a narrative poem. It told a

story, a high drama. And this was an age when, you know, before the movies, not everyone could go to the theatre. There was no television. There was no radio. So people would share these dramatic poems. People would buy them as books, and they'd read it almost like a novel. And essentially, the poem, The Wreck of the Hesperus, it's about a ship called the Hesperus that is wrecked because of the captain's, the skipper's, arrogance and pride. This character, he goes on this journey in winter. He takes his daughter aboard his ship for company. He's given advice about which path to take,

how to avoid the hurricanes that are approaching, the storms that are coming. He thinks he knows best. He actually ties his daughter to the mast to prevent her from being thrown overboard to keep her safe. But, I'm afraid, the elements overwhelm them, and the ship crashes into the reef. And the next morning, horrified fishermen discover the girl's body still tied to the mast, drifting in the surf. And it's a woeful, tragic sight, the wreck of the Hesperus all washed up on the shore. The poem itself is a mixture of fact and fiction. There was a real blizzard in 1839, which ravaged the northeast coast of the United States for a whole night. And it destroyed about 20 ships, loss of 40 lives. And Longfellow, inspired by that, came up with this extraordinary poem

that became enormously popular. In fact, I dug up, because I knew this was coming, his diary. And he writes about it in December 1839. Suddenly, he writes, It came into my mind to write, which I accordingly did. Then I went to bed, but could not sleep. New thoughts were running in my mind, and I got up to add them to the ballad. It was three o'clock by then. I then went to bed and fell asleep. I feel pleased with the ballad. It hardly cost me an effort. It did not come into

my mind by lines, but by stanzas. So he wrote this poem in a great surge, and it became hugely popular all over America. And the phrase, the wreck of the Hesperus, became commonplace. And Hesperus itself is a literary term for Venus, isn't it? For the planet Venus. Yes. Because it goes back to the Greek Hesperus, which I think means western.

So the evening star, which is quite beautiful. It is beautiful. And it's a powerful poem, though I think very few people now would wade all the way through it. So what is left is this phrase, The Wreck of the Hesperus, better known in our parents' and grandparents' generation, though it was a phrase with which, for example, George Harrison of The Beatles fame was familiar because he had a song called Wreck of the Hesperus in his 1987 album Cloud Nine. So there you are. So if you look like a wreck of the Hesperus,

it is literary connotations to that. Amazing. Well, thank you for that. Just one last one, actually, before the break. Do you remember in our recent episode, NAF, which is all about Polari? Oh, yeah. We were stumped by something, and that was the use of Aunt Nell's to mean your ears. And we asked the purple people if they could help out, because they always can, and they've not let us down. Not sure we found a totally definitive answer, but some lovely theories here. So Katie Bass and Mike Turner have gone down the Nellie the elephant route, suggesting that it could be linked to elephants having big ears which makes sense but others including jeff lee tara gray and jillian willingale lean more towards polaris connection with london's east end and wonder whether it could be connected to shells and the phrase a word in your shell like which is a word in your ear which is a really interesting

theory and i have to say i hadn't thought about that at all. And shell-like ear, that's been around for centuries. That was a poetical term really, originally, which associated the shape of the outside of the ear with the beautiful convolutions, I suppose, of a small pink seashell. And that was recorded in the early 1800s. So it's very possible that Aunt Nell's was, you know, that somehow looked back to Aunt Nell's, your shells. But we have yet to find the evidence, but two intriguing possibilities. So thank you so much to everybody who's written in with their suggestions. And if you've got the evidence, just get in touch. It's purple at somethingelse.com.

And Susie Dent, who used to work for the Oxford English Dictionary, has all the best contacts there. So you may find, if you've come up with the answer, that it will eventually be in print and you're immortality assured. Let's take a break. there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security. Meeting friends a world away? You can use your travel credit. Squeezing every drop out of the last day? How about a 4 p.m. late checkout? Just need a nice place to settle in? Enjoy your room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together.

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Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh. So you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Welcome back. This is Something Rhymes with Purple, and this week we're looking into the postbag. Not that it's a postbag. It's a screen on which people have emailed us, including Josh Mountford, who's written to say, Dear Susie and Giles, long-time listener, et sec.

What does that mean? E-T-S-E-Q. It's a little Latin phrase, doesn't it mean? Yeah. Is it what it means? And sequence? And the following, yes. And what follows.

So, in other words, I think he's saying that rather than just say, love your programme, all of that stuff, it's just put et sec, which I think is lovely actually. Oh, and stay up, play good. Excellent. Here in Australia, dodgy political conduct typically gets referred to as a RORT, R-O-R-T. Potentially it's a global usage, but I'm yet to come across it. For instance, when the federal government granted a bunch of grants

to sporting organisations in exclusively government member electorates, the media called it sports rorts. What is the origin of rort in that usage? Now, this was a really new one for me. I'd not heard this at all. So I had to do a little bit of digging. And I think I might disappoint Josh, because we think it comes from an adjective rorty which you will find in British English as well as Australian English and that means boisterous rowdy or high spirited so you'd have to kind of slightly stretch your imagination and think that perhaps then that was applied to political behavior that was high spirited and a little bit beyond the bounds of general, you know, uniformity, conformity, etc. And from there, it sort of, you know, really went downhill

and started to be applied to political corruption. But the dictionary doesn't tell us this, and nor does it tell us where wrought comes from. It simply said mid 19th century of unknown origin. from. It simply said mid-19th century of unknown origin. So it's really annoying because I can't really trace that back any further than the mid-19th century, and nor can the OED. It doesn't mean that we won't eventually, but I don't think it's going to satisfy Josh. One other political phrase that's come from Australia that I think we now use in Britain a lot, and in fact, during your time as an MP, Giles, you might have heard it, is dog whistle politics. I love that expression. Yeah. Did you used to call it that? In the 1990s, when I was an MP, it wasn't a phrase that was particularly current then. No. So that's definitely come from Australia. And it's basically a dog whistle message is one that's very subtle, but it's subtly aimed so it's intended for one particular slice of or a demographic

group if you like and it can only be understood by them so only they will notice and comprehend it and it will stick in their minds even subliminally just as a dog whistle quite often is inaudible to most of us to the human ear but dogs can understand it perfectly. So that's going completely off tangent, just reminded me of another political piece of jargon that came from Josh's neck of the woods, but I can't really explain wrought beyond that word wroughty, meaning high-spirited and rowdy. If anybody can, do please get in touch. Speaking of high-spirited and rowdy, can you tell me, Susie Dent, what was the wildest, most high-spirited and rowdy gathering that you've ever been part of? The wildest party that you ever remember going to?

It doesn't immediately spring to mind. No. You know, the obvious answer would be that if it was that boisterous and rowdy i might have drunk too much and then just not remembered very much it's a bit disappointing how about you i mean gosh how long have we got recently and this will amaze you and i won't give too much details because the people are still alive i was invited to go to an orgy near ipswich seriously well but i can't tell you by whom but i, you'd have to tell me by whom. But I mean, was this by someone you know?

By a friend of mine, a friend of mine, a married friend of mine. And indeed, my wife was there. We were at a drinks thing. And there were some, I mean, it was all mature people. In fact, the oldest person in the room was about 85. And he wasn't invited. And this friend of mine sidled up to me and said, I've taken a room across the road at the hotel. I'm going to have a bit of a party. And he said, you know what I mean? A bit of a party. I said, I'm sorry? A bit of a party?

Isn't this a party? He said, yes, yes. Across the way, it's going to be riotous. It's going to be an O-R-G-Y. I said, what? An O-R-G-Y. Are you up for it? Is Michelle up for it? I said, well, you have to ask her. But anyway, we chickened out. But isn't that amusing? Okay, well, we both disappoint on that one. Let's go to New South Wales. We're going to sweep to Catherine Hurst, who writes for us from New South Wales. Indeed, she says, greetings from beautiful Lake Macari in New South Wales. Thanks so much for your wonderful weekly words. I listen while wandering around the lake. How lovely. What could be better than water, walking and words? words anywho a friend and i were recently talking about the current use of hack h-a-c-k in the sense of providing a novel way of doing something we were wondering how the action

of chopping haphazardly turned into how to advise oh explain actually this new use of hack suzy have you heard it well it's interesting isn't it also i think Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Also, I think it's Lake Macquarie, isn't it? Have I got that? Maybe I'm not sure. Oh, maybe you have. Yeah, no, no. Of course it is. It sounds absolutely beautiful. Lake Macquarie, I recognise. I just was reading it off the page. Of course. But I love anywho as well. Well, yes, hack is another of those words that has just proliferated in the senses. It means generally, and has done for centuries since

ancient times, to cut with rough blows of a knife or whatever instrument you had. So that's his kind of oldest sense. And then the modern computer sense of gaining unauthorized access to a system or to data etc that has appeared since the 1980s although hacker has to be said as was around I think a decade before then and the idea I think between the two is that you are sort of hacking a system you're hacking your way almost through a forest to kind of get to somewhere that you, you have to get through all the obstacles and then find the inner prize, if you like. So I think that's where that comes from. The sense, I can't hack it, dates from the 1950s. And again, the idea is that you just don't have the strength to kind of confront all of these

obstacles. The hack that is a creative improvised solution to something so oh yeah here's a good hack or here's a good life hack in other words it's a really good useful tip for how to handle things that again I think goes back to the computer hacking that actually you've found your way in to something you've discovered a route in which is not necessarily easy but it's very useful the hack that is the writer or journalist producing trite work but we have to remember that most journalists will call themselves hack as well do you remember we talked about this one it originally referred to horses used for everyday riding especially the ones that were hired out really tired really overworked and that's a

shortening of hackney from hackney in east london where those horses were pastured and which gave us the hackney carriage which you will still find on london black cabs and that also gave us hackneyed as in overused and unoriginal etc which brings us right back to the journalists but how many meanings and not all of them are very straightforward you know just like sort of hacking into a computer system it's quite convoluted but i think that's the tree but it's very intriguing how as it were they've gone in two different directions hacking into a computer system. It's quite convoluted. But I think that's the tree. But it's very intriguing how, as it were, they've gone in two different directions because the hack from Hacknet is something slightly pejorative, you know.

Yes. Although self-referential, as I say, a lot of journalists will say, I'm just a hack. Yeah. Whereas the other one is, that's a hack. It's a clever solution. Yes.

It's curious the way that works. And then it's linked to hacher, H-A-C-H-E-R in French, which gave us ash, which was an axe in French. And also if you ever want your meat, you know, sometimes they have the, what's the name of the dish that is the raw mint with an egg on top? Steak tartare, isn't it? Or something like that. Their meat is ha ashy which goes back to that very original meaning of being all kind of minced and cut up in the days when i ate meat i used to love that i mean it's extraordinary to think of that raw beef quality beef with a raw egg on top what a bizarre thing to a raw egg oh good grief yes it was a raw egg it was a bizarre thing is that

steak tartare or is the egg giving? I can't remember the name. It's steak tartare. It is. Is it? Even the egg? I think it is. I think it's a raw egg. Well, if we've got it wrong, no doubt culinary guru,

or indeed our mutual friend, Jay Rayner, will be in touch all about that. In fact, Catherine is also interested in cakes and biscuits because she asked us a question about those. And Catherine, we did a whole episode on cakes and biscuits last year in an episode we called Snickerdoodle. Snickerdoodle. So grab yourself a biscuit

or indeed a slice of Battenberg and go back and listen to that episode straight after this one. Have we got time for one more question? Yes, hopefully, because this is one of my favourite words. It comes from Sarah Knight in New Zealand. Good grief, we're really going far afield this week.

She's writing to us from Napier and she says, I love this podcast. And my question is, what is the origin of the word numpty? As I know, that's a bit numpty, isn't it? That's interesting. So she's using it as an adjective, but her nan, who was born in London, used it more to describe feeling a bit under the weather. I'm feeling a bit numpty. And I've not heard either adjectival use or the use to mean a bit as I would say fobbily mobbly a bit kind of not yeah meh where does it come from well the noun is pretty well known in British English in fact it's of Scottish origin so it goes back to Scots in the 1980s we think it was an alteration of numbskull, perhaps with an ending remodeled on the pattern of humpty-dumpty. So numbskull and then humpty-dumpty sort of perhaps gave the idea of a numpty, which again

seems a bit of a stretch, but I have to say that is quite often how language works when it's being playful. That's the best we can do, but I've never heard of it being used to mean I'm a bit under the weather. But it's one of those words which I think is multipurpose, isn't it? I think it can mean whatever you want it to. Sarah ends her letter, love and sunshine from NZ. Oh, yes, please. Not much here. Well, Doug, isn't it winter in New Zealand?

I suppose it is. She writes from Napier, which I imagine, and I hope in New Zealand and Australia they keep these names. But Napier, I imagine, is named after Lord Napier, rather as Melbourne in Australia is named after Lord Melbourne, and Victoria named after Queen Victoria. It's part of the story, part of the heritage. I'm glad they've kept the names so far. Now, speaking of the heritage of our language, you every week dip into your memory bank, or indeed your dictionaries. How many dictionaries have you got at home? Hundreds? Thousands? Well, we talked about whether or not I was a hoarder. Unfortunately, I haven't got as many dictionaries as I once had, but I still have a lot. As you know,

I use the OED online, so I don't have 20 volumes of the Oxfam English Dictionary on my shelf to sort of dip into. I just look at the OED online all the time. But yeah, I've got very many, and I've got many books of obscure vocabulary. And so these words you come up with each week, where do they come from? All sorts of places. Either my brain, my books, or quite often the OED. And also there's an absolutely brilliant book called Reading the OED by Amon Shea. I don't know if you've ever read it, but he collected all his favourite words from the dictionary. I mean, he literally overcame headaches. I mean, all sorts overcame headaches. I mean,

all sorts of ill health effects from doing nothing but reading the OED every single day. Such was his perseverance and endeavour and some lovely words came out of it. But anyway, the first one is inspired by the holiday that I mentioned at the top of the episode, going to the coastline, going to beautiful Lincolnshire in Britain and looking at the sea. going to the coastline, going to beautiful Lincolnshire in Britain and looking at the sea. And quite often it was plangent. Plangent is such a lovely adjective. And it's simply roaring waves breaking on the shore. So it's a kind of, they were plangent. I think it just, it sounds slightly, I don't know, I think maybe because of its sound, it sounds slightly plaintive, but it's

beautiful it just means loud and resonant as I say with a slightly mournful tone on top and it goes back to the Latin indeed for lamenting so that explains the melancholy so that's the first one also we were in a forest and as you know I'm a dendrophile Giles I love trees and so I was looking at the bark of quite a few of them and trying to work out how old. I wasn't counting the rings, I was just looking at the bark of the tree. And dendrology is the study of trees. So I became a dendrologist for a little while. Forgive me, you've told us before, but why is it dendro?

Dendrophile, so phile is from the Greek meaning loving. So if you're a lover of something loving. We are logophiles, you and I. We are logophiles, and i we are logophiles exactly logophiles we absolutely are and dendro is from the greek dendron meaning a tree so it's tree loving very good i'm also a dentophile oh thank you that's very sweet i don't think that one's in the dictionary yet not yet we're working on it the last one is just me being silly and playful but i discovered this in a dictionary.

I thought I'd share it. If you overuse the royal we and just say, oh, we are not amused is the famous one. But, you know, if you kind of talk about we when you actually mean I, you are a weegatist. It's a very silly word. I just quite liked it. A weegatist.

Stop being a weegatist. Very good. Yes, those are my three. Do you remember Margaret Thatcher got into trouble for announcing when she and her husband had their first grandchild, we are a grandmother. But she explained to me years later, she was haunted by this, why she did it, because her advisors had been drumming into her that she should stop using the word I. Well, because she always talked about the government in terms of I, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. And they reminded her, you know, it's supposed to be a collective government. You know, the prime minister is first among equals. It's we, we the government are doing

this. So please, Mrs. Thatcher, say we, not I. And she got this so drummed in that when she came to announce something personal, instead of saying, oh, isn't it exciting? I'm a grandmother. She announced rather grandiously, we are a grandmother. We are a grandmother. Oh, dear. We all make slips like that, for sure. Now, do you have a poem for us this week? I do. And it's a poem, of course, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, because we were celebrating the wreck of the Hesperus earlier on in this episode, and I found a short poem by him. Most of his poems were very long indeed.

But this is a short, sweet poem about rain in summer. And it's really, it's about that summer rain that comes after a hot, dry spell. And we've had a little bit of that all over, well, maybe all over the world. I don't know. Rain in Summer by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And we've had a little bit of that all over, well, maybe all over the world. I don't know. Rain in Summer by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. How beautiful is the rain after the dust and heat in the broad and fiery street, in the narrow lane, how beautiful is the rain.

How it clatters along the roofs like the tramp of hoofs, how it gushes and struggles out from the throat to the overflowing spout. That's it. It's a little picture of tumbling rain. Tumbling rain in the summer producing that wonderful smell of petrichor. That's gorgeous. Well, that's it for today's Correspondence Special. Please, though, do keep your questions coming.

We love them and we read all of them. Purple at somethingelse.com. They really do keep us on our toes. So thank you. And thank you to all of those who contributed the questions that we tried to cover today. And indeed, thank you for listening. Please recommend the podcast to your friends if you feel so inclined.

And if you've got a minute, leave us a nice review or rating if you enjoy it. As always, Something Rhymes with Purple is a Something Else production produced by Lawrence Bassett and Harriet Wells with additional production from Steve Ackerman, Jen Mystery, Jay Beal,

and someone who to me, because I had a glimpse of him today, looks exactly like my idea of the wreck of the Hesperus. It's that beard. It's gully.