Something Rhymes with Purple - PM

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Good Afternoon, Purple People! This is the follow up to Episode 144, AM, where Susie took us from morning to just before lunch delivering some perfect words to get us through the day. Now it’s time for the afternoon so let’s sit down for some luncheon as Susie helps us to identify the parasites, groakers, pinglers and guttlers amongst us before Gyles leads us into a post-perennial snooze. After our rizzle, it may be time for some expert fudgeling before a fit-of-the-clevers takes us to the end of the working day. After all that, I think we have earned ourselves a scandal broth! A Somethin’ Else production.   We love answering your wordy questions on the show so please do keep sending them into [e-mail]  To buy SRWP mugs and more head to.... https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple  If you would like to sign up to Apple Subs please follow this link https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/something-rhymes-with-purple/id1456772823 and make sure that you are running the most up-to-date IOS on your computer/device otherwise it won’t work.  If you would like to see Gyles and Susie LIVE and in person on our Something Rhymes With Purple UK Tour then please go to https://www.tiltedco.com/somethingrhymeswithpurple for tickets and more information. Susie’s Trio: Festinate - to make haste  Thalassophile - lover of the sea  Ferrule - tip of the umbrella, metal bit on a pencil to attach the rubber - something made of iron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Something else. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Something Rhymes with Purple. My name's Giles Brandreth, and I present this weekly podcast with my friend, who happens to be the world's greatest lexicographer. She's called Susie Dent. Are you there, Susie? I am and don't accept that lovely title, but thank you for it anyway. How are you doing? I'm in very happy form. And you know, we've got this new feature, Word of the Week or Words of the Week, words in the news, really, because I find I still read an old fashioned newspaper. Actually, I read several newspapers, which I handle with my own hand. Do you read newspapers, physical newspapers?

Not the physical kind. I used to love it because, you know, I used to live in Soho and I would pop out to the newsagents and I'd pick up the Observer and the Times and I don't know, probably a tabloid as well. And I would just spend the entire morning in bed eating croissant, going through them. And I absolutely loved it. But I just don't't do that anymore I don't seem to have time to do it anymore so it's online news sites for me now well I still get newspapers delivered to the front door and they come at about seven in the morning which is brilliant and I also I often go into an ITV program called this morning yeah and there they have all the newspapers. So usually most days I see most newspapers. And it's fascinating to me how often language pops up in the news. And the other day, I was intrigued to see a big story saying children name anxiety as their word of the year.

Oh, no. Really? Anxiety has been chosen by children as their word of the year according to your old colleagues at the oxford university press gosh that's a children's dictionary they surveyed more than 8 000 pupils aged between 7 and 14 they were asked to select a short list of 10 words the one they would use when talking about well-being and health in 2021 it was drawn up from i think you you call it the corpus, don't you? I don't know what that means. What does corpus mean? Well, corpus means body. That's from the Latin for body. So we have corpus Christi, of course. But corpus in lexicographical terms is a body of

knowledge or information. So these are the vast databases that we consult to track the evolution of language. Well, they have a children's corpus, which is a database of material from stories and poems written by children, as well as books written by children's authors. Anyway, they selected the following 10 words to be sent to schools across the country. Anxiety, challenging, isolate, well-being, resilience, bubble, kindness, remote, cancelled, and empathy. Gosh. So they then discussed the words with their teachers and fed back, as it were, the words that seemed to sort of resonate most with them. And 21% of them chose the word anxiety as their number one word. Followed by,

and I think this is interesting, by challenging, 19%. Isolate on 14%. So these obviously are words that have cropped up in this past year and have been used, you know, more than other words. I suppose, actually, language reflects the era, doesn't it? Of course it does. Yes, it's just perfect distillation of a time. I mean, you know, we talk about bottling history. I think nothing does that better than a single word. I had to choose a word of the year for a magazine that I write for called The Week Junior, which is essentially that the week, if anyone knows that, which is a sort of, you know, pricey, I suppose, of the week's news, but for children, and it's beautiful and it's uplifting and it covers the news, but in a really

calm and quite reassuring way. It doesn't sort of steer away from everything, but equally, it's just very, very balanced and lovely. Anyway, so we chose resilience as our word of the year for 2021. That's good. But anxiety is quite a sort of bleak word, really, because it goes back to the Latin angere, meaning to choke or squeeze or strangle. It's related to angina, which is that heart condition where you feel like you're suffocating almost. And anguish came from that as well as anxiety. So, yeah, it's a tough word. Hopefully this won't be the same this year. It won't be the same for them this year. There won't be so much anguish

and anxiety this year. Anyway, that's intriguing. And we want to lift people's mood by exploring, well, fun things today, don't we? The other day, we looked at words to take us through the morning, from the moment we wake up through to lunchtime, covering, of course, elevenses, almost my favourite time of the day. So today, we thought we'd move into the afternoon. We've had lunch, haven't we? Well, I don't know if we've had lunch yet, actually. I mean, we often talk about food and drink, so I think we've probably covered it a lot. I certainly know, and I remember this, it's wonderful, that lunch is made to aggrandise the word lunch. Lunch came first. That's what we think. I mean, it's not nailed down, but yes, it's quite possibly an extension of lunch, which sounds posher. And I always compare it to the, do you remember the Welsh rabbit that people made into the Welsh rare bit? Because they couldn't, they just couldn't face the rabbit bit. It just sounded too cheap, which was the whole idea behind

this saying, really. But I have a few words for lunch, and I'm not sure we've done these before. Well, I'm going to start with one that we definitely have done before. I don't think, I'm not sure if people have work lunches anymore, but I used to love them when I worked at OUP. If we ever did have a work lunch, I used to absolutely love it. And I would always end up ordering the wrong thing and want everybody else's food, which I would stare at longingly. And do you remember the word for that, to stare longingly at someone else's food? No, tell me. It's groking. G-R-O-A-K-I-N-G. And we've definitely mentioned it before, because this is what dogs do all the time. Groking.

Groking. So you have that, if you have... Can I stop you and say, did you resent, as I always resented, when you went on those team lunches with the rest of the team, because I don't drink and I try to eat simply and I usually choose the cheapest thing on the menu, I always resented the fact that the bill when it came was, let's say there were 10 of us, was divided by 10. And you ended up subsidising other people's gross appetites. Brilliant.

Yeah. If you are enjoying perhaps not a lunch al desco, but have actually gone out and decided that you'd quite like to sit in a quiet corner which as you know is latibulating to hide in a corner if you just want to sort of lunch to yourself and somebody comes along and sits next to you there are two words for this one is a parasite which of course means something quite strong these days it's somebody who lives off another person but actually it just meant someone who sat down next to you and probably pinched your food. And also, Samuel Johnson spoke of a scambler, and a scambler is a bold intruder on your table, he wrote. So that's quite a nice one.

That's a very used word. Go away, you scambler. I find that very irritating and a bit alarming. You're sitting in a train, somebody comes and sits down next to you, and there are lots of other vacant seats and people who start conversations on aeroplanes. Oh, and, you're sitting in a train, somebody comes and sits down next to you and there are lots of other vacant seats. And people who start conversations on aeroplanes. Oh, and then you're stuck. You are stuck. For quite a long time. Yeah, that's very difficult.

You might also be someone who pingles, which if you remember means to pick at your food. Or you might guttle it. You might just eat it greedily and get it down your gandhi guts in fact the gandhi guts is somebody who really who loves their food and eats very very quickly and after that we've talked about arse ropes before for intestines but they're also called your gruselins so you might have a grumbling in your gruselins after lunch i love the idea in fact of a post-prandial snooze i say i love the idea sometimes in fact, of a postprandial snooze. I say I love the idea. Sometimes the idea seems to love me.

And whether I'm ready for it or not, it takes me away. Postprandial. What does that mean? Post means after, of course. Prandial. What does the word prandial mean? That just means a meal, really. So it doesn't necessarily mean lunchtime.

It's postprandial means after a meal. And as you would guess, that is from prandium. It's from Latin, meaning simply that, a meal. A as you would guess, that is from prandium. It's from Latin, meaning simply that, a meal. So post-prandial, you can have a prandial conversation if you're chatting with someone over dinner or lunch, but we tend to only use it almost in a fossilized form now with, as you say, post-prandial. Do we talk about pre-prandial? Some pre-prandial snacks? Yeah, let's have some pre-prandial. Yes, we do. When you say fossilised, you mean as though it's an archaic word. We talk about it.

Is that what you meant? No, a fossilised word is really one which exists only in one expression or one idiom and it isn't really used in other things. So if you think about spic and span, we don't use spic in any other way at all. Or, gosh, helter-skelterter is another one i'm trying to think of so you're saying that people talk about pre-prandial or post-prandial they never talk about prandial they don't really do they let's have a brand new let's have a brand new meeting means let's meet over lunch or dinner or over a meal yes i like that and that's one of the

wonderful things that that lexicographers do, is they look at the words which are used alongside the word that you're looking at. So if you're drafting an entry in a dictionary, you look to see what that word's companions are, and then you can gauge whether it's used positively, negatively, or what the register is, whether it's slang, whether it's informal, whether it's formal, et cetera. So it's fascinating. But if you talked about you're feeling snoozy, there is a term actually for a snooze after lunch, a sort of siesta, and it's formal etc so it's fascinating um but if you talked about your feeling snoozy there is a term actually for a snooze after lunch a sort of siesta and it's a rizzle a rizzle a rizzle that's our dialect i'm going to have a little rizzle a rizzle if you're feeling sloomy very good sloomy i love sloomy meaning just a bit slumberous i knew a man who used to always say after lunch that he was going to do his exercises.

And it was only later that I discovered what he meant was having 40 winks. The idea of, you know, the eyes going up and down. 40 winks, where does that come from, actually, 40 winks? Yes, I don't know why they're 40, actually. It's a good idea. I'm going to see whether the dictionary helps us with this. But rizzles, I like.

Rizzles is a snooze, is it? I'm rizzling. I'm rizzling, yes. You could use it as a verb, actually. It's usually there as a noun. And to be honest, it's very old and I'm not sure anybody uses it anymore. I'm having a little rizzle,

means I'm having a little doze, a little dozette. So I am looking to see why it's 40. I think it might've just been used a bit like umpty used to be. Do you remember in Morse code, umpty was an indefinite number. And so 40 winks, if you remember, to wink was originally to close your eyes completely, not just to blink.

And so to hoodwink somebody was to put a hood over their heads so that their eyes were forcibly closed. So that's what wink first meant in Old English. So yeah, I don't think there's anything particularly significant about 40. I mean, maybe 40 days in the desert, you know, the biblical references. 40 thieves, 40 days and nights, yes, in the desert. Yeah, it's one of those. But a rizzle, a rizzle is a snooze. I'm going to use that. I'm going off my rizzle. Yes.

Yeah, very good. So do you ever have a snooze after lunch? Only when I'm on holiday in a really hot country and it's just far too hot to go out and you've probably had a late night and then it is just glorious. You put the fan on and just, I haven't had one of those for ages. I tell you, the big mistake of having a glass of wine

at lunchtime. Oh yes, that's it. That forces a rizzle on you, doesn't it? Yeah, I can't really do glasses of wine at lunchtime actually, can you? No, but when I started out in journalism in the late 1960s, and I worked first for the Manchester Evening News

and then at different London papers, they drank in the office in the morning, but then you'd go for lunch and there would be a big liquid lunch. These journalists, they would literally be having whiskey, no wine, they'd have solid whiskey

and then maybe beer. They'd drink heavily at lunch. They'd smoke. I mean, it was amazing how they functioned. Well, of course, they're all dead now. So we know how they functioned. It killed them. But that sort of thing used to go on. I mean, now it's, I think, understandably frowned on, drinking at lunchtime. Absolutely. And it might make you causey webs, which is a really curious expression, which again, a lot of the words I'm going to mention today come from old dialect dictionaries. But to be causey webs means to neglect your work and as defined in the dictionary, to be too long on the street. In other words, you go out for lunch and you don't come back for a

long time to be causey webs. Causey Webs. How do you spell that? So it's C-A-U-S-E-Y. And I think that used to mean the kind of conversation. So maybe the idea is that you were just out there gossiping with other people. And then Webs, W-E-B-S. As in the French phrase, Couserie, like a conversation. It's the same origins. It's C-A-U-S-E-Y.

Yeah. Oh, Cousy Webs. Cousy Webs. It's funny, origin. Same idea. Yeah. Oh, Corsiwebs. Corsiwebs. It's funny, isn't it? And there are lots and lots of words describing what might well happen after a boozy lunch, really, which is, you know, I often use these words on Twitter, actually. Words like fudgling and to fudgel, again, a dialectic. I mean, this is mentioned by Mark Forsyth, actually. And I talked last time on the podcast about his brilliant horologicon, does exactly what we're doing today it takes you through the day and to fudgel is to look to pretend

as if you're incredibly busy but actually be doing very little at all it's an art fuddling well and I see people doing the street pretending to have phone calls you know holding the mobile after the phone and you know it can't because you're in an area that hasn't got any signal oh it's so funny I do that I have to say, in the days when I used to wear heels out, well, now I just wear trainers or boots or whatever, but I just couldn't walk. I was always scared of tripping up over pavement, so I could stride as powerfully as you like across carpeted areas.

But when it came to walking on the pavements, I was so slow and I just look like one of those ridiculous people who just cannot walk properly in heels. So I would pretend to be on the phone. I regularly did that. So I put my hand up now. There must be a word for that. Somebody who pretends to be on the phone.

Okay. So then you're an eye servant, which is another good word if you remember. And an eye servant is somebody who only works when the boss is looking. Oh, I like that. An eye servant. Yes.

Yes. But we've got to tea time yet because this is... We can go from... I've woken from my post-prandial snooze now and I'm thinking, yes, I'm ready for tea. Where are the muffins and the crumpets? We're getting a good idea of your working day. Well, I was just going to say that actually this is about the time, if we're talking sort of three or four o'clock, where I have a fit of the clevers, which comes before the end of the day. And the fit of the clevers is a sudden realization of how much work you've got to do. So it's a sudden spurt of activity to try and get everything done by the end of the day. So it's called a charrette also in French, and that came into English for a while, but I prefer the fit of the clevers, which happens to me a lot at about this time. But then,

as you say, it is definitely time for a cup of tea and there are so many different ways of describing serving up tea you want to hear some of them i want to hear them all okay i don't know if you are a theist are you a theist yeah somebody who believes in god isn't it there is somebody who believes in god but there is a secondary meaning in the dictionary meaning a lover of tea or a person addicted to tea really i'm addicted to tea and i'm trying to stop having it in the afternoons. Yeah. I am addicted to tea. I don't drink coffee. I love tea.

I've started in the morning having black earl grey, real leaves of earl grey and no milk. And I'm liking that. And I'm trying not, I might have one cup of tea after lunch, but I'm trying to stop because I haven't been sleeping at night and I'm thinking,

oh, why am I not sleeping at night? Maybe I'm having too much liquid in the afternoon and evening and just stop taking the tea so I love tea though I do as well you can get decaf tea it's not quite the same and also I think it does still have a bit of caffeine in it because I've made that mistake before but like you I'm ridiculously sensitive to caffeine so if I have anything after midday that's it that's me gone okay well I'm going to give you some examples. Apparently drowning the miller was one way of saying, let's drown the miller, was let's have a cup of tea. We have definitely mentioned before that- Forgive me, what's the origin of drowning the miller? No one knows. You know, maybe the idea is of sort of things that are ground down,

like sort of tea leaves. And so if you're drowning them, you're pouring the water on top. That's my best guess. But who knows? But it's definitely there in several dictionaries. So drowning the miller and also bitching the pot. Do you remember? Remember people used to say, who's mother? Who's playing mother?

In other words, who's going to have the role of serving the tea? And the kind of Victorian alternative to that, which I love, is bitching the pot. So usually the woman, but to bitch the pot was much more than serving tea. I think it also was to sit down and have a good gossip. And of course, tea and gossip go together and you will find a lot of references to tea drinking as quite damning judgments on the tittle-tattle that was predominantly associated with women and their tendency to gossip. So if you remember the classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, which was compiled by Francis Grose, who lived at the same time as Samuel Johnson, but if you remember collected words from the sort of lower echelons of society, if you like. So he

would go into the taverns and he would talk to highwaymen and he would talk to brothel keepers and prostitutes or sex workers. And he would collect all of their language, which had never been documented before. Anyway, he lists various slang terms for tea, including prattle broth, cat lap, and of course cat there was sort of slang for a gossipy old woman, and scandal broth. So there was a definite association. And in fact, William Cobbett, the pamphleteer, was so incensed by members, female members of his household getting together and as he thought, just sort of talking that he said, how the wenches drink tea and he advised them that he said the gossip of the

tea table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel the girl that has been being brought up merely to boil the tea kettle and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice is a mere consumer of food a pest to her employer and a curse to her husband if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her. It's a really strong staff when all they would do was having a cup of tea. I forget who it was who said. I think it's Alice Roosevelt. If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody, come and sit by me.

Oh, excellent. Excellent. It's a nice line, isn't it? But you're not a gossipy person, actually, are you? No, I hate gossip. I really, I don't like gossip. And I sort of know well enough, having been, I suppose, in telly like you, albeit maybe on the sort of periphery of it, but just to know that so much of the gossip that goes around is clearly not true,

or at least clearly only half true. And then it gets in the papers, and then it gets sort of, you know, exaggerated even more. So, no, I hate gossip with a passion. How about you? Funnily enough, I like old gossip. I don't like contemporary gossip. Interestingly, the present Pope, you know, his very first pronouncement when he became Pope was to talk about gossip and say how one should avoid gossip it's interesting isn't it the very first thing he said i mean i don't indulge i mean i'm on the whole i'm quite good at not being a gossipy type of person i say that but i do love

reading old diaries you know famous diaries like the political diaries of the 20th century, people like Chips Channon, Harold Nicholson. I love those diaries. And in fact, but it is a sort of, if you go back to peeps, in a way, you're gossiping about life in the 17th century. You're being a bit of a, yes. But I suppose it's, as you say, it's kind of, it's a safer world than the kind of contemporary kind, which is usually malicious. But we often talk, don't we, about how the dictionary loves a gossip, because clearly it's so full of insults and it's so full of words that, you know, are like, oh, look at them doing this, that and the other. It clearly is enshrined both in English dialect and in, you know, in the English dictionary. So clearly we've always been a nation of gossips, I think. Is there a dictionary definition between

afternoon tea and high tea? Because afternoon tea I think of as being cucumber sandwiches, egg sandwiches, maybe tomato sandwiches and cakes, scones. That's afternoon tea. High tea I think of as having your Welsh rabbit and something cooked. And do they all precede supper? Yes, they do. Well, I think high tea might be, as it were, what you have in the afternoon if it's going to be a late supper. If you're going to, you know, a dance, a ball, you might have high tea at about five o'clock. Then you get changed, you go out for the dance, then you have supper late at night. But of course, some people, I think, had dinner first before supper. But I just wonder if the dictionary gives us a definition for high tea. Yeah, I'm looking it up now in the OED. So the first reference that it

has is 1787. And it says in British, Australian and New Zealand English, it is a meal eaten in the late afternoon or early evening, typically consisting of a cooked dish, bread and butter and tea. And then there's a little note underneath saying, if a main meal in the evening, more commonly called just tea. So that makes sense. And there are quite a few quotes here as one, for example, in the Girl's Own magazine, 1884, for people who are not in the habit of giving dinner parties, high tea is a capital institution. Very good. So yeah, I just, I mean, I love this kind of, you know, very rare, wonderful teas where you go to somewhere very posh. I remember taking my mum to the Ritz and

then we went to the Savoy for tea and we did all the cakes and everything. And that was a real treat. That is a treat. Tell me about the word tiffin. Well, tiffin is from Indian English, really, and I think was brought back as a sort of part of the, you know, the empire. So tiffin is, I mean, I think nowadays it just means a sort of small snack, really, doesn't it? Whereas if you took tiffin in the olden days, I think you took lunch. It was a light midday meal. Oh, funnily enough, I thought it was like high tea. I thought it was an afternoon thing. Oh, no, I think, but it comes from the the verb tiff which was to take a little drink or a sip which is um yeah definitely anglo-indian usage i mean today a tiffin carrier is somebody

who transports meals you know who works so hard and transport hundreds and hundreds of meals to offices etc they're called tiffin carriers tiffin carriers yeah and i think there's also the the containers used for transporting them with the tiffin carriers. Tiffin carriers, yeah. And I think there's also the containers used for transporting them were the Tiffin carriers too. But yeah, I think it was luncheon rather than tea. But very kind of dated now, isn't it, to talk about Tiffin over here, at least in British English, I think. Yes, unless you're doing it in inverted commas and being a caricature.

Yes, that's true. So it's time for Tiffin. But it is time. We took a break, Susie. Let's true. So it's time for Tiffin. But it is time. We took a break, Susie. Let's do that, and then the evening can beckon. Okay. 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, who had limited prospects outside of acting. The only thing that I had that I could have done was organize crime. And Sofia Vergara, my very glamorous stepmom. Well, I didn't want to be comfortable. Or Julie Bowen, who had very special talents.

I used to be the crier. Or my TV daughter, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, who did her fair share of child stunts. They made me do it over and over and over. You can listen to Din 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. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. This is Something Rhymes with Purple. We're excited

because this is our 149th episode and that means that next time it'll be our 150th, Susie. Wow. And I want you to do some homework between now and then because I want to know what 150th is. I know there's a silver jubilee is 25

and I think gold is 50, diamond is 60. We've discovered with the Queen having had a reign of 70 years that that's platinum, apparently. I wonder what 150 is. Yeah, we'll come back to you. Let's, before we get onto the correspondence, have we got a couple of things for late afternoon or early evening? Well, yes.

As I always say, if you want a good excuse that sounds very plausible for bunking off early from work, because you're actually going to meet a friend down the pub, you can say you're off to a symposium, because symposium, going right back to ancient Greece, was actually a drinking party, albeit one where, you know, proper philosophical conversations took place, but it goes back to the Greek for drinking together. So symposium is the one you need. If it's quaff tide, do you remember that quaff tide? I do remember quaff tide. Time for a drink. If on the other hand, you have done enough work, you've done your fit of the clevers, you've left work and you're rushing home and all you want to do is collapse on the sofa. There is a brilliant word, which might've been one of my trios once upon

a time, which represents the sound of something hard falling onto something soft. And I like to think it's of a body falling onto soft furnishings. And that's SOS, S-O-S-S. SOS. A SOS. A SOS. Yes. So that would probably be me just kind of collapsing onto the sofa.

Tell me about your work routine when you're writing a book. I know you're writing another book. I know you're writing another book. You always are writing a book. If you've got a clear day, how do you divide up the time? Because there are different views on how long one can concentrate. Some people say, you know, actually, you can only concentrate for 25 minutes. You should take a break every 25 minutes. I'm about to start another book project and I'm trying to work out what's going to be the most effective way of getting it done. What do you do? What's your day like? You're quite regimented about this.

I am a bit of a potterer. And do you remember there are so many words in the dictionary for pottering. Fan for looshing is one of my favourites. And I have to say that I get up and move about a lot. So I write a bit, get up, make a cup of tea, walk around, go back. And so I'm not, I think probably the maximum that I can keep writing for without having some kind of excursion, albeit to the kettle, is an hour, probably. But I like nothing more than having nothing in my diary and just seeing that actually I've got three days free, for example, one week. That's quite a rarity, but it's joy to me because it means I really can

just dedicate myself to writing. How about you? Oh, I would love to have those three days free. Yeah, you never do. Because that's when you can do it. And in the old days, when I was able to do that, you know, I would work from eight till six and say, I've got to get my thousand words done. But I do know that one can't really concentrate. You can't really do, I don't think, much more than five hours of really good work in a day. And I'm thinking of starting at seven and trying to work through until lunchtime and trying to work on the book just on days when I've got a clear morning, trying to do it like that in a concentrated way.

So my idea is to get down there seven o'clock with a cup of tea and do a solid hour just with the tea. I've got something down, then go out, make toast, come back to another solid hour, then go back, more toast, another solid, do it like that. Okay. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's a good idea. You'll have to let me know how it works out because I end up lucubrating. Do you remember that word? Lucubrate is to, literally, it's to work by artificial light, but essentially it means to burn the candle at both ends

or at least to burn it well into the midnight hours. And I'm not very good at doing that, but sometimes if my fit of the clevers comes quite late on, that's what I have to do. So, yeah, well, let me know how it goes and I might take a leaf out of your book, actually. a dipnophilist or a dipnophile that is somebody who loves dinner parties oh so it's spelled d-e-i-p so um not used very often and you know mostly tongue-in-cheek i have to say but it's yeah somebody who loves dinner parties i can't

remember the last time i had a dinner party should we devote a whole evening to dinner parties i think it'd be a and then i can bring you some anecdotes from some of the great dinner parties of yesteryear perfect let's do that let's do that okay because because we've got people lining up to ask you questions purple people thank you so much for being there also international purple people and we do have a few probably all the things we've been talking about, about afternoon words, really are very British English orientated. So, if you have other examples that you want to share with us, please do get in touch. It's purple at somethingelse.com. Who's been in touch with us this week, Susie?

Let's listen. Dear Susie, Giles and the team, thank you for the passion you put into the podcast. I discovered it at the start of the first lockdown and I've been an avid listener ever since. I heard you mention the word coleslaw on the podcast recently and I've often wondered if there's a link between the col or cal sound and lots of other cabbage-related words.

Colerabi, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens and coleslaw, to name the ones I can think of. If there is a link, where did this come from? And why has English missed this in the word cabbage, or French in choux? Thanks, Rhys. Wow. French in choux, as in C-H-O-U-X.

My goodness. I mean, I know nothing about it. And I do remember Murphy's Law. And I remember hearing that Cole's Law is chopped cabbage. Cole's Law. Okay, you start with cabbage, which is a bit of an odd man out, which goes back to the French caboch, and that just meant head. So it's related to the Latin caput, which gave us capsules in capital letter, captain, so many, so many different words. So cabbage looks like a head. That's as simple as that. But the other ones all pretty much stem, sorry for the pun, from the Latin caulis or C-A-U-L-I-S, which did actually mean a stem or a stalk. And that in turn branched out through lots and lots of different languages. And I have to say there are siblings in even in the Viking cal, K-A-L, for these kind of dishes or vegetables. So you will find, for example, cavolo in Italian, Spanish col, old French choux. So that is actually related.

And indeed, in the col slaw, the slaw there actually goes back to a Dutch word this time, which is sla, S-L-A, which in turn is short for salad. So it's a cabbage salad, if you like. It gave us kale. Now it gave us broccoli. It gave us the second bit of broccoli as well, a C-O-L-I. And the first bit is related to projecting bumps. So if you think about brocade embroidered on a coat, for example, you've got lots of lovely sort of little bumps of golden

thread, for example, and that is related to broccoli. So it's actually, what it means is it's got lots of bumps, i.e. florets coming out of it. It gave us the collard greens and sort of the whole lot, if you like. Most of them go back to that Latin caulis, meaning a stem or stork. And from there, you can take it back to an ancient root, which meant pretty much the same thing. Gosh, you're brilliant knowing that. Well, I hope that covers it. Oh, no, it's interesting. Oh, it is interesting.

And thank you, Rhys, for getting it raised. Trevor Aston has been in touch. Hello, Susie and Giles. Is there a word for the moments after a piece of music ends, but before the applause starts? A friend in our writing group also sings in a choir, and she says it's one of the most exquisite feelings, providing the performance has gone well. Yes. What is that moment of awe? What would you call it? Do you know, I thought long and hard about this because Lawrence, our producer, gave me a heads up on this one. And I thought, surely there must be a word. And the only one I can think of is not quite right, because it's quiescence, which is a beautiful word. Quiescence is a calm before the storm, if you like. It's a calming.

And a lull isn't right either, because a lull suggests that there's been rapturous applause first, then there's a lull, and then it goes back to it. So I'm going to put this out to the purple people who might be able to invent a word, it could be playful or it could be serious, for that moment where you were just sort of overwhelmed by emotion before you then show it physically by clapping or standing up and giving an ovation, et cetera. So I'm putting it out to our listeners. Very good. Well, there we are.

And get in touch with us, please. It's purple at somethingelse.com. Now, every week, Susie, you come up with three intriguing words. What have you got for us this week? I do. Well, the first one sort of relates to the working afternoon before well maybe after the rizzle and possibly the fit of the clevers it goes with that where it might relate to going home and rushing home if you've got a date to go to festinating so to festinate is to make haste, simply to festinate. This one, I don't know why this occurred to me. I think it was because I miss the sea. I sort of live as far away from

the sea as it's possible to get if you live in Britain. And I am really a thalassophile. So that's T-H-A-L-A-S-S-O-P-H-i-l-e. And the Thalassophile is a lover of the sea because Thalassa was the primeval spirit of the sea. So I love that one. I seem to remember somebody saying that there's no part of the British Isles that is more than 70 miles from the sea. Wherever you are in the British Isles,

you're no further than 70 miles from the sea. It's intriguing, isn't it? Yeah, I'm trying to check that one out. I don't know. I guess it depends what seas we're talking about. And the last one, I don't know if I've done this one before, but it came up on Countdown recently and I just thought, this is such a useful word. And most of us didn't know there was a word for it. And it's a ferrule, F-E-R-R-U-L-E. And it's that ring around a pencil rubber that keeps the rubber in place. Or it's the steel tip at the top of an umbrella. And that is ferrule, something made of iron originally, but used for all those kind of, you know, doofits, watsits, doofuses, that kind of thing that actually have quite important functions.

Do you have a trick for remembering these words? I mean, I know you, as it were, prepare them for the podcast each week. But I often find when just chatting to you normally that you can come up with these words simply from your head. How do you remember them? How can we remember those words? I mean, I want a word like rizzle that you introduced us to earlier for that postprandial snooze.

I'm having a little rizzle. How do I get that? Because I can see a week from now, I'm going to think, oh, she came up with that very good word. Are there tricks? Are there ways of remembering words? For me, it's familiarity, obviously, because I'm exposed to words all the time and I write them down and then they will come up again and again in my head or in whatever I'm doing. So I'm much luckier than most because I encounter them all the time. I think for me, and it would be different for everybody in terms of memory aids,

it's writing them down. So I have a little notebook. I've kept notebooks all through my life to jot words down that fascinate me and just write them down. And for me, that's the best way. I find also actually writing it down, not typing it, makes the difference. Yeah, it definitely does. As I think you know, a few years ago, my son and daughter-in-law and I,

we did a three-person version of Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Yes. And which was put on in London. And to learn the lines, it was quite challenging because I was playing Claudius and Bolognese and assorted other characters. I found it really, really helped that I kept writing the lines out in longhand in a notebook. So I actually wrote my script several, and the process of writing it really did help. I totally see that. Never mind a three-person Hamlet.

Next week, I'm going to see Eddie Izzard in rehearsal for a one-person Hamlet. She is giving us the complete play, just one person. Wow. Which I think is going to be fascinating well i love your three words thank you do you have a poem i do have it well it's a poem really it's one of my favorite poems so it's actually in my head and it comes to me because you talked earlier about burning the candle at both ends when you were doing your writing and this is a poem by edna saint vincent millet who was an American poet. She was born in the 1890s. She was a playwright and she was hugely popular, but not held in great respect by

literary people. But the people loved her. She was an interesting character and died in America about 1950. And this is one of her most famous poems. It's just four lines. My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light. That's beautiful.

She's definitely Luca Brating there. Yes. Remind me on Luca Brating. What was Luca Brating again? Luca Brating is to work by artificial light, so to burn the midnight oilating there. Yes. Remind me on Luca Brating. What was Luca Brating again? Luca Brating is to work by artificial light, so to burn the midnight oil, essentially. Yeah. Luca Brating.

I love it. Great word. All the words you know are brilliant. You are extraordinary, Susie Dent. So, look, I hope next week you'll be wearing a party frock. I shall try and find a fun jumper for our 150th podcast. Oh, my. And if we can't come up with a word for it, for what the 150th anniversary should be,

maybe one of the Purple people can. Thank you, wherever you are in the world, for listening to Something Rhymes with Purple. If you like the show, do keep following us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, wherever you find us. And do recommend us to friends and get in touch via purple at somethingelse.com. Something without the G. Something Rhymes with Purple is a Something Else production. It was produced by Lawrence Bassett and Harriet Wells with additional production from Chris Skinner, Jen Mystery, Jay Beale and the fudgler himself. It's got to be gully.