Something Rhymes with Purple - Sorbetto

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream! Join Susie and Gyles this week as they take us on a delicious journey, unpacking the history behind ice cream flavour names. We love hearing from you, find us @SomethingRhymes on Twitter and Facebook, @SomethingRhymesWith on Instagram or you can email us on our email address here: [e-mail] Want even more purple, people? Join the Purple Plus Club by clicking the banner in Apple podcasts or head to purpleplusclub.com to listen on other platforms' Don’t forget that you can join us in person at our upcoming tour, tap the link to find tickets: www.somethingrhymeswithpurple.com  Enjoy Susie’s Trio for the week:  Blowsing: Red-faced and somewhat dishevelled; having a blowsy appearance or quality.  Toodley-oodley: All fine and dandy. Ferricadouzer: A knockout blow. Gyles' poem this week was 'The End' by Alistair McGowan A Sony Music Entertainment production.   Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts     To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail]  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

losses and real talk with special guests from the Athletes Village and around the world you'll never have a fear of missing any Olympic action from Paris. Listen to Olympic FOMO wherever you get your podcasts. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there.

Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself.

Hello and welcome to Something Rhymes with Purple, Download Bumble and try it for yourself. It's the third from the last. It is. Episode of Something Rhymes with Purple, as we know it. Not that you and I will be part in company because we have been friends for so long. And I love listening to you talking about words. We shall be manifesting ourselves in a different form in the future. But yes, this is us over three weeks saying au revoir, not farewell, to our lovely purple people because life is full of change and what's interesting to me is I did something last week that I've never done before and I'm trying to be positive about change which you should be I went to an ice cream parlor in Driffield in East Yorkshire now have you ever been to East Yorkshire um no I don't think I've been specifically to east yorkshire i love yorkshire people haven't

people haven't the east riding they don't know so well even though it's the only part of yorkshire that is mentioned in the bible as you know yes um yes the three wise men traveling east riding their camels uh-huh anyway that's by the by do you remember where riding comes from we'll come back to that in a minute ah yeah and tell me now just quickly tell me now because there is the north there's a south riding east riding you're true yes it's from uh the old north for third thing because there were three ridings there are still three ridings on there or therefore no there aren't anyway uh three things uh and uh or three parts. And it was a tri-thing, which we eventually assimilated to writing because it was easier to say, but it has thing at its heart.

Of course, just to remember that thing was once an incredibly important word that has really lost its oomph because the thing was a general legislative assembly where very important people came as well as ordinary citizens to discuss important matters. So it's really come down in the world, but that's what it was, the third thing. Well, I went to East Yorkshire. It's a part of the world I know quite well, because I have a lot of family who came from different parts of Yorkshire. I'm often in North Yorkshire, visiting my teddy bears at the lovely Newby Hall, which is near Ripon. But I go to East Yorkshire because I take part and have done for several years in a wonderful event

called the Bridlington Business Day. This happens at Bridlington Spa. Bridlington is a wonderful seaside town. They have this fabulous spa that was built in Edwardian times. In the early days, there was a lovely palm court orchestra at Bridlington Spa. And tragically, the band leader and the orchestra from the Bridlington Spa were very excited to get a job with a shipping company. And they went off and they became the band and the band leader on the Titanic. Oh, wow. And it was the band from the Bridlington Spa. Anyway, I remember them always around there. I love the Bridlington Spa. The ones who amazingly just kept playing.

Yes, they were heroes. I mean, it moves me just even thinking of them. So, but Bridlington itself is just wonderful. There's a fantastic bay. Bridlington Bay is beautiful. There is this spa. I host this special day. This year was particularly amazing for me because the guest who I was interviewing

was none other than Bjorn, founder member of ABBA, Bjorn Alvius. And I have to say, a more delightful person you could not hope to meet. I am totally sure. Did he have an ice cream with you? This is the point of the story. This is the whole point of the story. I have shared an ice cream with Bjorn from ABBA, a Bridlington. What flavour did he have? Now, this is the other interesting thing. You see, we both chose to have vanilla. Oh, I really was expecting you not to say that. We're hoping you wouldn't say that. This is the point. Was it amazing?

We are so predictable and we should have tried something new. Yes. And after my encounter with Abba, which you can listen to because Bjorn became a guest of mine on my podcast, Rusebud. Other podcast. Well, I hope you will be a guest one day, telling me all about his childhood. We talked a bit about ice cream. But I was then, because I ate this vanilla ice cream in Bridlington, I was told, oh, you must go to Roberto's in Driffield.

Now, Driffield is also in East Yorkshire. There is most unlikely, Driffield is not a large place, but it's got this amazing Italian cafe where they serve that's where i had a most extraordinary experience you order a cup of tea and attach to the and i put this out on on x and on instagram attach your cup of tea is a tiny cone tucked into the the what you hold what do you call the thing you hold your cup with a cup handle tucked into the handle is a little ice the thing you hold your cup with? A cup handle. Tucked into the handle is a little ice cream. This is a podcast about words in language.

Well, yes, we're getting there. We're getting there. Tucked into there is a cone with inside the cone, a little scoop of ice cream. And this was a kind of creme de menthe ice cream, which I would never have ordered, but it was a taste sensation so what i'm saying off the back of you saying that things are changing for the purple people and for us yes but change can be good for you i love ice cream we can talk about ice cream do you like ice cream and what is your favorite flavor i love ice cream my favorite flavor bar none is pistachio oh um i ice cream my favorite flavor bar none is pistachio oh um i absolutely love i can't bear pistachio that's the sort of is that got green nuts in it what are they called yeah pistachio nuts and it is slightly green it is also completely delicious no and you're very pistachio as a nut is delicious

but when you start blending it with an ice cream, it just does not work for me. Oh, I know. Okay. I love it. So give me vanilla every day. And on alternative days, give me creme de marte. I'm not one for strawberry. Where are you with strawberry ice cream? No, not me. I'm not.

I would love. I did used to like sorbet, but not so much anymore. But should we kick into it? I did really love a Nicobocca Glory once upon a time when I was little. I could not imagine anything nicer. A Knickerbocker Glory is a layered ice cream sundae, S-U-N-D-A-E. Just give us, before we go on with the Knickerbocker Glory, the definition of sundae. Sundae is, well, I can read you the definition, but I can tell you where it comes from. It is a riff on Sunday.

Oh, the day of the week. S-U-N-D, yes. Because there was one particular ice cream shop. Basically, they had to circumvent Sunday legislation. This was in the US. And of course, that dictated, much as it does here in Britain and other parts of the world, how many hours you could be open for. So they couldn't call it a sundae with a Y, even though they made it on the sundae. So they called it S-U-N-D-A-E. I mean, another theory is

the dish was made with ice cream that was left over from sundae and then sold cheaply on the Monday. But I think I'm going with it was sold on Sunday, but they couldn't quite let on that it was, and so they changed the spelling. Well, in the Knickerbocker Glory, which first was described in this country, the United Kingdom, in the 1920s, but I think the name is actually older than that, it's layers of different sweet tastes alternated in a tall glass topped with syrup and nuts and whipped cream and sometimes a cherry, which is fantastic. There is no definitive, apparently, recipe to a Knickerbocker Glory, but I think the name Knickerbocker Glory is American, isn't it? It is, and it's thought to be named the Knickerbocker Glory after the Knickerbocker Hotel

in Manhattan in New York City. And during the early 20th century, this particular hotel was pink and cream coloured and was very well known to New Yorkers because of that. And so when it closed in 1920, a very tall, originally pink and cream ice cream dish was created in honour of the hotel and glory was added on. And then it was introduced to the UK in the 1920s as well. And we loved it. But the Knickerbocker hotel itself was probably named after the same person that gave us knickers used in the UK for

pants. Not the American version, but pants as in underwear. And this was Diedrich Knickerbocker. I love the Knickerbocker. And he was the pretended author of Washington Irving's History of New York. And there were illustrations in his book of Dutch gentlemen who were wearing knee breeches. But anyway, and so that was where the underwear connection came. But Knickerbocker became very much associated with New York itself, which is why the Knickerbocker Hotel in Manhattan was so named. Now, I want to know where as a child you had your Knickerbocker glories. I want to know where as a child you had your knickerbocker glories. Okay.

I think I did go to, occasionally went to ice cream shops, but I also think I used to enjoy them in the Little Chef that we used to stop at from time to time. So Little Chef was a chain. I don't think it exists anymore. I think there was an attempt at revival. I'm not sure how well it worked. But Little Chef was this roadside cafe chain where I just absolutely loved it. It was perfect for children. It was very cheap. They did amazing pancakes

and it was much more of a kind of destination than the actual destination to where we were going. And I think that's where I had my first knickerbocker glory. I loved Little Chef. When our children were small, as you say, we would go out to The Little Chef. And they weren't necessarily on major motorways. They were more on sort of A roads. Not on motorways, absolutely. And it was lovely because they also did sort of eggs and chips and simple old-fashioned comfort food.

Old-fashioned food. I was introduced to the knickerbocker Glory in the 1950s as a little boy. I would go every summer for a summer bucket and spade holiday with my mother, sometimes with my older sisters, to Broadstairs in Kent. And there was a big, and I think it's still there, a big ice cream parlor on top of the cliffs. And every day I was allowed to go in and sit on a high stool at the counter and order an ice cream. And I would order a Knickerbocker Glory.

And I seem to remember the cream at the top was then topped with little bits of not nuts, but of chocolate sprinkles. Hazelnuts. Oh, maybe they were. Well, maybe yours is more authentic than mine. And there was a long spoon that was quite fun. So you could dig really deep into it. Oh, I love, oh, almost my best Christmas ever was one we spent in New Orleans at a hotel, the Pontchartrain Hotel. American listeners who know this part of the world, New Orleans, there's a very long bridge called the Pontchartrain Bridge. And one end or the other of it

is the Pontchartrain Hotel, where on Christmas Day, they served us mile-high ice cream pie. And you could have as much of it as you wanted. If you finished it, you could have some more. Nobody, apparently, in the history of the hotel had ever got anywhere near finishing the mile-high ice cream pie. But it was layered. Oh, really? It was layered.

Give me some more ice creams and the origins of their names. Well, there's the banana split. So the banana split is essentially a banana that is split down the middle, as you would expect, and vertically. And then, well, it takes various forms, but I remember it as ice cream and then chocolate sauce and various things on top. Do you? Yeah, I certainly do. I mean, I like bananas and I like ice cream, but I'm not sure that mixing the two really works. I mean, as a rule, because I do like vanilla, I'm very predictable. I usually have, if there are two scoops, I will have either coffee and vanilla or chocolate and vanilla. If there are three scoops on offer, I am confused. I can't cope with too much. So I don't want actually three different.

Actually, I might have vanilla cookies and cream and coffee as a three scoop sensation, but I'm not sure that the fruit and all that goes to the banana split. How old is that banana split though? Oh, I would love it. Well, it's said to have been created in the early 20th century by an optometrist in Pennsylvania who was called Doc Streckler. And he apparently took his inspiration from the Sundays with lots of fruit that he saw whilst on holiday in atlantic city

and so he vowed to create something else and a lot of our food does it and drinks indeed cocktails etc um do take the name of the people who invented them nachos for example after oh like peach melba named after nelly melba and i think that is peach and ice cream, isn't it? I think it might be peach and vanilla ice cream. I'm not sure. Often on a banana split, as well as having a variety of ice creams in the split banana, they top it off with maraschino cherries, little sticks through them. Yes. Now, the maraschino in a cherry, what a maraschino is that a person or is it a

flavor and alcohol well no that is almost certainly and i don't know the answer to this i'm going to look it up as almost certainly a um a place do you think oh do you think so i think maybe a drink but you think they come from rather like. Rather like Jaffa cakes. Well, they don't come from Jaffa, do they? But I mean, it's named after a camel bear. It probably comes from somewhere called Camel Bear. Yes, it does. Sorry, my computer is thinking about this, and it is slowly getting there. I would just say, well, my computer thinks about this.

You and I have both had computers being on goes lately. We've overworked them doing these hundreds and hundreds of episodes of Something Rhymes with Purple. We need new computers. We're going to reboot our lives, you and I, Susie. to cherry um because maraschino as you say is this strong liqueur that's made from um i think the cherries are from a dalmatian actually i think i think that's where they come from but um i would there is there is an interesting side note to the banana split that our lovely producer naya has noted and i didn't know this but it's reputed to have um inspired the big debate that we have in the UK between those who live in Devon and those who live in Cornwall in England about the correct order of a cream tea, i.e. jam, onion scone first, followed by cream, or the other way around. Because apparently with food rationing after the Second World War, ice cream was in really short supply. food rationing after the Second World War, ice cream was in really short supply. So the normal ingredients for the banana split were partly replaced by scones or scones. That's the other

debate. And then, of course, each county were arguing as to how to best meet the tastes of their tourists. And it was all about how to assemble the dish, etc. So apparently there was a BBC mockumentary about this back in the 70s. But I didn't know this little history to the banana split. So it literally did cause a split between two counties. And it still hasn't been resolved, has it? There is no definitive answer. No.

I like to think it's quite friendly, though. What about a baked Alaska? Now, has this got an apple in it? No, this is ice cream and cake and meringue, which is sort of hot. Oh, that's it. And the ice cream stays cold, but the exterior you bake in is very hot. It's a wonderful idea. Yes. Oh, it's absolutely brilliant. So you place it in the freezer. It has slices of sponge cake, sometimes Christmas pudding, then placed in an extremely hot oven for a very brief time, long enough to firm up the meringue, but not long enough to begin melting the ice cream. It is a real art and I have not conquered it.

Meringue. That's a nice word. Where does that come from? Ah, meringue. Yes. Okay. So I've looked up meringue in the dictionary and it says it's from French, but we don't know where it comes from beyond that, or indeed what the etymology of the French word is. Good grief. An interesting word like meringue, we can't get to the root of it. I know. Well, it's one of those, isn't it? I'm surprised. I love a freshly cooked meringue with wonderful double cream oh there's nothing nice apologies to all of our listeners who are probably also finding

their mouths are watering at all of this i hope they are all about neapolitan ice cream oh it's famous isn't it yes but is that i thought it was just simply ice cream that came from naples well yes um it has three separate flavors vanilla chocolate and strawberry you wouldn't like that I thought it was just simply ice cream that came from Naples. Well, yes. It has three separate flavors, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. You wouldn't like that, that's a bit. And it was the first ice cream recipe, apparently, that combined the three flavors, created by the head chef of the Royal Prussian household. And the German name for it, thanks to the name of the person to whom it was dedicated,

Fürst Pückler, the German name is a real mouthful. And this for once and once only, I'm going to say this is not very attractive. Fürst Pückler Ice. That's terrible. Sorry, Fürst Pückler. Anyway, that's Neapolitan ice cream. and I did mention that I'm not a huge fan of sorbet but I know a lot of people are and of course in gastronomy it's used to cleanse

the palate isn't it but that is from the Italian sorbetto but ultimately it's linked to sherbet which is from Arabic just one sorbetto isn't that interesting

that advertisement for Cornetto it's become an earworm it has I mean it's become an earworm. It has. I mean, it's extraordinary. What about gelato? That is the Italian simply for meaning frozen. Frozen. Frozen. And gelato, they call ice creams gelato. Gelato. I'm going to give a shout out because you've given a shout out to, what was the name of the ice cream shop that you went to?

Roberto's. name of the ice cream that you the ice cream shop that you went to roberto's whilst whilst we're on ice cream i would just tell you about um you know about egg corns that does those kind of slips of the ear um one of the favorites that i heard on radio 2 bbc radio 2 uh the other day which was somebody wrote in to say that their nan um would regularly say when it came to pudding i'll just go and get a slice of vendetta from the freezer. Because the ice cream is actually called Viennetta, isn't it? Viennetta, yes. Oh, how funny. I'll go and get a slice of vendetta. Classic layered freezer staple.

Now look, Susie Dent, all that talk of ice cream has made me feel I need a quick toilet break or loo break or comfort break. Okay. So let's take a commercial break while I go and refresh myself. And then we'll see what we're sticking our tongues into next. 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, who do you want to be comfortable with? Or Julie Bowen, who had very special talents. Or my TV daughter, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, who did her fair share of child stunts. You can listen to Dinners on Me wherever you get your podcasts. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right 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 a room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash ymx benefits vary by card terms apply welcome back to something rhymes with purple we haven't absconded to go and raid our freezers sadly i don't have any ice cream in there um but we are going to do our next best thing which is to listen to you the purple people and some of the fantastic inquiries that

you have sent in and um it is no joke that this has been jiles and i always say that the very best part of something wise with purple has been you uh you have meant a huge amount to us. And at our live shows, we were so touched, weren't we, Giles? We were. Yeah. We were actually, the very first one we did, which was several years ago now, it was in London somewhere. And I think in Islington, Islington Town Hall or somewhere odd like that, we were standing in the wings and the ovation before we came on was so great that we were literally, both of us, I think, moved to tears in the wings. Yes. And then, yes. Anyway, enough of that and on to your queries. Now, Giles, I don't think we have a voice note for

this first one that comes from Sasha. So, would you mind reading it out? With pleasure. Hi, Giles and Susie. I've just discovered your podcast. Well, Sasha, better late than never. I've listened to this year and last and have now gone back to the beginning in 2019. Wow. My gosh, that is five years ago. So apologies if you've already done my suggestion, but I haven't heard it yet. I recently found myself asking a friend, are we Costa-ing? That's capital C-O-S-T-A dash I-N-G, meaning, shall we have a coffee?

Are we Costa a coffee? Are we costering? It feels a recent thing to turn nouns into verbs, but it's probably been going on for ages. Do any words not work? What are new ones that have made it into the OED? What is the first use? Another favorite is the order of adjectives. Who decided? I've always loved words and remember learning at primary school about how place names were formed. I'm from Littlehampton, which means Mr. Little's farm town. Thanks for all the knowledge, Sasha. I remember Littlehampton so well.

We used to go there on trips when I was little and to Arundel nearby. Lovely. Well, Sasha, a lot of questions there. And I think they would take an entire episode. I'm going to be very, very quick and say that we have been verbing for a very, very long time. And the person who is often held up as the king of verbing is, of course, Shakespeare,

who played around with parts of speech like no one else. And not just verbs and nouns, but adjectives. He just was so experimental and exuberant with the words that he had at his disposal and then what he did with them. So it is definitely not a new thing. Shakespeare talked about things like, well, he said, grace me no grace, not uncle me no uncle, he even turned uncle into a verb. I'm sure there are some that don't work quite so well. I think Costa-ing is a little bit of a mouthful, if I'm honest. It's clunky, isn't it? It's like saying, I'm Starbucks-ing. Exactly.

Are we Starbucks-ing just now? Yes. But the beauty of it, though, is that every single person will know exactly what you mean, even if it's not particularly elegant. So it has been going for a very long time. It is a very quick and easy way. It's a shortcut to explain to somebody what you mean. And the OED is absolutely full of them. I don't know what would be the most recent, actually. That's an interesting one. So I may return to that in the future. But certainly, verbing, we are all at it. We often blame the Americans for it. There are some very ugly examples, like solutioning, which I have heard, but ones that we tend to think of as being American inevitably are a lot older and were used in British English first. And then, Sasha,

you ask about the order of adjectives, and this is famously one of the rules that we don't know we know if we are a native English speaker. We are decidedly lacking in rules. Most of them don't work. I, before you accept, have to see as a prime example of that. Too many exceptions, for the rule to work. But there is an unspoken rule, if you like, regarding the order of adjectives. And there is a long sequence which any non-native speaker presumably then has to learn. And it's something like size, opinion, shape, matter and various categories that any adjective or pile up then has to follow. Luckily, we don't. As to what inspired it and why we do it, I suspect it's all about sound, much like that rule of ablout

reduplication that I often talk about with Giles, which dictates that bells don't go dong-ding, they go ding-dong, and we don't play pong-ping, etc. It is an unspoken rule that has become instinctive to native English speakers, and I love it. And I love you for knowing all that stuff and sharing it with us. The next letter is actually from somebody who may live just down the road from you, Susie, because it comes from Laura, who lives in Oxford. Let's listen to what she's got to say. Dear Susie and Giles, I've been listening to your podcast since seeing the live show in Oxford a couple of years back. Thank you for your ongoing entertainment. Something has been irritating me recently. The word itself itself whilst driving to work

this morning i decided enough was enough and i thought i'd get in touch in the case of irrational irrelevant irresponsible irregular etc the ir prefix produces the opposite meaning of the root word but in the case of irritating i wondered can i be rotating does the word differ to the rule because of the vowel that follows the IR, or does it not belong to this group of words at all? Please help me resolve this so I can stop irritating my partner by shouting out IR words that do seem to fit the trend. Irreducibly grateful, Laura, age 34, from Oxford. That's brilliant. Well, there we are. Yes, iridescent. Does ridescent exist? Anyway, give us the answer, Susie. So, Jazz, I'm going to start off with your iridescent, which actually isn't linked to this,

and iridescent is linked to Iris, who is goddess of the rainbow. Something is iridescent. This almost is reflective of the colours of the rainbow, which is quite beautiful, and the iris of the eye, of course, which can be various different colours. So that's that one. That doesn't fit the bill. But our prefixes in English are very confusing. So if you get, for example, confused between flammable and inflammable, you will become equally confused as Laura. It's a different category because the in here does not mean the opposite of, or it's not a

negation as in intolerant or inarticulatory. It's actually used as an intensifier, but it's very rare that it would be used that way. Now, when it comes to irritate, it goes all the way back to the Latin irritare, which meant exactly the same thing. And the retiree bit has never existed in English sort of separately. So although sometimes you can find these separate things, you can't in the case of irritate. And it's tricky to take it much further back than that. So I would love to say to you, but in Latin, there was a verb, retire, that meant this, that and the other. But I can't at the moment because we haven't quite worked out exactly where it comes from. So I think it doesn't quite fit the bill of the others. And

if you can hear me at the moment, I'm just checking my only other source, which may take me all the way back. But in the deepest depths of my etymological dictionary, it's possible that it comes from a Proto-Indo-European word, an ancient word, rito meaning stirred, S-T-I-R-R-E-D. But that wouldn't make sense, particularly with iritics. It doesn't mean not stirred. You are stirred up in some way. You are enervated. So it doesn't quite work. But as as you can tell i'm waffling because the answer is we don't completely know um but i would say that it's a bit of an outlier and you were right to shout this at your girlfriend but excuse me uh if it's an intensifier if you're telling me that inflammable actually means even more flammable than flammable. Yes. Inflammable. Okay. Could it be an intensifier?

Rotating does mean stirring up, but irritating means stirring up even more so. Well, quite possibly. What I mean is it doesn't seem to belong to the stable of words with IR that means not or the opposite of or without. So that IR there is essentially a riff on the Latin IN, which we've just covered, which is a negation. And it tends to work with most of them. If something is irreconcilable, you can't reconcile it. So that's the kind of negation effect. I'm not sure it works with irritate.

And as you say, it might have been there as an intensifier. But it is incredibly idiosyncratic, our language, and none more so than when it comes to prefixes, because they don't always work. And when it comes to inflammable, you will rarely find that on labels these days for clothing and duvets, et cetera, because it is misleading. So you will usually find highly flammable instead. So I'm really sorry, Laura, I didn't particularly answer your question very articulately, but as you can tell, I'm as baffled sometimes by our language as the rest of us. So Laura, when she asked the question, was age 34. By the time she's heard Susie's answer, she's pushing 60 and none the wiser,

really. But that's good because it shows that we're not infallible. Very good. Infallible, of course, is in the dictionary. Very good. All right. Give us your trio of interesting and unusual words. Okay. Well, this is me after that attempted explanation. I am blousing, B-L-O-W-S-I-N-G. You could pronounce it blosing, but it means red-faced and somewhat disheveled, which I quite like. And it was the opposite of something that was toodly-oodly. Toodly-oodly from the 19th century means all fine and dandy, obviously a nonsense word, but I quite like it. So that's all toodly-oodly.

And finally, if anyone wants to insult me after my attempted explanation of irritating, you could deliver me a ferricadoozer. And a ferricadoozer is a knockout blow. So slightly strangely, it comes in various forms like our ice creams, but F-E-R-R-I-C-A-D-O-U-Z-E-R is the one that I've written down here. Ferricadoozer. There's another one which is quite nice, which means exactly the same, but particularly in an argument.

It's a sockdologer. So if you deliver a sockdologer, it is a really punchy argument that might leave the other person speechless. Or if you knock them over entirely, that is called a recumbentibus. Recombentibus. Anyway, those are my five, in fact. Do you have a poem for us today? I do have a poem for us. And given that this is our pre-penultimate episode,

I picked up a poem called The End. And it's written by my friend and yours, Alastair McGowan, best known as an impressionist, actor, entertainer, but also a pianist and now a poet. In fact, he's been a poet for some years. And this poem he wrote in 1992, comes from his collection, Not What We Were Expecting, that is just out. Written in 1992, when he was young. It's called The End, which is why I picked it up and thought it would be appropriate to read at this juncture in our purple life. But it's about the end of an affair. And Alistair at the time, I'm assuming it's autobiographical. I may have got that wrong. But I'm picturing him, you know, it is 30 and more years ago, as a very young man starting out on the comedy circuit, appearing in different theatres.

And I think this one is set before he's about to appear on a stage in South London, and it's about the end, the end of an affair. Silence in the crowded bar between us. The noise all around of banter and office crushes, dares and plans and football, all light and fun and hope on Friday night. The start of their weekend echoes around us as we sit, silence between us, staring at the happy past, the empty future, our dream, like broken glasses around us, the end of our life together. Our year. Us. Gone. A few words in an unlucky bar, and that's all it took. The shaking of the heart, the painful, frantic searching of the eyes that followed. Sobbing both, we head for the quiet of the streets, where hate now enters the picture,

for the first time, sauntering in on the back of love. And I don't know, I can't explain where love goes. It walks past us, hand in hand, it laughs out of the pub, squirms onto the last tube home. What more could I want? I don't know, I say. Something. But love has gone, swallowed in his last pint, shot in her handbag, powdered onto that keen cheek. Between us, silence. I'm on stage, in Balham, in an hour. Gosh, it is powerful stuff. It's powerful stuff. He's writing interesting poems, isn't he? And that was written, obviously, years ago. And I think anybody who's been in that situation, as many of us have been, will recognize it.

So brilliant, Alistair McGowan. Not what we were expecting. No. And not only have you and I not had an affair, but also we're not finishing. No. Oh, no. I wasn't suggesting it was about us. So we are the antithesis of that.

Well, that's an interesting idea. But never mind. Oh, no, I wasn't suggesting it was about us. So we are the antithesis of that. Well, that's an interesting idea. But never mind. No, no. The end of the affair, the affair hasn't yet begun. But who knows what the future holds? We can dream on. And we do dream on because next week we will be with you for our penultimate episode of Something Rhymes with Purple.

Thank you so much for being with us. Yes. And just to remind you, it's a Sony Music Entertainment production produced by Naya Dio with additional production from Jennifer Mystery, Richie Lee and Ollie Wilson.