Something Rhymes with Purple - S.W.A.L.K.

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

The purple postman has arrived ready for a full episode of your correspondence. Today we’ll delve into the tweets, letters and emails from you all to discover what ‘clockwise’ was before the invention of clocks, the turbulent tale of the word ‘manufactory’ and Gyles shares many an anecdote of a younger Gyles using the pen to woo admirers. Susie's Trio: Begrumpled - left a bit displeased or affronted Capadocious - splendid or excellent, Devon or Yorkshire  Strolloping - an old Lancashire word for going about in a scruffy, slovenly manner. Try 6 free issues of The Week magazine worth £23.94 today. Go to http://bit.ly/SomethingRhymeswithPurple and use your special code PURPLE to claim your 6 week free trial today. To buy SRWP mugs and more head to.... https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple A Somethin' Else production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main We'll see you next time. Annex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Something Rhymes with Purple. I'm Giles Brandreth, speaking to you from London, England.

And speaking to you from Oxford, England, is my colleague, friend and the world's leading lexicographer in my book. Anyway, that's what she is. It's Susie Dent. How are you, Susie? Just in your book. Thank you, Giles. Very well. Thank you very much. You sound a bit sniffly. I am covered in cold. I've got a sore throat. I've got a thick head. But there we are. This is life. And curiously, because I've spent the whole, you know, the past year and more thinking about this pandemic, I'd forgotten to be ill in other ways. So now I've suddenly got a cold. And of course, I feel I shouldn't be out there, but at least I can put on a mask and keep my sneezes to myself. That's the thing that I hope we maintain with mask wearing when and let's hope it will be

a when this is all over, that we will become more like Japan and we will actually wear masks. It's a benevolent thing towards other people not to infect them rather than not to be infected, you know, if we have colds, etc. And I am not keen to go back to the handshake. I am now got into the habit of the namaste, is that how it's pronounced? Yeah. The namaste, which means what? Sounds great. And it means homage to you. Homage to you. Homage to you. Homage to you. That's a very good start.

I'm pressing my hands together and I'm saying homage to you. So I'm not necessarily into hugging or handshaking, but I am into namaste. I'm also into old-fashioned communication. I still like to get a letter, a letter in an envelope, even one with S-W-A-L-K on the back. Do you remember that? Yes, I remember that from Snoopy cartoons.

It stands for what? Sealed with a loving kiss. Sealed with a loving kiss. You open the envelope and there was a lovely letter, sometimes a love letter. I have kept in boxes in the basement, every letter almost I've ever been sent, certainly every letter from my teenage years, every letter any girl sent me, even amazingly, the rejection letters. I have kept

them all. And I remet one of my sort of teenage girlfriends the other day. And we'd been, you know, a proper item for a couple of years. And I met her and I said, I've got all your letters. And she said, oh, really, Charles? I threw yours away years ago. Not very nice, is it? Hundreds of them. And I've also got a correspondence I had with a girl called Chrissy. At school, I was in a play, a production of Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot. And I played one of the monks. And a girl who was the oldest sister of a girl at the school saw the play. And she said to her sister, well, I like the look of him.

And the sister gave her sister my name. And so this girl, who was about 18, I was about 16, began writing to me. And we didn't meet. She just corresponded. And she sent me a photograph, and she was very beautiful. And she wrote me these wonderful letters. I mean, really extraordinarily exciting letters to receive when you're 16. I mean, amazing, including some rather candid drawings of herself as the months went by.

And so this correspondence carried on for about two years. And then one day, I was sitting in my dormitory. I was at boarding school. And a boy came into the room saying, there's a girl called Chrissy waiting in the quad and she wants to see you. I thought, oh my goodness, this is her. I'd never met her. We'd corresponded in an increasingly intimate way as the years had gone by.

Anyway, eventually I, you know, brushed my hair and went downstairs to see for the first time Chrissy. And there she was. And she looked as lustrous and as lovely as first time Chrissy. And there she was. And she looked as lustrous and as lovely as you can possibly imagine. By now she was 20 and I was almost 18. And she saw me, her face fell. Oh. And it became immediately clear that she'd been writing for two years to the wrong person.

She had fancied another of the monks in the school play, and her sister had identified me by mistake. And the boy she had liked, a boy called Mark, as it happens, had now left the school. She'd been writing to me under a misapprehension. Oh, no. But this has to be like Cyrano de Bergerac. Was she not so wooed by your letters that actually nothing else mattered?

I never heard from her again. I've kept all the letters. And because this year I've been writing a sort of childhood memoir, I dug them out again to see whether I'd imagined all this. And there they are, boxes full of them. Have you kept love letters from your girlhood? I was just thinking about this the other day, actually. I was talking to my youngest about soft toys and how I was never massively into soft toys, unlike her.

But I did have a tiny, tiny little bear called Marmaduke. And he was amongst all my treasured possessions, which included a few love letters from when I was, I mean, I started quite late, so probably from university. And I can't find them anywhere. I have a feeling that in a massive attempt at scurry funging, which you'll remember is frantically tidying up because someone's about to come around, that somehow they got put into the wrong, you know, repository and then got thrown away. That's a sadness. That would be a real sadness for me. I'll put up on Twitter a photograph of the basement room where I keep all my past

correspondence and people won't believe the number of boxes there are. There are literally scores of boxes. There may be even more than a hundred boxes. The truth is my wife has said to me that when I die, because of course I'll die before her, before even she phones the doctor or the undertaker, she is going to be calling the people who run the skips. And they're going to be around and it's all going to be tossed onto a skip. So I've got to work out what to do with this stuff. That's clearly not going to happen. Well, no, I think it really is going to happen. She says, God, Charles, who is going to be interested? Even the girls you wrote to, they've not kept your letters. Why have you kept theirs?

It's all about you, isn't it, Charles? All about you. Well, this week it is all about letters, correspondence, because we are very lucky. We may not get many love letters anymore, but we do, and we may not send many love letters, but we do get correspondence, and we love the correspondence we get. And we get it literally from all over the world.

People write to us, purple, P-U-R-P-L-E, at somethingelse.com. And the something is spelt without a G, just to be different. So shall we devote this week to talking about the people who've written to us and thanking them and trying to maybe answer some of their queries? Definitely. Let's do that. talking about the people who've written to us and thanking them and trying to maybe answer some of their queries. Definitely. Let's do that. Well, actually, this is less a question and more a brilliant and helpful comment. Because a few weeks ago, our episode on cat phrases, which we call Lovely Jubbly, if you remember, just got a few people getting in touch, particularly about Homer Simpson's famous cat phrase, dough.

And it would seem that Matt Groening was a fan of the great Laurel and Hardy. And the phrase Doe was regularly used by one of their kind of mainstay supporting acts. And that was the Scottish actor, Jimmy Finlayson. I think it was called Finn, wasn't he? I've only got a distant memory of Laurel and Hardy, but I do remember loving them.

So apparently it started there. So it didn't begin with Homer. Do you remember that? I do, indeed. I wasn remember loving them. So apparently it started there, so it didn't begin with Homer. Do you remember that? I do, indeed. I wasn't a fan of Laurel and Hardy when I was small. I didn't find them funny. The only one of those silent film people that I did find funny was Harold Lloyd. He was my hero, but Laurel and Hardy passed me by until I rediscovered them many years later, making films about them for the one show. Okay, well, it was Mark Kudlowski, Mark, I hope I've pronounced that correctly, and Jonathan Havard who pointed that out. So thank you very much. And as always, as Giles says, if you want

to get in touch, question or comment, please just email purple at something else.com. Well, we have had lots of questions. And the first one is from Claire, who comes from southern England. She writes, Dear Susie and Giles, thank you so much for your entertaining podcast. It's a nice thing to say. Like Giles, I always want to remember lots of these amazing words to use in everyday life, but rarely do. It's a challenge. And we must, Susie, find a way of helping people to remember these words. Yes. Working in a hospital x-ray department, though, I have managed to remember arthropes and lalokesia. What was arthropes again? Okay, so arthropes was a very old word for your intestines, which I loved. And lalokesia, as Claire goes on to say, is the relief of pain and sort of stress and frustration through swearing.

Absolutely. And she says, I often tell people who are swearing due to pain, usually we have to move them to take an x-ray, that there's a word for that. And indeed, there is a word, as we now know, lalokesia. Widdershins is one of my favourite words. And I was wondering if there is an ancient word that means clockwise that was around before the invention of clocks. Oh my. Remind us what Widdershins means. Okay. So Widdershins means in a kind of contrary or awkward or wrong direction. Usually left-handed because as we know, left-handedness for centuries

was seen as wrong, the wrong way, very unfairly. So Widdershins comes from German really. It means to travel backwards. In other words, it's to travel against the natural or normal direction. And the sort of sinnen bit, which was the old German for travelling, was eventually linked to sun. And that's how it today signifies something. It runs in a direction contrary to the sun's course, in other words, counterclockwise. So, the question about clockwise is a really good one. So clockwise is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. The first record is 1874. So that's quite a long time after the invention of clocks as we know them, which began to appear around the 14th century, I think.

Before then, you would have sunways or sunwise, which is quite interesting because in the northern hemisphere the sun appears to move in an arc isn't it from left to right across the sky and so sunwise was synonymous with clockwise although in the southern hemisphere it's from right to left but anyway so we had that we had sunways and sunwise and we also had something called diesel I think it would have been pronounced so d-e-a-S-I-L, and that meant right hand wise, if you like, turn towards the sun. That ultimately goes back to the Latin dexter, meaning right hand, which of course gave us dexterity, etc. So yes, the daily movement of

the sun was often considered, you know, as kind of lucky or auspicious from east to west. So sunways, I think, is the answer to Claire's question. I quite like that. It's moving sunways. Very good. We've got a question now from Northern Ireland, from Catherine Penny in Carrick, Fergus. And she says,

I came across this old photograph which she sent us of a street in Belfast near where I'm from. And I noticed the wording on the side of the Cantrell and Cochrane fizzy drink factory. It's a marvellous evocative picture. Yeah, it's gorgeous, isn't it? It says on the side, Cantrell and Cochrane's aerated water manufactory. So what she's asking is, is the word factory that we all use an abbreviation of manufactory. I've never heard of this word. Can you enlighten me? And I'd never heard of the word before. So thank you, Catherine Penny,

for that. Tell us, is manufactory the origin of the word factory? Well, yes. I say yes with a little bit of hesitation because there's not a clear line when you look at the trajectory of factory, but, manufactories existed. So just to go back to the origin of factory, the first factories were from any urban area in India and Southeast Asia. And in the late 16th century, a factory was a trading company's foreign station, if you like. So in the modern sense, it didn't come around until the late 1600s. But until the Victorian era, really, a building where goods were produced was more usually called a manufactory. So a factory had its kind of own course on its own. But as I say, there was manufactory running in parallel alongside

it. And so one probably did influence the other. The root of factory is the Latin facere, to make or do. That gave us fact and factor, feature, feat, all of those things. And the manu, of course, of manufacturing means by hand. So to manufacture something was to create it by hand. That manu goes back to the Latin again. It gave us manual and all sorts of different, you know, manipulate all sorts of different words, manacles, et cetera, et cetera. So definitely one influenced the other, I would say. But whether or not it's a straight line from manufacturing to factory is open to debate. Very good. I mean, I love the idea that factories can be called manufacturers because it makes sense to manufacture.

What do you manufacture? You manufacture it in a manufacturing. Speaking of manu, I was learning interesting things this week about centipedes. Oh, yeah. You know a centipede is so-called because it comes...

100 feet? 100 feet, exactly. Centrum is Latin for 100 and pedis is Latin for foot. Yes. But there is no centipede in the world that has 100 feet. No.

That's strange, isn't it? They can have 30, they can have, you know, 150, I think. But they all come in pairs and they never come in even pairs. So there'll never be a centipede with 50 feet. Ah, that's very interesting. 49 pairs or 51 pairs, but not 50 pairs. I wonder if that goes back to the sort of old naming of animals, where people hadn't really seen certain wild animals before.

And so they simply likened them to, you know, other things that they saw. So I never know how to pronounce this. I think it's a camelopard. Camelopard, that's a sort of cross between a leopard and a camel. Yes, exactly. That, you know, goes back to Latin and Greek. But that is what we would call today a giraffe. But obviously, when they first saw one, they had no idea what it was.

So they simply took two animals that they were familiar with and kind of put their names together and thought, that will do. Gosh. So they saw this little insect that looked as though it might have 100 legs and thought, well, let's call it 100 feet. Yeah. Well, what an amusing idea. If you know better, let us know. It's purple at something else. Someone who has been in touch is, well, really referring to the terrible weather we've been having in recent weeks here in Britain, Giles Brearley and Ross McCreary. They want to ask about the phrase phrase it looks black over Bill's mother's mother mother I think it's

normally mother yeah have you heard that expression I have heard it so often simply because so many people write in saying who was Bill so it's a very common expression that people have inherited from their parents and their grandparents well it's very popular in the Midlands in Britain I would say and it has been around for a long time. I think records date it to at least the 1920s, but because it's very much of a sort of regional spoken tradition, it probably goes back a lot longer than that. It was popular in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and can still be heard today. It basically means impending bad weather. basically means impending bad weather. Sometimes it's black over Will's mother, which might give us a clue, because the most plausible theory is that the Bill in question is William Shakespeare,

who originated from Stratford-upon-Avon, so to the southwest of those counties where the expression were most used. So if black clouds are seen over that area where perhaps his mother's house, i.e. his birthplace, is located. Then perhaps the southwesterly winds will push rain towards those counties before too long. It all sounds a bit convoluted. It might simply be, you know, as so often in English, the use of a personal name in an expression actually means very little at all. And the example I always give is jack of all trades, you know, a steeplejack, a lumberjack,

Robin Redbreast, oh, so on and so on, Tom, Dick and Harry, Flaming Ida, Flipping Nora, you name it. But the most plausible of all the suggestions put forward is that it might be Will Shakespeare. It looks black over Bill's mother. And can you tell me what her name was, Shakespeare's mother? I've just remembered. Mary Arden? I haven't looked this up. Mary Arden.

Mary Arden. That is correct. Mary Arden. Well done. I tweeted yesterday one of my favourite words to do with capricious weather, which is, I'm sure I've done this, this is one of my trios, thunderplump. And thunderplump can be found in dialect dictionaries, and it's known particularly in Northern England and in Scotland. And it's that sudden, heavy, thundery downpour that totally takes you by surprise and soaks you within seconds. And we have had so many of those. But I love the idea, the plumpness, the fat, heavy raindrop

that just kind of dumps on you very quickly. That's a great word, a thunderplump. Yes, it should be a verb. Yes, to thunderplump. I've just been thunderplumped. I've just been thunderplumped. Well, let's go somewhere sunnier. And we can do that because this is a global podcast.

We have people listening all over the world. Todd Harris from New Zealand has been in touch to ask about a more sun-appropriate activity. Every night I lie down in bed and listen to an episode of your podcast. The question is this from Todd Harris. I've always been confused by the word barbecue. As a child, not knowing the spelling, I wondered what connection was with barbecues and Barbie dolls. Now that I'm older, it seems they're unlikely to be related, but who knows?

Hopefully you do. I do. Nothing to do with Barbie dolls at all, as you might expect now, I would think, Todd. But it actually goes back to 17th century Spanish explorers who, when they landed in the West Indies, saw native people, the Arawakan, drying meat over a frame. And the Arawakan called the wooden rack that they used a barbacoa. And so the explorers simply borrowed the term and it came to name not only the frame, but the process of cooking, not drying, but cooking meat. Because that was, you know, that was the kind of traditional method, or it became the traditional method of cooking meat.

So yes, it goes all the way back to the 17th century and the borrowing as we so often do from other languages. Should we have a break and a cup of tea? Oh, let's have a cup of tea and stick with New Zealand because we seem to have had a raft of communications from purple people in New Zealand. Builders or Gumboot? Gumboot?

Yeah. I've heard of Gumboot Tea. You can tell me all about it after the break. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no.

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a safe digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services or Android and play Lego Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. Welcome back to this special correspondence edition of Something Rhymes with Purple, where we have been basking in the sunshine of New Zealand. And we're going to stay there for a little while because Becky Bateman has been in touch to ask, calling us the Kia Ora team, to ask about gumboot tea. So she's a colonial commoner, she says, in New Zealand in a coffee and wine country. When she's asked what she'd like to drink, she often is asked, would she like coffee, wine or a gumboot tea? So a bit like Giles, she has never heard of the gumboot tea

in the UK. So it was a bit of a surprise when she was given strong English breakfast tea. She probably didn't quite know what to expect. She says, I hope it isn't because the tea was originally made in gumboots. Eager to hear about where the phrase comes from. Have you ever owned a pair of gumboots? We don't really call them gumboots over here, do we? Do we call them Wellington boots? Yeah. We call them wellies after the Duke of Wellington. So I think sometimes if you do see gumboots sold over here, they're kind of quite cheap boots, which are kind of plastic, but they are absolutely not the real gumboot, the real authentic gumboot, because those are incredibly durable and incredibly tough. So the gum, first of all, that goes back to an Egyptian word, which then went to Greek and Latin and gave us gum in English,

which is a precursor of rubber. So that's where gumboot comes from. Now, gumboot is actually applied to lots of different things. So you might hear about a gumboot country, you might hear about gumboot politics or gumboot diplomacy. And the idea is simply that it is practical, pragmatic, and does what it says in the tin, I guess. So I think I've got that right. But obviously, those listeners from New Zealand will tell me if I've got the nuance wrong. But essentially, what it means is it's just a practical, everyday, functional thing. So Welly Boots it is for us, Gumboots will do the job in New Zealand. And so Gumboot tea is simply straight up, average, proper tea. Everyday tea, what we sometimes call builder's tea.

Exactly. We call it builder's tea. Straightforward tea. What you sometimes call builder's tea. Exactly. We call it builder's tea. Straightforward tea. What you might give your builders. Absolutely. The idea is kind of unpretentious, unassuming. Well, I like to think that this is a gumboot podcast. Let's go straight laced, stay down in the Antipodes. Melbourne, Australia, a long way from New Zealand, I know.

But someone is writing to us and it's Julia Kerry. I said the other day that one of my old teachers was straight laced. I'm wondering whether that has anything to do with tight lacing on a corset. It also made me consider other words and phrases such as highly strung, strung up and string along. Well, can we help Julia? Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I think, is it Richard III that Queen Elizabeth shouts, cut my lace, because, you know, bodices and corsets were once so tight that they could make their wearers faint. And it was from these tight beginnings that straight laced evolved. So it's behaviour that suggests a person literally can't move, but it's less that they're kind of prisoner in their corset and more that

they are very rigid in their outlook so if you're straight laced these days you're a little bit prudish and you're not really keen to venture beyond your very narrow boundaries the reason it's straight s-t-r-a-i-t is because straight but with that spelling means narrow, strict or constricted. So that also gave us a straight jacket, if you like. A straight spelled S-T-R-A-I-G-H-T can mean, you know, without a bend in it, it can mean fairness. So given that though the idea of a kind of narrow path is there in both or an unbending one, kind of narrow path is there in both or an unbending one you can see why straight s-t-r-a-i-t quite often replaced with the other straight because that's the one that we we encounter that one far more regularly i think the only other occasion where we use straight s-t-r-a-i-t is when we talk about being in dire straights but straight laced people are supposed to be

prim proper buttoned up. That's what the word now means, isn't it? Exactly, exactly. As if they're wearing a corset so tight that they can't actually do anything else. And what about the other phrases she's asking about? Highly strung, strung up, string along? Yeah, I think highly strung. Yes, again, the idea of being so tightly strung that you can't move, that everything's very constricted.

Quite why, then, that would mean that you are likely to, or maybe the idea is that if the string is suddenly relaxed, you would kind of lose all sense of boundary or focus, et cetera. And so if you're highly strung, you might lose it. Perhaps that's where that comes from. But the dictionaries will just tell you it's a simple metaphor. Strung out is a really interesting one because I can never quite get to the bottom of it. Why would we be strung out? It could mean lots of different things. In drug culture, it's to be under the influence of a drug. But for us, it's kind of being in a state of tension. And I liken it to being on tenter hooks. Nowadays, often mangled to being on tender hooks but on tenter hooks means the hooks of a tenter and a tenter was a drying frame across which damp wool would be stretched and it would also be I

think cleaned possibly in the process as well so it would be suspended very tautly between two tenters between two drying frames and that's why if you're on tenter hooks you're really in a state of tension and the idea is that if anything kind of was suddenly to cut that, everything would go completely awry. I began talking about love letters, and we've now got a question about love, but not love as we know it. Love as in the score in tennis. Benny Yates asks, I'm wondering at what stage in the history of words love came to mean nothing, as in love all. What do you think? It's a strange one, isn't it? Well, lots of different theories for this. So for a long time, people have said that the love in tennis, for

example, is to do with the French l'oeuf, the egg, from the resemblance in shape between an egg and a zero, which is, after all, what you will find in cricket. If you're out for a duck, you are out for a duck's egg, i.e. for zero. But actually, what dictionaries will tell you is that it is simply from the phrase to play for love, i.e. for the love of the game, not for money. And quite how that then equates to a score of zero isn't completely clear. I guess you're maybe not so ambitious that you actually really, really care if you don't score very much. It's a bit of a kind of weird one. I love the egg theory, but sadly, none of the evidence seems to bear that out. How far back does this go? Because

Binnie has got an interesting idea. Thinking of Shakespeare's play called Much Ado About Nothing, which of course is all about love. Is there a little bit of a joke there? If nothing meant, if love could mean nothing in Shakespeare's day? That is really interesting. Okay, let me look. As you can imagine, love in the dictionary has an incredibly long... That goes on for pages and pages.

Yes, it really does. The first reference that we have is sometime after Shakespeare, I have to say. The Oxford English Dictionary dates love, as in meaning nothing in competitive games, to 1742. And it repeats the perhaps developed from the expression for love, but it doesn't say so definitively. So who knows? I mean, as we know, Shakespeare set in place so many different meanings and permutations of English. You know, who knows? The work will go on is all I can say. When I was young, says Rachel Pearson, my dad would often call me a cheeky haperth. Do you know where that comes from? My dad was born and raised in Yorkshire. Not sure if it's a local thing. Cheeky haperth. It's interesting, this one. This one, again, sent me to the dictionary where it's simply being used metaphorically in lots of different expressions. The half penny

worth, which is what haperth is short for, to mean a very small quantity. So as much as a half penny worth which is what hapeth is short for to mean a very small quantity so as much as a half penny or a hapeth will purchase and you'll find it used in lots of different expressions i mean quite literally as in a penny loaf and a hapeth of milk uh harp off it's called here of cheese but if you call somebody a cheeky hapeth it's just basically saying you're not quite there and you're not worth much. So you can see where it came from. The metaphorical expressions, I think also Dickens used it in this way, probably around the sort of middle of the 19th century. I'm going to give you just one more and we'll do another episode like this in a few months time. So do keep your questions coming.

And we try to answer a few every week anyway. It's purple at somethingelse.com. Anne Everett and her grandson Luke have emailed to ask, we are interested in knowing why animals feature so often in sayings and phrases. Some that are of particular interest include donkey's ears, and you've made a pig's ear of that. Can you unravel those two, Susie? Yes. Donkey's ears. That's a pun on donkey's ears because donkey's ears are long. This is mostly British in usage, though it is known in the USA and elsewhere. First recorded around the beginning of the 20th century as donkey's ears,

which is why we know about that punning origin. And then donkey's ears became donkey's years, supported by the belief that donkeys did in fact live for a very long time. But it was a pun, much as tandem, as in a tandem bike, is a pun on the Latin at length. So, you know, I love the little hidden puns within our language. As for a pig's ear, the pig's ear itself began as Cockney rhyming slang for a drink of beer, which is lovely in itself. But the modern expression, as in you've made a pig's ear itself began as Cockney rhyming slang for a drink of beer, which is lovely in

itself. But the modern expression, as in you've made a pig's ear of that, you've made a right horlicks, as we might say in Britain, or I might mess with that. That has nothing to do with the drink of beer. Instead, it's a version of you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, which is very kind of well-known British proverb that dates back as far as the 16th century. And so a pig's ear refers to what might happen, I guess, if you did try to make something out of a sow's ear, which is a total mess. And a pig in a poke? Pig in a poke is a poke was an old word for a bag. It's related to pocket. So pig in a poke, something that's bought without knowing its value first. And that's because the pig at an old market

might be, this is awful, I hate the cruelty of this, but it might have been bought in a sack, wriggling about in a sack. And another word for a sack or a bag was a poke. It's related to pocket. We learned so much with you, Susie Dent. It is a joy for me to know you and to be able to, well, to tease out your wisdom. And thank you, Purple people, for writing with these questions. Yeah, I love these questions. They send me scurrying to the dictionary, my favourite place. So please feel free to keep keeping in touch. We love hearing from you

wherever you are in the world. It's purple at something else dot com. Now, every week, Susie Dent, if you're new to this, you'll discover it. Susie gives us three words, three genuine, real words that may me have fallen out of currency, but she feels are worth reviving and cherishing. What trio have you got for us this week, Susie? Well, I have to give full credit for these to my hero, who I know I've mentioned before on the podcast, and I think you know him too, Giles, David Crystal, one of the most eminent linguists there is in Britain and right across the world. Anyway, he writes a brilliant book called The Disappearing Dictionary, in which he captures

quite a lot of the beautiful, resonant old dialect words across Britain, which of course have also kind of slipped into the Englishes of other nations. So three from his brilliant book, The Disappearing Dictionary. The first is begrumpled. And I just love begrumpled because it just means you're a bit displeased or affronted, as in I was left really begrumpled by that. It just kind of sounds like you're glaring and a bit crumpled at the same time. The next one, you might have heard this one. It's a little bit like Bill and Ted's Bodacious. It's Cappadocious, meaning splendid or excellent. You will find that in Devon and Yorkshire in this country. Cappadocious, that's truly Cappadocious. And finally, if you want to walk about aggressively,

or if you're sitting on public transport, which we are now doing a little bit more often, do not manspread. Do not do this. This is strolling. Stop strolling. So it's walking around as if you own the place. And as I say, taking up way too much room on public transport by spreading your legs or other things. So stroll up.

Yeah, don't be a stroll up. I love it. Three really good words. I've got a poem. Is it a poem? Is it a prayer? It's called Benediction. It's by James Berry, a Jamaican morn, British poet. His writings often speak of his love of Jamaica. This is, I think, a wonderful poem. It's called Benediction. Thanks to the ear that someone may hear. Thanks for seeing that someone may see. Thanks for feeling that someone may feel. Thanks for touch that someone may be touched.

Thanks to flowering of white moon and spreading shawl of black night, holding villages and cities holding villages and cities together. Wow. Love that. Love that. Powerful stuff. It is something to make you think. It's extraordinary what language does.

That's what we come to celebrate every week on Something Rhymes with Purple. Absolutely right. As well as all your fantastic letters. So thank you for those. Please do keep getting in touch with us, purple at somethingelse.com. Something Rhymes with Purple is a Something else production it was produced by lawrence bassett with additional production from harriet wells steve ackerman ella mcleod jay beal and mr cappy doges himself golly