Something Rhymes with Purple - Tattarrattat

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Good day Purple People, we hope you’re all enjoying some summer sun and using your umbrellas the old fashioned way as we dive, this week, into the weird and wonderfully wordy world of James Joyce! Whether you’ve read Ulysses, are feeling particularly uxorious or are listening while peloothered, we’re here to ringroundabout you with joy. Gyles tells Susie how the sausage got made, Susie explains why a hobbledehoy is adorable, while showing our Purple People how impossible it is to not botch-up the pronunciation of Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunnt-rovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk. Go on- we dare you to try!  Elsewhere we remember Ireland’s fabulous literary history and discuss the banning of books, before answering your purple post. Susie's Trio: Twitterty-snip- State of nervous apprehension Spumescent- frothy or foamlike Gallimaufry- hodge-podge, jumble or mess If you’d like to get in touch with Gyles and Susie then please do! At [e-mail]. 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

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Something else. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Something Rhymes with Purple, the podcast for word nerds, but also anybody who has ever stopped to think, I love that word, or I really hate that word. I'm Susie Dent. I work on a programme called Countdown, and I also dabble in dictionaries pretty much all the time. And with me is my wonderful co-presenter and friend, Giles Brandreth. Hi, Giles. It's good to be with you. We haven't met in a long while, and I would like you to be the first person that I hug. But you wouldn't want to hug me right now because I've got a cold, a stinking cold. You have got a cold.

And I don't know how you've managed this because I'm looking at you on a Zoom screen. But we were chatting a little bit before we came on air. And I now have a sore throat. It's the power of personality. My wife has been saying for me for years you know a marvelous personality chance but do just tone it down a bit if you wouldn't mind just spare people you don't need to give them the full thing every time but i'm so keen on you suzy that i've clearly been breathing into the microphone it's been going down the line and i'm so sorry it's the kind of

illness equivalent of um echopraxis and echopraxis is the sort of process by which if someone yawns, then it's immediately infectious and you have to yawn as well. I don't quite know how that works for sore throats, but yes, literally just come on. I think it's all psychosomatic. What do we want to talk about this week? Well, every now and again,

we like to shine the spotlight on one person who has contributed greatly to our language. So we've focused on George Orwell, haven't we? Dr. Johnson, of course. Charles Dickens. And Charles, you teased a couple of weeks ago someone who I'm going to be completely honest about. about, I have not read very much of at all, which is appalling really, because he has made an impact in a very sort of strange, slightly tangential way. He has made an impact on our language. You will find many of his words in the dictionary, but I wouldn't say many of them equally are words

that we would use every day. But you know so much more about him than I do that I'm going to sit back and listen today. We're going to talk about James Joyce. One of my favourite words that he came up with is smile smirk, S-M-I-L-E-S-M-I-R-K, which is a cross between a genuine smile and a disdainful smirk, a smile smirk. He did have an amazing way with words, James Joyce. an amazing way with words, James Joyce. We are so blessed, we who speak and read the English language, that Ireland exists, because Ireland has given us some of the greatest, wittiest, most profound and exciting writers. If you like the theatre, as I do, you love the plays of Sheridan and Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, three great Irish playwrights. James Joyce also wrote a play, Exiles, but he's most famous for his novels.

And I do know a little bit about him only because I did him for O-Level and A-Level. And I've dug up my notes and I thought I might begin, since you know so little about him, by just reminding you and everybody else who James Joyce was. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. Great name. Born the 2nd of February 1882. Same date, 2nd of February, as one of my daughters. She's called Scythrid. I thought we'd give her an interesting name. And he died on the 13th of January 1941. Novelist, poet, born in Dublin, where his father, and this is relevant to his stories, was somebody who went around collecting the rates. He was educated at a Jesuit college, and he became captain of school. He then went on to University College Dublin. He had a great imagination and a great mind. He studied naturalist and

symbolist literature in Paris. He married a lady called Nora Barnacle in 1904, when he was just 22. One of the best names ever, surely. Isn't it a great name? And she, again, is important to his writing. Well, Norla is a fascinating name. Barnacle is an even better name in some ways. And he left Ireland and then lived on the continent, teaching languages at Trieste and in Switzerland for more than 10 years. And living abroad is relevant again to his writing. One of his devotees who helped him with his writing and also is a

great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, who also contributed to the language, though he wrote mainly in French and then translated his plays back into English. Anyway, back to Joyce, his first publication was a volume of lyrics, poems and songs called Chamber Music. And really, of lyrics, poems and songs called Chamber Music. And really, he becomes famous. And we begin to recognize him through his short stories, Dubliners. And that was published in 1914. And that's, in a way, a very good book with which to start. Stories about Dublin. And the book I did at school, and this is how most people listening to this would have been introduced to him, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It's a biographical novel, and that came out in 1916. But his fame rests on the book that I have read, and many have tried to read and abandon it.

I don't pretend that I've understood it all, or possibly even understood any of it, really. It's a novel called Ulysses. It was published in Paris because of the censorship elsewhere. It was reset six times by the printers because Joyce kept rewriting it every time he got the proofs. But eventually... Sounds like my books.

Yes. But if you were James Joyce, the misprints in your book would have been treated as great original new words. Anyway, when eventually it was published, he got the first printed copy on his 40th birthday. And one critic at the time described it as the greatest novel of the 20th century, while another said it was the foulest book ever printed. So we have to at some point talk about how scatological he is, because it made a huge impact for that reason as well didn't it i i think ulysses is a little bit like tristram shandy it's the book that you take on your summer

holidays because you are finally going to read it and you never quite get around to it yeah absolutely i still haven't finished war and peace uh never mind a la recherche du temps perdu oh bruce yes bruce what's the film well exactly the films they they help us through uh and A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Oh, Bruce, yes. Bruce, there's so many volumes of that. Well, exactly. The films, they help us through. And people have tried to make things like Ulysses into films. But you're right. The language was banned in America until 1933

when a judge ruled that while in many places it is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be aphrodisiac. And the story deals with a single day in Dublin. And it is amazing. Let's begin to explore some of the words that he uses and have some fun with those. But I will just share with you my favourite Samuel Beckett story because it gives you a good impression of what Joyce was doing with language. Beckett, the man who wrote Waiting for Godot, was a younger person and helped Joyce in his writing. He would dictate to Beckett and Beckett would write it down.

And once or twice he was dictating a bit of Finnegan's Wake, another of his great works. And in the middle of one of the sessions there was a knock at the door which beckett didn't hear and so joyce said come in and beckett wrote that down and afterwards joyce was rereading what beckett had written down and said well what's this come in and beckett said well you said that and joyce thought for a moment and then decided, let it stand. So he was quite willing to see coincidence as a collaborator. So I don't think we need to worry too much. Somebody knocks on the door, he says, come in.

Beckett writes it down as part of the book and it stays in the book. So we can be quite relaxed, I think, in our ways. So let's choose, let's look at some of the words. I mean, he's most famous, I think, for a hundred letter monster of a word that appears in Finnegan's Wake that begins, ba, ba, ba, da, ga, ga, ta, well, I can't even do it. People will have to look it up or even read Finnegan's Wake. Do you know about this word? Yeah, well, it's supposed to be a representation of the thunderclap that accompanied the fall of Adam and Eve. So it's supposed to, I guess,

sound incredibly ominous and heavy and powerful. It's got bronto in it, which of course is Greek for thunder. It's got a thunt in the middle and it's got a thurnuk at the end, which sounds very Norse like. And if you imagine the thunder is Viking. So it's a very clever word. Can I pronounce it? No, no chance. If you, I mean, it's one of those words you'd have to sort of break down into 10 parts and then you probably could. Because I think in the middle there, I can see after Bronto,

there is tonnerre, which is the french for thunder isn't it it absolutely is and there's the italian tuono is in there okay and the japanese cami nari i mean it's the most famous of the 10 equally enormous words joyce conjured up it's a fantastic word as i say these are ones that stick in the memory, if not on our tongues, because I don't think we particularly use many of the words that he came up with, but you can admire their flair and their versatility. There is one word that he does use, which I actually quite like, and I think we could do with bringing back into the language. And that's uxorious.

Do you know what that means? I think it means, it's something with your wife, isn't it? It means being devoted to your wife. Yes. So I guess Joyce absolutely sort of lived this out. This was a husband who dotes on his wife, possibly slightly obsessively. And there is a single word that describes the reverse, a woman excessively fond of her husband that is meritorious. But for some reason, that wasn't picked up really. But he himself said, and my right does, which I think is beautiful, what truly matters is that love loves to love love. That's lovely. No, he did. I mean, what is interesting about his books is that the early ones are certainly the easy ones to read. But even the ones that

you don't quite understand, it's rather like I don't understand music. But my friend Sheila Hancock, we've been making a television series where we go out on canals together. She has got me some ear pods and is making me listen to classical music and is trying to explain what it's all about to me. And I'm not really understanding what it's all about, but I am quite enjoying it. And that's a little bit what the... There's music in the language of James Joyce. You don't always have to understand it. Taratat is one of his words.

Taratat. Well, it's clear. It's a version of rat-tat-tat, isn't it? The sound of someone knocking at the door. Taratat-tat, yes. And it goes into the Guinness Book of Records, I think, as the longest single word palindrome ever used in English literature. Oh, really? Okay, that's interesting.

T-A-T-T-A-R-R-A-T-T-A-T. I mean, he's a strange character and he has a tough life because after he's written Ulysses for the next 17 years, he begins to go blind. And this is when he's working on Finnegan's Way. This is why he had to dictate to Samuel Beckett. And the truth is, the early stories are comprehensible. The later stuff is kind of musical and strange, and some of it really is, to me anyway, unintelligible. And he's experimenting with language. He ends up quite sadly, because during the Second World War, he's in Zurich, and he dies there. I mean, people say worn out by privations and worry. So his personal story has great joy in it and great unhappiness too.

And the language is, I think, more intriguing and interesting than changing our language. I mean, he does take a word like sausage, though, and use it in a way that hadn't been used before. Do you know about that? Yes, he verbs it, doesn't he? So, you know, as we've often said on the podcast, a lot of people blame verbing on North American English and just say, you know, this is a terrible sign of degradation of English is that we turn everything into verbs and verbs into nouns as well. But actually, this has been going on for a very long time. And yes, sausage transformed the noun, sorry, Joyce transformed sausage into a verb from the noun, meaning this is according to the OED, to subject a personal

thing to treatment reminiscent of the manufacture or shape of a sausage, which I think is brilliant. It is good, isn't it? It'll be used figuratively, obviously. One of the words I think he has introduced to the language or given it a new twist is botch up. Similar to bog up, I think, but botch up. Tell us about that. Yes. So botch up has been used for a long time. So, Joyce definitely didn't coin this. So, it's been used since the 16th century, meaning to repair hastily, a bit like bodge, which is another English dialect word, to make a mess of something. But again, Joyce took that verb and reworked it into a noun. So, a botch up in Ulysses is a total mess, a botch up of a concert. Yeah, a veritable botch up. Yeah. What about Chiseler?

Again, it's a bit like Shakespeare, isn't it? It's very difficult to know whether a particular writer actually coined a phrase or whether he actually popularised something that was already in common currency or at least bubbling under. currency, or at least bubbling under. So it's possible that chiseler had already been in use in Irish slang before he put it into print in the 1920s. But it comes from a slang use of chisel to mean to fleece money from someone. So a chiseler, he uses it as a nickname for a young child in Ulysses. Now you can tell me this, do you know whether chiseler is actually a fleecer or a swindler or works for a criminal of some kind? No, I don't think he is. I think it's just an expression, a little nickname he gives him, like a cheeky brat. Yeah, well then that would be a little bit like a wag, because a wag, which we now apply to a comedian, actually began as a nickname really for a mischievous child.

began as a nickname really for a mischievous child and it was a wag halter. So fairly dark humour here. The idea is that the child is so mischievous that they might wag, i.e. hang from a halter, the noose of a gallows. So yeah, it's a similar idea, I think. One of his words that I think is quite useful is mono-ideal. Tell me about that one. Well, mono ideal basically means expressing or conveying only one idea, mono ideal. And we now live in a world where there are people who are sort of obsessed with one thing and bang on about it to the exclusion of everything else. And I find that slightly irritating. And I think that's a coinage of Joyce's. Monoideism existed apparently before him in the mid-1800s, meaning a kind of single mental fixation. But monoideal is a word that he came up with. I mean, what he was really into, I think, is what we call onomatopoeia. Remind me what

onomatopoeia means and how it's formed as a word. Yes, onomatopoeia is kind of, it's like sort of sound symbolism almost, isn't it? It's used of a word that represents through its sound the thing that it describes. That's the formation of a word from a sound that's associated with it, like cuckoo or sizzle, that kind of thing. One of my absolute favourites, I was aware of this one because I think it's possibly one of his most characteristic sentences, popismic, popismic. So that's the smacking sound of a person's lip, popismic, popismic, it's quite hard to say. But the sentence that he uses it in, in Ulysses is absolutely brilliant. I'll see if I can get through this. He uses it in Ulysses.

It's absolutely brilliant. I'll see if I can get through this. Flory whispers to her, whispering love words, murmur lip-lapping loudly, poppismic plop-slop. It's wonderful. It's a stream of consciousness, isn't it, really? And it's verbal music. Extraordinary.

Another of his onomatopoeic words is Mwa-nyo. Mwa-nyo. I think I'm pronouncing it correctly. He isn't here to tell us. M-R-K-G-N-A-O. M-R-K-G-N-A-O. It's his version of meow. It's used several times and with a variety of spellings in Ulysses.

It's meow, the cat said loudly. She blinked up out of her avid, shame-closing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milk-white teeth. Meow. Oof. And you see, it works in its own way. He is an extraordinary person. Do you know the word polluted? Polluted.

Yes, I do know that one because it is Should we come to this one after the break? Because it is one of many, many, many, many synonyms in the English language for being drunk. Good Ring roundabout, it's time for a break Wherever you're going

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Dubliners, which is his early work, stories that I do recommend. And it was probably inspired, I think, by the early word blutard. Yes. Blutard. It's a kind of Irish version of blutard. Blutard. It means being drunk, doesn't it? Are there lots of words like this? Oh, my goodness. So the brilliant slang lexicographer Jonathan Green always says, the waterfront of slang is narrow, but very, very deep. And he produces these most fantastic timelines of particular themes within English. And you can trace the different synonyms for that particular concept. Some of them are quite rude. You will find the vagina, penis, all sorts of things in

there. But when it comes to drunkenness, oh, the timeline is absolutely incredible. And quite a lot of them are in the OED, but I have to say slang furnishes a whole lot more. So if you can, I would urge you to look up Jonathan Green's about Jonathan Green, his timelines of slang. They're all free, all available online, as is his fantastic slang dictionary. And yeah, I mean, polluted, bloated, just two of many. Did James Joyce invent the quark? Q-U-A-R-K. So what did he use it for in the physical sense,

as we would use it today? In Finnegan's Wake, he has three quarks for Muster's mark. And it sounds to me just like a bit of rhyming fun that he's having. Yeah, three quarks for Muster's mark. Sure, he hasn't got much of a bark and sure any he has, it's all beside the mark. This is from Ulysses. Well, apparently, a US physicist called Murray Gell-Mann, he coined it in 1964, but he did later associate it with that use of quark by James Joyce. So definitely influential there. He said,

I employed the sound quark for several weeks, this is the physicist speaking, in 1963 before noticing quark in Finnegan's Wake, which I had perused from time to time. The allusion to three quarks seemed perfect. I needed an excuse for retaining the pronunciation quark, despite the occurrence of mark, bark, mark, and so forth in Finnegan's Wake. I found that excuse by supposing that one ingredient of the line, three quarks for Master Mark, was a cry of three quarts for Mister, heard in H.C. Earwick's pub. Gosh, there's a whole lot going on in that quote. So actually, it's quark rather than quark i think i'm going to check so if you can hear this if you look in the oxford english dictionary

you can um click on audio and get the pronunciation so here you go quark there you go and in the u.s quark there we go i use the word ring roundabout because I rather liked it before the break. And that's used in Ulysses to mean to completely surround something. Okay. Scribbledy hobble. Scribbledy hobble. Oh, I like that. Sounds like hobbledy hoy. What's a scribbledy hobble? That was the name Joyce gave to one of his notebooks in which he jotted down names and words, ideas, turns of phrase, anecdotes. And the word has made its way into some English dictionaries as the sort of name for a rough notebook. You know, I'm going to jot that down in my scribbly hobble. I wonder whether he actually lingered over these confections and really thought very hard about how

he put them in or whether they were just very spontaneous as I say streams of consciousness which which is what we get in Ulysses it's in the Oxford English Dictionary it appears as the first entry in one of his notebooks for Finnegan's Wake and he uses it substitute scribble the hobble for an earlier instance of scribble the hoy used with reference to school children working at their lessons and in fact remember I said it reminded me of hobbledy-hoy? That already existed since the 18th century, and I love hobbledy-hoy because it describes a teenager, particularly a boy, who is kind of in that sort of slightly difficult twilight stage between boyhood and manhood,

and so is ever so slightly awkward a hobbledy-hoy. Very good. I mean, with some of these words, I think because of the story I told you about Beckett writing it all down and when he said, come in, keeping it in the book, I think a lot of it just sort of came to him. Like he has the word umbershoot. Oh, I love that because it's a riff on bumbershoot, isn't it?

Which is my favourite term for an umbrella. And what's the origin of bumbershoot? Is is my favourite term for an umbrella. And what's the origin of bumba shoot? Is that a Victorian term for an umbrella? It is Victorian. Yeah, so the bumba is simply from umbrella, bumba. And the shoot bit, I think, is, although it's written S-H-O-O-T, that is a variant of shoot as in a parachute, because it kind of looks like a parachute that you sort of have above your head.

So bumba shoot, it's particularly North American, that one. I love it. And umbrella, does that come from the word ombre, meaning shade? Yes, they were sunshades originally, umbrellas. But of course, particularly in Britain and many parts across the world, I was actually hearing a lot about the thunder plumps in Florida this week. Thunder plumps, just to remind you, being those heavy, sudden, unexpected

downpours of rain. But in rain-soaked countries, the umbrella actually became a rain protection rather than the sun protection for which it was originally designed. I think what Joyce was doing is when he needed a word, if there wasn't a word that came to mind, he invented one. Wentzness is a good example of that. I like that. Wentzness is a good example of that. I like that. Wentzness. I mean, it means what it says. Someone or something's Wentzness is sort of the source point, where they came from, the place from which it came. Wentzness. Wentzness is gorgeous. And actually, we have a letter from someone who's also been pondering some new word creations in the spirit

of Joyce. So this was a letter from Minnesota and Paul Peterson, who says, we recently gave him the word biblioclept, meaning someone who steals books. And he's wondering if there's a word for the opposite. His wife, for example, firmly believes that no one should own books and that if you read a book you love, you ought to give it to someone who you think would love it as well, with no expectation of ever seeing it again. Is there a word for such a person? And he suggests, Paul, a bibliodore or a panbiblist, which are great, I think. And yeah, I've been pondering this a little and I can't actually come up with anything better. So it would be great to put this out to the purple people and ask them if they can coin a word that means somebody who loves to give books away. In the language of Easter Island, there is famously documented by Adam Jaco de Buono in his book, Toujours Tingo, the word Tingo, which means to borrow objects from a friend's house one by one until there's nothing left.

means to borrow objects from a friend's house one by one until there's nothing left i think he in turn may have got that from his his predecessor howard reingold but it's brilliant tingos but i can't think of anything for somebody who just loves to give books away do you well i can't and i think we need to challenge the purple people to bring out their inner james joyce and come up with an original word and if you are if you have read any James Joyce, and particularly if you've read the tough ones, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, and want to put us right on any of this, or tell us what your favourite James Joyce word is, do communicate with us. I think my, probably my favourite one is Yogi Boogie Box. Yogi Boogie Box. It's just, it's fun. He coined that word in ulysses and it's to describe the

the equipment and paraphernalia that a spiritualist carries around with them it's his yogi bogey box so if you can come up with a a word for uh the bibliodore uh or your favorite word by james joyce or a new word in the j Joyce tradition, do please communicate with us. And if you haven't read any James Joyce, give him a go and probably start where I started when I was a teenager with the easy stuff, the portrait of an artist as a young man or the Dubliners. And approach his letters with caution, although they are interesting. Yeah, absolutely. We've had another letter.

Yes, about vice. Yes, this is Ryan from Dorset. He says, I've just had a random word thought. And of course, you were the first people I thought of. What are the roots of the word vice? I'm thinking of the vice in vice president to do with holding a position of authority versus the vice associated with immoral behaviour.

And he said the same thing, some would say. So thank you, Ryan, for that. Well, the vice as in vice captain simply means a substitute for, and that comes from the Latin vic, V-I-C, which means change. And that also gave us vicarious, which means that you are experiencing something through the medium of someone else so it's all the idea of channeling authority through someone else or substituting being substitute for someone else so that's the vices in vice captain vice president etc the vice that is the sense of immorality has a different root that's from the latin visium v-i-t-I-U-M, meaning vice as well, which gave us vicious. And that originally meant

kind of showing immorality, if you like, but it was extended to mean savage in descriptions of bad-tempered horses, and later came to mean spiteful. And now it's actually even stronger. It kind of goes against the tide of many English words where they lose their power. This one is actually gained in power over time. And finally, there's also the tool sense as well, the vice that's a kind of, you know, a screw or a winch. That again is different, showing just how many journeys all our vocabulary makes. That comes from the Latin vitis, V-I-T-I-S, which means a vine. And that's because of the spiral look of the tool and the spiral growth of a grapevine's tendrils. Well, my favourite letter of the week

comes from one of our regular correspondents, Professor Marc Laviolette, who is in the Department of... Great name. He has a great name. And he has a great job in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.

And it's appropriate for this part of the podcast because he writes, surely the collective noun for three vocabulary words suggested weekly by English lexicographer Susie Dent and aimed at improving our elocutions and writings is a trident. Oh, brilliant. Isn't that clever? Why didn't we think of that? Yeah, very good. A trident. What is the origin of the word trident, in fact? It means three-toothed, really. So you have to remember that dent means tooth and possibly my ancestors had quite prominent

teeth. Alternatively, it might be topographical and refer to dent in Yorkshire. But yeah, it means three-toothed. So it was the three-pronged fish spear, wasn't it, that Poseidon or Neptune had. And obviously that's born by Britannia. So yeah, three-toothed is a trident. Three-toothed. Well, there you are, a trio. And so have you got something we can get our teeth into?

Have you got a trio of interesting words to share with us this week, Susie? Yes, I have a dialect word today from Devon in Britain. we can get our teeth into. Have you got a trio of interesting words to share with us this week, Susie? Yes. I have a dialect word today from Devon in Britain, which describes you if you are in a state of nervous apprehension. I seem to spend my life in that.

We were talking about being on tenderhooks. In a state of nervous apprehension, you can say you're a twittity snip. Twittity snip. I like that. Twittity snip. That's a little, that's a slightly Joycean word in itself. Isn't it? Twittity snip. Yeah, it is. Now, I don't know if you remember, but one of my trios for a little while back was a spindrift, which is one of my absolute favourite English words. And spindrift is the tang of the

sea that's carried by the air. You know, sometimes you can taste on your lips the salty tang of the sea. But if the sea is particularly whipped up by the wind and producing a lot of spindrift, it is spumescent. Spumescent means frothy or foam-like. Spumescent. Well, I think that is worthy of James Joyce too. Spumescent. And finally, a gallimaufry. I think some people will be familiar with this one. A gallimaufry is simply a hodgepodge or a jumble or a bit of a mess. And it comes from the French for an unappetising dish made of all sorts of different ingredients.

A strange concoction. A gallimaufry. Like a hodgepodge. Exactly. Or a potchup. What is the... Yes, or indeed the Joyce word potchimorphory. Like a hodgepodge. Exactly. Or a potchup. What is the, yes, or indeed the joyous word potchup. But what is a hodge, where does a hodgepodge come from?

And is it a hodgepodge or is it a hodgepodge? Oh, do you know, we need to return to food and I'll talk about it then because there are so many different words that for a complete mess that are related to food. So leave hodgepodge with me. Good. We'll come back to food. We'll come back to you very shortly.

I'll give you one more James Joyce story and then a poem, a short poem, by somebody who was a friend of his and also rather a strange person who ended up pretty unhappily. But this is my favourite Joyce story. A young man comes up to him in Zurich and says to James Joyce,

may I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses? To which Joyce replied, no, it did a lot of other things too. And now the poem. And I thought I'd do a poem today by Ezra Pound, controversial poet, strange man, 1885, 1972. And he was a friend and collaborator of James Joyce at times. And the poem is simply four lines. And the days are not full enough. And the nights are not full enough. And life slips by like a field mouse, not shaking the grass. Oh, who is to such beautiful poems? Excellent. Well, thank you.

Sorry, I was just pondering that one. Thank you for listening as always. Please do recommend us to friends if you liked us. Or better still, get in touch. Purple at somethingelse.com. Something Else Rhymes with Purple. Something Rhymes with Purple, as well as Something Else 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 Beale, and Popismic Plopslop himself. Hi, it's Gully!