Something Rhymes with Purple - Tittermatorter

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

In this week's merry episode, we're frolicking through the linguistic playground! Join Susie & Gyles as they swing through the history and etymologies of all things fun. Come and relive your youth, Purple People! We love hearing from you, find us @SomethingRhymes on Twitter and Facebook, @SomethingRhymesWith on Instagram or you can email us on our NEW 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:  Apterous: Wingless Armario: (Spanish) An unskilled player; literally, a wardrobe. Shmegegge - (Yiddish) Baloney; hot air; nonsense. Gyles' poem this week was The Playground by Richard Moore Over the playground where ancient and wizened trees touch odors to the air to draw the latest bees, children swarm on the lawn, muss the grass with their toes… What can they touch of dawn - what sweetness – as it goes? Dew, that all turns to tears and trickle through their sleep and through their future years, till they, they too, are old and in their wisdom weep a honey dark and cold. 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

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amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello, Giles here. And knowing that we have a family audience and the Purple people often include some very young people, just to say that today's episode does include some language that some people may find uncomfortable or offensive. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Something Rhymes With Purple. I almost said, Giles, Something Rhymes With Podcast, which I'm not sure it does. But this is Something Rhymes With Purple. Well, I don't know. I suppose you could, something could. If religious broadcasting, I've heard of a God cast.

I suppose that is true, although it's a bit of a cheat, isn't it? Because it is a riff on podcast. It is a riff, but it is at least a legitimate one. And God came before the pod. Well, some would say God came before everything. But there you are. Yes. And I suppose it would actually be quite fun to have a dog cast

where you just had the sound of hounds barking and baying in the background. I still love the fact, Susie Dent, that nobody knows the origin of the word dog, where it comes from. Hound we do know about. You've always loved this, haven't you? Because it's such a kind of basic word. But as you know, one of my favourite things about etymology is that we find the first records of names in people's surnames.

Our swear words also appear in place names and people's surnames. And it is fascinating to see that. It means the words were in existence, but we haven't found records of them yet, other than in these court rolls or whatever. So I love that. So yes, you're absolutely right about dogs. But you know what? We are talking about a place today where dogs are not allowed, because I thought it would be fun to explore. I don't know if this is one of your favourite places when you were a child. It was certainly one of mine. The playground, Giles. We're going to the playground today. I love the idea of going to the playground. My first school in London, which is where I was brought up, was a French school. I was a pupil

at the Lycée Français de Londres, as it was then called. It later became called the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle because President de Gaulle of France came to the school and everyone was very excited. And I was there waving the tricolore. But when I began at this school in the early 1950s, I was in the Jardin d'Enfants, which means, I think, garden for children, doesn't it? Exactly.

It's the equivalent of kindergarten. And I have two distinct memories of the Jardin d'Enfant. One was being taken to it by my sister, and she took me on her bicycle. And at the back of her bicycle, there was a kind of little seat where I sat. And unfortunately, I fell off the seat seat or the seat fell off the bicycle. But what is extraordinary is I don't think she noticed for quite a while. So she went cycling on and I was sort of sitting in the middle of the road, wailing. So that's one of my recollections. And the other recollection is the playground. And we're talking now about the early 1950s.

playground and we're talking now about the early 1950s and this was only six seven eight years after the end of the second world war and there were in london many bomb sites and the playground of the lycée france de londres was a huge bomb site which had been tarmacked over on the cromwell road the back of the school was this enormous, they've now built an extension of the school on what was the playground. But I can remember it was a vast tarmac area, and you could see the Cromwell Road and the museums, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Victorian Ableton Museum, across the road, and we played in this huge playground. So those are my childhood memories of going to the playground. What are your childhood memories of the playground? What was the one you knew best? Well, I have to say that I don't have memories of the sort of playgrounds that I took my kids to, which were just local, wonderful areas where you can meet

other parents. And it was just lovely to hang out on a sunny afternoon. I only remember the playgrounds that were, you know, where I grew up, which were just essentially the fields around me. I would just take off and find my own sources of amusement and trees to climb and things. But I do remember our school playgrounds. And I remember going back years later as an adult to one of the playgrounds at my very first primary school and being inevitably astonished by how little it was, because for me, it was absolutely vast. And it was a real shock to see that it was actually this tiny little area because I was now tall and grown up, but I used to love, I loved swinging and I

still do. So whenever I see a playground and there's no one looking or I'm with my now older kids, I will get on a swing and just lean back there's nothing like it and I also like to try my hand at the very narrow beams that you can walk across because I'm pretty rubbish at that but I like to do it I love zip wires that's another great thing so that's the great thing about as you know because you've got grandchildren now Giles it is actually you can relive the joy of playgrounds all over again. You do have a reputation as a bit of a swinger. I loved playgrounds that had all those things like roundabouts and swings

and climbing ropes. And I got involved quite early on in the adventure playground movement because for a while I was very active in and eventually became the chairman of the National Playing Fields Association, which was a British charity founded in the 1920s that tried to improve and create play, recreation, and sport facilities for young people. And we got into playgrounds and indeed became a kind of playground inspectorate, making sure they were safe, but also making sure they were exciting. playground inspectorate, making sure they were safe, but also making sure they were exciting.

And I think up until really in the 1950s, playgrounds could be a bit dull. They had one of those roundabouts and they had a slide, which was fun usually, but that was about it. And now playgrounds can do so many amazing things and they have these special surfaces. So it's safe, you know, it's much safer now. If you fall over, you're not going to crack your head and break bones. Well, we hope you're not. But they do amazing, they're amazing climbing frames and things to swing from A to B. And I love all that. But you are right. There is something in the adult that you want to get to that playground and find there are

no children there. And there's no, we hope there's no CCTV and there are no childminders keeping an eye on you so that you could run riot and recreate your childhood by getting on the swing or the seesaw do you remember the seesaw oh I love seesaws I still love a seesaw although I think also as you get a bit older you sort of don't quite relish that sort of bump um as you come down quite as much as you do when you were little but it's funny we're talking about sort of recreating our youth. I went to the seaside quite recently, and there was a hair braider. So quite often, in lovely seaside towns, you will find people who set up a little stall, a pop-up stall,

and they braid children's hair. And it looks lovely, and it's a lovely summer thing. There was a man there, he must have been in his 80s and he'd let his hair grow a little longer than yours, Giles, but not too long. And his granddaughter was having a braid, so he decided to have one too. And I thought that was absolutely perfect. So he was totally unselfconscious about walking around with a sticky up, very long braid, which I thought was brilliant. So yes, there's soft play areas as well. But you do say, you say that health and safety is kicked in. That is true. But I remember getting, not too long ago in a soft play area, going down a slide, the worst slide burn I think I have ever had in my life. Boy, was that painful. So yes, don't go down there in a skirt is my advice to

anybody. But should we talk about the language of the playground? Please. Etymology. Could you begin with seesaw? It's a lovely one. Well, first of all, I would just say that there are some wonderful local terms for seesaws in different parts of Britain. And I'm sure we will hear from the purple people as well, their own words for seesaw. So, for example, I think it might be in the southwest, they're called titamatortas, something to do with think it might be in the Southwest, they're called titamatortas, something to do with teetering and tottering, but they're called titamatortas, which I think is a lovely onomatopoeic thing. So it's really a seesaw. The C bit is just a

reduplication. So it's one of these reduplicative compounds that we have in things like helter skelter, namby-pamby. Oh my goodness, there are so many of them where one part of that compound, one part of that couplet doesn't really mean anything. It's just added for effect. Willy-nilly. Willy-nilly, shilly-shally, dilly-dally, all of those. If you think of a sawyer, so sawing a piece of wood,

it's quite rhythmical, isn't it? And seesaw, you think of that seesaw, marjorie door, the nursery rhyme. You can sort of replicate that sawing motion almost. So seesaw, seesaw imitates that sort of up and down of the thing itself, which I think is lovely. So it's been around that word since the 1600s, so for quite a long time. But I would love it if the purple people could let me know their local names for a seesaw because they're very colourful. Take me through some of the other things that you see in a playground, swings, slides, even the sandpit. Give me the etymology of some of

these fun words. So the playground sense of swing dates from the late 17th century. And swing itself, really in Old English meant to rush or to fling yourself, which is pretty much what you do if you swing higher and higher and higher. And the swinger that you mentioned, that is a sort of, well, first of all, we've got swing, the jazz swing, the easy flowing, but vigorous rhythm. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Remember that? That again, is the sort of rhythmical movement, which you can imagine if you're sitting on a swing. Remember that? That, again, is the sort of rhythmical movement, which you can imagine if you're sitting on a swing. And in the 1930s, a swinger was a jazz musician who played with swing. And then in the 1960s, and of course, it had to be the 60s,

the swinger became somebody who was lively, who was fashionable, and then eventually somebody who was into partner swapping. So it's had quite a strange journey. But the idea is, I think there's lots of relatives in Germanic languages, but it's to rush or to fling yourself. You mentioned the slide, that is related to slay, to sled, to slither and to sledge. So the whole idea is just sort of slipping, if you like, over ice. And of course, slide, you're just slipping over plastic these days. But it's the motion that is behind that. Sandpit. Well, I always like the fact, as you know, well, it's a bit dark, but that almost the first sandpits were arenas in Roman gladiatorial contests. Arena goes back to a word meaning sand, because sand was used in those big, big, big amphitheatres, etc., to soak up the blood. So those almost were the first sand pits that we saw

in the sense of a big, big space, but in the modern sense that you will find, not in gladiators' arenas, but in gardens or parks. That was from 1898. That's the first record that we have. And it's simply a pit with sand and sand itself is a Germanic word. What else do we have in the playground?

Is there anything else that you particularly loved going on? Well, those things, roundabouts. Well, of course, that roundabout is simply going round and about, isn't it? I loved those. Yes. I loved jumping onto them when they were moving. Did you like The Magic Roundabout?

Oh, the television series, The Magic Roundabout, yes. Made in France and originally French and voiced and translated, I think, by Eric Thompson, who was a man I knew who was an actor and a theatre director and, of course, is the father of Emma Thompson, among other gifted children. Ah, I didn't know that. Well, I think I did know that, but I'd completely buried that fact.

So yes, that's lovely. I was a little bit alarmed when I learned that there were many drug references in the Magic Roundabout. Is that apocryphal? Because obviously as a child, you have absolutely no idea. I have no idea. No, I know. And there were supposed to be also rude references in another children's series

that I enjoyed called Captain Pugwash. Oh. Yes. Well, I think one of the junior seamen was, a seaman, forgive me. Let me move on from there. He was called Bates and he was known as Master Bates. But I think all these things after the fact. Oh, no, no, I'm afraid so. I know nothing about magic mushrooms in the magic roundabout. But again, this is the joy of having a universal crowd out there who do know, the purple people may well know, if in the television series Made in France, in I think the early 1960s, maybe 1970s, whether there were references to, hidden references to drug taking. I think Zebedee was always out for the count, wasn't he? I think he was always stoned. I don't know. He was jumping about. We love Zebedee, yeah.

Well, this is my retrospective analysis. But anyway, yes, roundabouts, I can't do roundabouts these days. I just get too much vertigo. And vertigo, of course, goes back to a Latin word meaning to spin, which is exactly what you do on that. And it just, yeah, it does my head in quite literally if I go on one of those. There were games I remember playing in the playground. Hopscotch was the game we most played.

And with chalk, and some playgrounds, they actually have them painted on, you threw a stone into a square, and you then had to hop to pick up the stone and hop back as i seem to remember i don't know the detailed rules why is it called hopscotch that game yeah so you've got the hop bit so you're absolutely right each player takes turns to hop into whatever squares that you've marked out on the ground to retrieve this whatever that you're using as a marker um it's so cool because the squares were originally scotched or scored with a stick or whatever into the earth. So rather than using chalk on concrete as I did, they were actually just sort of almost dug into the ground, which is why you scotch or

you score out the squares into which you're going to hop. Very good. Any other games that you used to play in the playground? Oh my well i tell you what should we take a break and then we'll come back to lots of things because i remember uh playing in the playground jacks cat's cradle french skipping this well not so much this slinky which i did love that the yo-yo oh i remember the skipping but some of these are are games that you could actually play indoors because they're things with marbles and jacks and all that. But I do remember those. But the skipping, I certainly remember skipping challenges. Oh, let's take a break and then we'll return to the playground.

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And watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. Welcome back to Something Rhymes with Purple, where Giles and I are reminiscing about our playground antics and the sort of games that we used to get up to, all of them above board. But I did mention marbles, actually, Giles, because you're right, although we would associate it probably as an indoor game, I do remember big marble competitions at school on our playgrounds. And there is an entire lexicon devoted to the Mibsters, the sort of the really expert marble players that we may have talked about

before, actually, on one of our previous episodes. But there are ducks, there are stonkers, there are deagles, there are taurs, there are scudders, there are alleys, there are all different kinds of marbles that can be used. And one of the things that you will notice if you do play, well, whether inside or outside, is the way that the marble player will sort of stoop and the way that they will knuckle down to the contest. They will literally put their knuckles down, which is where we get that expression from as well, which is great. I used to collect marbles, though, you know, the ones that just looked absolutely beautiful. You could have onion skins, bumblebees, pearies, penkers, again, lots and lots of lovely words for those. I did used to play jacks a lot with my sister,

probably not in the playground quite so much, but I adored jacks. In fact, I've still got a set at home. Did you ever play that? Yes, I did. But you mentioned marbles before that. And I was thinking, why are marbles so called? Because they weren't made of marble. They were all, mine certainly, were made of glass. So they're called marbles for what reason? Because once upon a time, they were made of marble years ago? I think maybe they were actually, yes. And actually all sorts of different materials are now used. So I think some of the most valuable marbles today are gold stones, and that's glass made with copper copper crystals so yes the beautiful handmade marbles but i think maybe the original original ones were indeed made of that material jacks we talked about jack there is used as we've often said on purple used in so many different ways

either as generic term for a man a laborer such as a steeplejack, a lumberjack, etc. Or for something that is small of its kind, jackass, for example, a smaller version of an ass. And I think the smallness is what is going on here with the jacks that we would play in the playground or at home. They're not really counters. I mean, I don't quite know what you would call them. But anyway, I used to absolutely love it. My sister was ace at it. Excuse me. I'm so sorry, Susie Dent.

You can't simply say you are the world's leading uh lexicographer you can't simply say i don't know i don't know what to call them i mean this is a kind of well exactly they didn't describe but you've got to be able to describe they're star-shaped pieces of metal star-shaped pieces of metal or plastic aren't they i'm not sure they are star-shaped. I'm not sure they are. They are like, well, maybe they are star. Maybe it's not. It's two or three metal lines that cross one another. Look, if we had to describe to somebody who could not see or touch them what a jack was, you and I, we're supposed to be people who know and love language, are failing completely.

This is going to be a Something Right with Purple challenge. We would like somebody out there to send us the briefest, best description of a jack to somebody who cannot see it and cannot feel it, but can only have it described to them. The most accurate description of what a jack is, have it described to them, the most accurate description of what a jack is, looks like, please, and send it to our new address, purplepeopleatsomethingrhymes.com. So if you can come up with this perfect definition of a jack, clear, crystal clear, send it to us at purplepeopleatsomethingrhymes.com. I will once say that they were originally pebbles, I think, which makes the whole thing much easier. And the game of jacks, just for anybody who's got no idea what we're talking about, it's played by tossing small round pebbles or the star-shaped, I would say, pieces of

metal. And you have to toss one up in the air and then pick up a ball from the ground and then catch the jack. If you get one right, then you have to pick up two jacks and three and four and five until hopefully you get all 10. It's absolutely, well, it's so simple, but it's beautiful in its simplicity. I love it. Anyway, enough about jacks. We will see what comes back from those. What about yo-yos? Did you ever use yo-yos? Did I use a yo-yo? I love a yo-yo. Because, and in fact, for a while, I was quite good at yo-yo. I had a traditional wooden yo-yo. It's, again, difficult to describe. It's a round object with a piece of string that sort of goes around the inner workings of it. And you would make it go down and up and down and up.

And you competed just to see who could have the most going to the bottom and coming to the top without it stopping and dangling there off the rope. What is the origin of the word yo-yo? Yeah, interestingly. So I will give you the dictionary definition of this. It's a toy consisting of a pair of joined discs with a deep groove between them in which string is attached and wound, which can be spun alternately downward and upward by its weight and momentum as the string unwinds and rewinds. There we go. And then, of course, it's become a metaphor for anything that repeatedly fluctuates. So we think yo-yo came to us from the Philippines, actually, probably from a language of the Philippines.

And the yo-yo has been popular there for hundreds of years. It didn't really become the latest thing for us until the late 1920s, but it had been around even in ancient China and Greece, toys resembling the yo-yo. Yeah, so that's it. It was an absolute craze. I also remember, and they were banned from school, and I like this particularly because we kept the hard K in this word, kanokas. Do you remember kanokers? No, is that something to do? Oh, I do. They were metal balls on bits of string that went click, click, click, click.

Is that right? Yes. Nothing to do with conchers, which is also another playground activity, playing with conchers. But tell me about the conochers. I don't really have anything to tell you about, except the balls knocked against each other very, very violently, which is probably why they were banned from schools but as i say i just like them because we we keep the hard k or we have put in a hard k which as you know we used to have in old english

with the germanic borrowings that we made so we were connitting and we had a connite um perhaps on our knee etc very good so that's a favourite of mine yeah slinky do you remember slinky that actually wasn't a

playground toy because you had to have stairs for it to go down I loved slinkies that wasn't a playground toy

I loved slinkies maybe near a Christmas we could do an episode devoted to those toys like the slinky like the Rubik's

Cube that became sort of obsessions for a while that would be lovely I'd also love to do more on nursery rhymes. So we can talk about here we go around the mulberry bush and various other things that you might find being carried out in playgrounds. Because you and I have mentioned before

Peter and Iona Opie, who collected the language of the playground and some of the wonderful rhymes and sayings that they found in playgrounds up and down the country. It's the most beautiful, wonderful collection. And yeah, we could delve into that again, I think. Wonderful. Meanwhile, we ought to delve into our postbag. People get in touch with us via our new email address, which is purplepeopleatsomethingrhymes.com. And I think we've got a message from somebody with a wonderful surname. It's Neville Swade. Hi, Susie and Giles from Cape Town, South Africa. The other day I was watching the astounding Wimbledon final, and I was wondering about the origin of the term tennis. This also led me to think about other sports coach names such as rugby, which I know is a place name. But what

about soccer and hockey, for instance? Thanks very much for my regular Tuesday Fix. I think you should think about coming down and doing an international purple tour. Thanks very much, Neville from Cape Town. Oh, thank you, Neville. I said a wonderful name. It's actually spelt S-W-E-I-J-D. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, Swade. I love South Africa every time I've been there. And I've been right across South Africa. Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, Cape Town. Some wonderful holidays on the wine coast, ending up places like, well, just fantastic.

Let's not indulge ourselves with that because we've got questions to answer. Very good questions, too. Tell us, Sus Susie the origins of or is he right about rugby being named after is it the school or the town of rugby that gives the name to the sport yes the school the school well both soccer was actually well I think most people know there's a shortening of association football so that was the official name given in the late 19th century to the game. And that was to distinguish it from what was called rugby football. So soccer, we have soccer,

we have rugger, etc. Now Neville asks about tennis. And go back to medieval times and tennis was the name for what we now know as real tennis played on an enclosed court. But then since the late 19th century, it's referred to the outdoor game primarily that we call lawn tennis, really. And the name probably, we say probably, comes from the old French tenez, meaning receive or take. And this is what the server would call out to the opponent as they served, tenez. We think that's where tennis comes from. And Neville also mentions hockey, and that actually goes back to a French, old French word, hockey,

meaning a bishop's crozier, really, or a hooked staff or stick. And of course, that hook is a direct reference to the sticks that are played in the game. I loved playing hockey, I have to say. I miss hockey. So great questions all. And we have done an episode, Neville, on sports, I think.

So you could look back at that. And hopefully, I think we cover quite a few of them in there. There's an expression, jolly hockey sticks. I'm not quite sure what it means. Is it a type of person who's a jolly hockey sticks type of person, a kind of hearty girl who used to enjoy playing hockey? What is the origin of that expression, jolly hockey sticks? I think it is absolutely.

It's just, you know, supposed to imitate what, as you say, a sort of hearty public school girl might say. But I don't actually know when it first emerged. So let me have a look in the OED. Okay, so it says, used in representations or imitations of upper or upper middle class speech

associated with the type of English public schoolgirl, especially to express mock boisterous enthusiasm, excitement, exuberance, etc. First mentioned, as far as we have found so far, in the Daily Mirror from 1953. So, Susie, we move from South Africa to New Zealand for this next letter. It says, Hi, Susie and Giles. We were recently discussing when and why we use the word an before saying a word beginning with a vowel, i.e. an old man, but use a before other words, i.e. a lovely lady, an old man, a lovely lady. To be fair, I have no idea why, just that it sounds correct when I say it. Why is it then we say an honest person and then horrendous bore?

That's an inquiry from Graham Webster in New Zealand, who adds rather charmingly, please bring your live show to New Zealand. I'd even pick you up from the airport. If you'd pick up the flight costs as well, Graham, you can be sure we will be coming to see you very shortly. What are the answers to his questions? We've got Cape Town and New Zealand. We've been very lucky today. So I think essentially it is all about sound. So with a vowel sound, if a word has a vowel sound at its beginning, you would normally say an, an old man.

The O in old man is obviously a vowel. If it's a consonant, lovely, the L there in lovely is a consonant, you would use a. It does get to be slightly confusing when we have the H coming into play. And it's whether or not the H is voiced. So were we to say a honest person, we wouldn't need the an, but because we say an honest person and the H is silent, we put an an into it. Like with a horrendous ball, the H there is voiced, so we don't need the an in front of it. Now it's all to do with words that came over from French and sometimes

we took over the French pronunciation And sometimes we took over the French pronunciation, sometimes we didn't. We have our and we have honest, but we have, you know, all sorts of other words that we have decided to voice the H in. But it's been very fluctuating over time. And I'm often asked whether I hate the modern pronunciation of the letter H, because a lot of children now, a lot of children and teachers, a lot of people are saying H and some people absolutely abhor that. And the only thing I would say is that H has dipped in and out of fashion in terms of whether or not we voice it for centuries. And it was actually correct, as you will know, Giles, to say an hotel, to miss

off the H sound from hotel, hospital, likewise. And then we decided to voice it. So it's gone in and out of fashion. But in answer to Graham's question, it is all about how we pronounce those beginning letters, the letters that begin the words after the A or an. Does that make sense? It makes total sense. Very good. Okay, do keep writing to us from wherever you are in the world. And please invite us over to your part of the world. I've never been to Brazil, by the way, where the nuts come from. Do we have, Susie, a trio of interesting words from your personal lexicon? We do. Well, I didn't make any of these up, but I do love them.

And I love this first one particularly because it is well known amongst the countdown community the countdown show that I work on there's a group of absolutely seasoned expert players but also beginner players on it called apturus where you can try out your skills on there and apturus actually means wingless now I still to this day don't quite know why they called it wingless perhaps you get your wings when you go on countdown but apturus means wingless. So any creature that doesn't have wings is apturus. The second one is a bit of Spanish slang for you, and it made me smile, Giles. So an unskilled player in any sport, any game, could be marbles, could be jacks, could be football, soccer, etc., is known in Spanish as an armario, A-R-M-A-R-I-O, which translates literally as a wardrobe

because they stand still and don't do much. Oh, as in armoire, yeah. Armoire, exactly. And finally, a word from Yiddish for you. And Yiddish is so good at dismissal and particularly good at words for sort of nonsense. So this means bologna and hot air and it's shmagege. So S-H-M-E-G-E-G-G-E, schmagege. These are wonderful words. Those are my three. If you want to remember them, you have to write them down in a notebook actually and repeat them

to yourself time and again. It's rather what you have to do with a poem. If you want to learn it, one of the best ways I find of learning a poem is just to do two lines at a time and to write them down, to write them down repeatedly. Get a page and just write the poem, write the first two lines down again and again and again, and then learn them overnight. And then the next day, do the next two lines and gradually build it up. But actually writing it down, there must be research that tells us why that works, does help. Can I just correct myself? Because I've just double checked the pronunciation in the OED, and I think it's shmagegi rather than e at the end, shmagegi. Anyway, however you pronounce it is absolutely brilliant and can also mean a fool, by the way.

But yes, on to your poem, Giles. Shmagegi, shmagegi. That sounds much more fun as well. It's more memorable. I think the poem I've chosen today is memorable. It's actually quite a complicated poem, and it's short. I chose it simply because I came across it. I knew we were going to talk about the playground today, and I thought, oh, look, here's a poem called The Playground, written by an American poet, Richard Moore. And it's, well, you listen to it and see what you think. It's

superficially about a playground, but it's about much more than that. It's about childhood, and it's about life, and it's about old age, and the playground is just where it begins. Over the playground where ancient and wizened trees touch odors to the air to draw the latest bees, children swarm on the lawn, must the grass with their toes. What can they touch of dawn? What sweetness as it goes. Dew that will turn to tears and trickle through their sleep and through their future years, till they, they too, are old, and in their wisdom weep a honey dark and cold.

It's thought-provoking, isn't it? Call the playground, but there's a lot going on there. By Richard Moore, anyway. Oh, that's so wistful. It is. It's wistful and it's slightly disturbing. And if you go, there's a marvellous website that I sometimes pop into called the Poetry Foundation. And you'll find several of his poems there. I'm going to discover more about Richard Moore. Lovely. Thank you for that. And thank you to

everyone who has been listening to us today. And thank you for following us wherever you get your podcasts and on social media. Just a reminder's at something rhymes on twitter and facebook or at something rhymes with on instagram we also have the purple plus club where you can listen to ad free and you'll get some bonus episodes on words and language something rhymes with purple is a sony music entertainment production it was produced by Naya Dia with additional production from Nemi Oyiku, Hannah Newton, Chris Skinner, Jen Mystery,

and at the helm today with us, hopefully for a while, it's Matthias. And Matthias is going to be flying our plane all the way to South Africa and then New Zealand and then on to Brazil.

Oh yes.