Guest Blog! Just A Few Words by Granny C

            I like words. They have been called the life-blood of writers but writers don't have a monopoly on them as the tools of their trade.  Words are the life-blood of chatterers, lecturers, nags, crossword addicts — you name it — they need them.  But what I want to write about are my favourite words - or some of them at least.

            Take buttock for example.  Doesn't it have a rich, round sound?  You have to have a round open mouth to say butt and then the closing ock sound has a sharpness, a firmness about it that suggests the muscularity of the gluteus maximus.  Go on, say it.  Buttock.  Not only does it have this round, strong sound but there is something about it that makes me think of yeomen.  They would have used buttock in their everyday speech.  Not for them the namby pamby bottom or the euphemistic nether regions.  "There's a lass wi' great buttocks," they would have said.  "Good for child-bearin', that 'un."

            I like Zoo too.  There is something alien about the word.  Perhaps it's because we don't have too many words beginning with Zed.  (While we're on the subject, I like Zed better than the American Zee.  Zed has the finish needed for the last letter of the alphabet.)  You can go into a light trance saying the word Zoo over and over again.  Beats the hell out of 'Om' any day.

            Hippopotamus is one of my favourite animal words.  I was delighted when I discovered it meant river horse — horse of the river actually, I suppose.  Hippopotamus has a lumbering sound to it.  When you say it your voice sinks - try it.

            Hippo

                        pot

                                    amus..

            You can see the great heavy beast sink slowly beneath the surface of the river in which it has been wallowing.  Hippo — you see the whole animal ...  pot — body gone, head with its little ears sticking up ...  amus — only the nostrils show at the end.

            A schoolteacher I knew once wrote, wrongly, the word rhinocerous as if it were an adjective.  It has haunted me.  I want to use it as an adjective but have not yet found a noun to use it with.  Perhaps you could say that someone who over-imbibed had a rhinocerous nose, though I think it would be better described as rhinocerise.

            Wishy washy — that's two words but they always go together.  You never say that someone is just wishy  or just washy.   They go together like ham and eggs or forks and knives.  I do not know what either word means.  What does it mean to be wishy?  How can you be washy?  but being wishy washy — well, you can hear what it means.  It means bleh.  It means nothingness, ineffectualness, it means being Charlie Brown to someone's Lucy.

            Take rhomboid now — that has a stalwart ring to it.  A rhombus was a parallelogram that dared to be different.  A rhombus stands out in a crowd, so the adjective has that same sense of presence.  Rhomboid could team up with Buttock.  They're two of a kind.  Rhomboid buttocks.  Don't laugh.  Picasso, I'm sure, painted rhomboid buttocks somewhere.  Rhomboid buttocks could be worth millions.

            Gillyflower  and Chrysanthemum are my two favourite floral words.  Gillyflowers are those little clove pinks that look like miniature carnations.  But the word has an ancient sound.  There are overtones of medieval herb gardens in the word gillyflower.  A monastic herbalist might once have planted borders of gillyflowers and then wondered if he sinned because of the enjoyment he gained at the sight and smell of them.  Chrysanthemum is a strange word with its latinate ending.  Can you decline chrysanthemum?  Would it be a second declension noun like 'bellum' I wonder?  Chrysanthemum, chrysanthemum, chrysanthemum, chrysanthemi, chrysanthemo, chrysanthemo.  And how about 'of the chrysanthemums'?  That would be chrysanthemorum.  There's a word to delight a wordsmith!  Clematis, on the other hand, would have to be conjugated.  Clemo, clemas, clemat, clemamus, clematis, clemant.   Chrysanthemum is a word children should be introduced to at an early age - after haberdashery perhaps.  Haberdashery is easy to spell and chrysanthemum is not.

            Which reminds me — haberdashery almost tells you what it means.  Can't you just see an anxious draper, perhaps with a tape measure slung round his neck, rushing about in his ancient shop with the bare floorboards, dusty from a thousand feet?  Hither and thither he dashes, opening drawers, pulling things from shelves, looking for buttons, needles, threads of the right colour, lace for trimming, ribbons, bones for stays.

            To finish, though it is by no means my complete list, I give you relict.  It is my desire, if I die last in this marriage partnership, to have added to a tombstone if we have one, relict of the above.  Some people object to the word thinking it has overtones of chattel, that you were a nobody before and after your husband died.  Words suggest different things to different people.  For me it brings forth a feeling of bereavement, of being left behind, but a feeling only possible from one who has had a happy marriage.  Widows of husbands who had been unkind could not be described as relicts — merry widows perhaps.  Glad to see the last of him.  Relicts grieve but they do not go into a decline.  Relicts survive.  Relicts have things to do.  Relicts live on.  Relict is another of my stalwart words.  Perhaps some even have rhomboid buttocks.

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A PS.... Grandad has a tendency to make up a word  - always apposite but not in any dictionary.  "That's not a word," I say, and he replies, as I'm sure Shakespeare did to a similarly accusing Anne Hathaway, "Well, it is now."