Somehow, It's Funny that Way

[Pulsegleaner]

Last night, I had a dream where I was running a library under the sea for fish, and some of the titles were great puns (yes, I can make up puns in my dreams unconsciously).

Agatha Fishy's The Complete Cases of Hercule Poisson.

Arthur C. Sharke's "The Nine Billion Names of Cod".

Robert Louis Stergeonson's Squidnapped.

 

[digitS']

 

[digitS']

 

[Pulsegleaner]

View attachment 54021

For time's sake, I'll skip to the end


On The Twelfth day of Feasting, my good chef served to us
Twelve Drums of Stilton
Eleven Pies a Piping
Ten Lagers Leaking
Nine Ladyfingers
Eight Maids of Honor*
Seven Swans with Cherries**
Six Geese a Roasting
FIVE ONION RINGS
Four Jellied Birds***
Three French Fries
Two Turkey Legs
And a Partridge in a Pear Sauce.

*A kind of small teacake

** Yes, this WAS a common dish in Former Days, at least for royalty (THAT'S why the Ruler of England Technically owns all of the swans in England (with two ancient corporations being allowed to "rent" some each year in exchange for a fee****) It wasn't because they thought they were pretty, it's because they wanted to make sure only the King got to eat them. Same as nobility and deer (or why the Pilgrims were so elated when the Native Americans showed up at the first "Harvest Home" celebration (the name they would have called Thanksgiving by, after a similar holiday in England.) with three deer carcasses in tow.) The king also owns any dolphin caught in British waters.

***As in birds in "jelly", i.e. aspic.

****Which is why London does "swan upping" every year, during which all swans must be caught, weighed and their ownership marked by a small nick in the bill (left side, one corporation, right the other, no nick, the monarchy.)

 

[digitS']

Of the "things," I think #7 answers #4. I just bet that I could answer "Great Confusion" #3 etymologically. Even though, I'm quite often trying to spell refrigerator as refridgerator.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

#4 I KNOW the answer to. It's that, originally, U and V were the same letter, the same way I,J and Y were. You called it "U" and wrote it like "V". We STILL use "V" for you in the inscriptions of lots of things, including our money (look a the "In God We Trust" on your dimes, it's actually says "TRVST".)

1. Depends on the nature of the poison. Organic poisons would probably oxidize over time and break down into inert things, inorganic ones (like arsenic) would not.

5 is sort of true. After all, Oxygen DOES oxidize things. And anyone will tell you that, unless you actually NEED it, breathing pure oxygen is very bad for you long term; you'll burn out your lungs. Plus, of course, the higher the oxygen in the atmosphere around you, the bigger any fire that starts is going to burn.

 

[flowerbug]

#4 I KNOW the answer to. It's that, originally, U and V were the same letter, the same way I,J and Y were. You called it "U" and wrote it like "V". We STILL use "V" for you in the inscriptions of lots of things, including our money (look a the "In God We Trust" on your dimes, it's actually says "TRVST".)

when you're carving rocks straight lines are much easier than curvy ones.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

when you're carving rocks straight lines are much easier than curvy ones.

It goes deeper than that. The shape of the letters of your language have a LOT to do with what method you traditionally use to write them. Cuneiform looks like that because it was pressed into clay with a stylus. Ditto Greco Roman letters, only with the tablet being wax covered wood. Many Asian languages use a brush, so they have a lot more curves and differentiations of line thinness. Burmese is supposedly based on the lines left by eating silkworms in leaves (or maybe that's Thai, or Korean). Doing full Hieroglyphs in day to day writing took too long, so the Egyptian invented Hieratic and Demotic "shorthand".

 

[digitS']

 

[paiyaan8]

My cursive penmanship used to be fairly good. During my time in the Military, I was away from home a lot, and writing letters constantly - always in cursive. But when I retired & moved home permanently, there was no reason to use cursive, other than for signatures. At work, all hand-written documentation was printed; all of my garden records were printed as well, and any written compositions were typed out on the computer. So I've mostly forgotten cursive now... what you don't use, you lose. DW kept a few of my first letters to her, my old writing style looks foreign to me now.