A (presumably) never ending series of notebooks

I always have a notebook in my bag, largely because the way my brain works seems to churn up thoughts that I feel should be memorialised at moments when I am otherwise ill-equipped to capture them, but also because otherwise I will write on whatever comes to hand (including, indeed, my hands) regardless of the appropriateness or otherwise of the medium.

Were I to only be struck by the urge to write down brilliant ideas, moving lines or intriguing questions that occur to me, these would probably be relatively interesting documents, but as it stands they often include shopping lists, reminders to look up song lyrics that I can't remember and notes to myself written when drunk. Such as:

Why do we use @? It's not that much shorter than the word 'at' to either read or write.

Godfrey from Dad's Army IS George from Rainbow

Ben and Jerry - hee hee

Misunderstood sayings

Although the number of names and classifications for this kind of phenomenon grows at about the same rate as the internet, I'm not sure if there is a word for the mingling of two sayings into one hideously confusing phrase. Some of my favourites are:

Too many chefs, not enough Indians

The sky's my oyster

Bite the bull by the horns

It's not brain science

I used to be stupid tribute

Having read some of the entries on IUsedToBeStupid.com I thought I should catalogue some of my own childhood misconceptions:

I used to think that a sign saying 'To Let' on the outside of a building meant that there was a toilet inside - weirdly, I knew how to spell 'toilet', but thought that the rules of spelling were more flexible than to limit the spelling to one version.

My Dad used to let me sit on his lap and drive the car, resulting in a belief which endured till I was a teenager than the steering wheel actually powered the car and was pretty much the only important factor in making it move.

Probably my most inappropriate misapprehension was that the word 'cunning' was short for 'cunnilingus' - I don't know where I had heard the word, but I figured they were close enough, so they must be related. It wasn't until I said it to my step-dad when I was about 10 that he asked where I had heard it and explained that it probably wasn't the kind of word I should use without knowing what it meant.

May Bugs

I am generally quite a fan of bugs - I'm not in love with them (as the Boy Wonder seems to think) but I don't have a particular problem with them and I find quite a lot of them actively interesting. The only ones I actively dislike are Daddy Longlegses and that's because I'm always really scared that in the process of trying to catch them to release them into freedom I will trap one of their teeny weeny legs and pull it off, or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile little bodies. My favourite kind of bug was, until today, the caterpillar, and although physically it still is, name-wise it has been overshadowed by the fact that I discovered today that another name for the may bugs is a cockchafer. There is no amount of maturity that will make that cease to be funny to me, and quite frankly if there was I would hope not to reach it - life's too short not to be entertained by the word cockchafer.

My brother from another mother

I can't believe that I have only recently realised that I genuinely have a brother from another mother. I mean, it's not the kind of thing I say very often, but I'm surprised that in the few years since it has been in common parlance that I haven't made the connection.

C-peck-mockle country and the magic basil plant

The Boy Wonder, whilst being generally brilliant, is prone, as we all are, to moments of surprising specialness which always crack me up and then go in my mental hilarity bank to be revisited whenever I need reminding of how simple pleasures are by far the best. One of my favourites was a misunderstanding in which I was unwittingly complicit and involved a month-long holiday to Canada. We had a basil plant in full growth when we left, which I optimistically left on the windowsill despite the fact that it clearly needed watering at least once a day to survive, so naturally when we returned from our trip, despite the poppies at the front of the house being so large we couldn't see out of the window properly, the basil plant was a brown, dried-up husk of a plant sitting on the windowsill like a memorial to our neglect. Being the super efficient little worker bee I am, I spent the day of our return doing all our laundry and ordering a shopping delivery, so within 24 hours of returning home, we were more or less back on track with normal life. I put our new basil plant on the windowsill and the Boy Wonder joked that obviously his giving it a pint of water the day before had worked magic on its health. It was only the next day when we went round to visit his sister and wonder at their new house, and I heard him telling her the magical story of how he had resurrected the brown and crispy basil with a pint of water and how incredible it was that it had come back to full green leafy goodness within around 24 hours, that I realised he hadn't been joking the day before, and was under the illusion that he had brought it back to life. Needless to say, I explained what had happened through my chuckles and tried to convince him that I hadn't intended to let him think he had magical powers, but I was secretly sorry that I had said anything as I would have liked to hear him tell the story at least once more before bursting his bubble. The most recent example of his capacity to crack me up is down to a music programme shown on the BBC iPlayer called 'Ceol Country' showing (often bizarrely lame) excerpts from various country music festivals around the gaelic speaking world with the occasional subtitle in English. We had been happily calling it 'Ke-Owl' Country until one day I insisted that the Boy Wonder look up the correct pronunciation before we watched another episode. He consulted the oracle on the laptop and after a few moments of looking confused he announced 'Well, that can't be right!'.

I asked him what he'd found, but he was just standing their muttering to himself 'C-peck-mock-l- hmm, that doesn't sound right'. I went and looked over his shoulder, and he was looking at a site which had pronunciations of Irish words, and next to 'Ceol' it said c, e-peck, o-mock, l. The Boy Wonder was very sweetly taking this literally, and it wasn't until I said 'I think it means to pronounce the 'e' as in peck and 'o' as in mock', not to actually pronounce the whole words!', that he said 'I thought that didn't sound right!'. I nearly wet myself, and from now on that programme will forever be called 'C-Peck-Mock-L Country' in our house.

A game which shouldn't be described

After a few drinks with the Gift the other night, we somehow got onto the topic of weird sounding children's programmes which inevitably declined into the traditional game of coming up with porn alternatives for film titles, only slightly altered to fit around first animal-based and then general children's film and TV (which is the main reason the game is not christened with any easy-to-misinterpret snappy name and bears full description at all times lest we find ourselves misunderstood). The normal pitfalls were all present - the double dip of distress at your sudden inability to think of a single film followed up quickly by a list of films which already sound dirty, or are a single word thus requiring a lot more explanation than the inherent humour allows - alongside new ones borne of the fact that I barely like films and can't remember the real titles of them anyway. All the more surprising then that I was the surprise winner (well - I christened myself, but only because soliciting nominations from my husband and the Gift seemed tacky, pointless and would inevitably open up the possibility of them not picking me) with my reworking of the popular children's classic about a boy and his bear to create the monster that is 'Genital Ben'.

Hot shit

Why is hot shit better than cold shit? I can't think of any situation where the temperature of the shit would have a significant impact on my response to it. I suppose if I was buried up to my neck in shit, my preferences for the shit's temperature might vary depending on the weather, but it would be of minimal concern compared to how I might extricate myself from said shit itself. I suppose it's one of those phrases that has evolved without people giving it much thought, but now I have, I will be more careful about my useage in future.

Funny Words

Opt - it's so little and once you've said, thought or heard it a few times (which one does in the world of permission marketing) it becomes ridiculous really quickly. Punctual - should mean something more dangerous than it does (although an unhealthy obsession with punctuality could be considered a disease). Ladle - this may be the quickest word to lose sense when repeated over and over again, though closely contended by 'ketchup'.

Amusing misspellings

Some of these come up fairly regularly in the workplace, some are less common, but all make me laugh whenever I type them. Fortunately the time I e-mailed a client and told him I was 'moistly' waiting for the holidays, it was someone who appreciated the entertainment value of the typo and found it amusing rather than offensive.

Promble - Problem Accunts - Accounts Borken - Broken Scared - Sacred Gold - Golf Gift - Git Most - Moist Dong - Doing Teat - Test Dong - doing Discunt - discount

Bateman's - Batman's

Hoodwink

I was listening to the lovely local radio this morning and they were discussing a fascinating sounding book by Adam Jacot de Boinod called The Wonder of Whiffling, which I cannot wait to read and learn about the crazy words that we might lose unless folks (like me presumably) start using them. I then looked at something I had written yesterday which contained the word 'hoodwinked' in it, much to my pleasure at my own use of outdated words! So I thought I would compile a list of words that I really like - here goes: Hoodwinked Footle Discombobulation Poppycock Snib (despite the fact that my family and the Boy Wonder accused me of making it up!) Spurtle Purloined

When typos go bad

It is almost always a big problem to type 'moist' instead of 'most', particularly when writing for work.

How can I sound more important?

I'm pretty sure this is becoming more common, or at least I have heard it more: the practice of substituting 'me' with 'myself', and 'you' with 'yourself' as in 'If you could send that to myself please' or 'We can book yourselves in for this weekend'. I can only assume that people who do not understand the English language think it sounds official in some way, or that terror of misusing 'I' or 'me' somehow leads people to thinking that misuse of the reflexive is preferable and will always be considered at least right-ish no matter what the circumstance. Either way, it grates - I would rather hear someone confuse 'I' and 'me' than complicate a sentence with unecessary use of 'myself' or 'yourself'.

Two words I love

Having spent last Thursday night entertaining a friend and his new Lithuanian squeeze, I am now the proud owner of a new facourite word. I neither speak nor write Lithuanian, but the rough pronunciation of this word is 'Ooshbackalooka', and one of the best things about it is that it means 'arse'. Not just any 'Oh arse, I've smashed my foot into a wicker basket and it's swollen up to twice its normal size' - it is not to be used in any context other than appreciation, such as 'That's a lovely Ooshbackalooka you've got there', which is an excellent way to complement someone whether they speak Lithuanian or not. My other new favourite is 'Asshat' although my affection is tinged with sadness as I fear I will never be able to use it in spoken conversation on account of my not being American. It is one of the things I find most cringy about this country - our inability to break out of our traditional toff pronunciation of 'arse' with a long 'ahh'. When hard-core slapstick show 'Jackass' hit these shores, I was initially entertained, then saddened and embarassed by the way people managed to strangle the pronunciation, coming up with 'Jack-ahhhse' and making themselves sound like tools. However, the beauty of 'ass-hat' is that it is as, if not more, effective written down as well as lending itself to the creation of other related parts of speech such as 'ass-hattery' and 'ass-hattage'. It also manages to combine amusing and insulting in perfect proportion, making it the perfect word to use when you want to draw someone's attention to the fact that they have just said or done something stupid, but you don't want to rest your judgement of them as a complete moron until they have had a chance to redeem themselves. Laughing at being called an ass-hat would be a good start.