Eaten? No, Rubbed all over myself? Yes.

Words.  Words are great right, if you didn't know any words... Well, you be stuffed wouldn't you? Recent studies have shown that there are somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million words in the English language - That's one for every mile between the Earth and the Moon, or one word for every pound of the price of an average UK house (Or Bugatti Veyron).

However, the average person's vocabulary can be anything between 20,000 - 50,000 words.  That means, for every word you know, there are at least another four that you probably don't.  OK, I mean a lot of them will be technical words or stuff you're never going to need, or dialect words.  But even so, that means that there's a potload of great words that we're not using, I say we... Obviously I mean you guys - I'm all about the using three long words where one short one will do.

I was reading some Blogs this morning, on the toilet (don't judge me, you all do it too, probably) and I saw that it's not just me.  A lot of Bloggers use 'flowery' language with the assumption that people will know what they mean. (Or to make themselves look intelligent) - That's not why I do it of course.  I genuinely love words... (Although the first time I wrote that, it came out as 'I genuinely love worms' Which isn't the same thing at all)

So, I present below a few of my favourite words (Not worms) as may or may not have been on the Blog, and their rough meanings - Please try to shoe-horn as many as you can into random conversations over the weekend.

-oOo-

Agglomeration - A stuck-together jumble, or pile of cr*p

Anapestic Tetrameter - A style of writing where you stress every third syllable when you read it out (Like T'was the NIGHT be-fore CHRISTMAS)

Anthropomorphic - giving something that isn't human, human attributes, like imagining death as a guy with a hood, and a scythe and a horse, called Binky.

Benzoylmethylecgonine - The posh word for Cocaine

Brobdingnagian - Huge, gigantic, large to the point of uselessness, From Jonathan Swift's book, Gulliver's Travels.

Burgeoning - To grow, but quickly. Like the buds on a flower, or perhaps the belly of an under-aged mother to be.

Calderkin - A dialect word for flint (the type of rock)

Chimping - The act of pooping into your hand and throwing it at the object of your affection. (Yeah, seriously - It's a thing that people actually do.)

Debauchery - Giving it large with the wine and the women, things you wouldn't tell your Mum.

Decrepit - (Not decrepiD, as most people seem to say) Old and feeble.

Gorram - A shortened version of God-Damn, originally from the Joss Whedon program 'Firefly' - Which you should all go and watch now, it teaches you how to swear in Chinese.

Hvad? - Danish for 'What?' - I've been using this for years and it sounds just enough like the English equivalent for people not to notice... Make me chuckle internally every time though.

Invective - Sweary and unpleasant words.

Ipovlopsychophobia - A fear of having your photograph taken, Like, that whole 'You can't take my picture! - Why, do you think it will steal your soul? - No, you've left the lenscap on' thing.

Laconic - brief, able to be described in just a few words.

Leitmotif - A (very) short piece of music, associated with a particular character - Possibly just a few notes that gets played when, for instance, the villain enters.

Panoply - A lot of different things, displayed at the same time. (From a Greek word that means a full set of weapons and armour)

Pitchblende - The ore that we get Uranium from

Poltroon - Not an idiot, as some people might think, but specifically a coward.

Proclivities - things that you enjoy doing, usually things that other people might find odd, disgusting, or potentially illegal.

Quantum - Now this sounds like one of those frightfully scary scientific words, you hear it a lot in Star Trek and stuff like that.  But it just means an amount of something, usually a small amount, but it doesn't have to be. (And you thought the title of the James Bond film Quantum of Solace was just gibberish? Well now you know)

Smorgasbord - (not SmorgasborG) Put simply, a buffet... But can be used to mean the same as a panoply.  It actually means a table full of sandwiches.

Sociopath - Someone who not only doesn't have a conscience, but doesn't even know that such a thing exists.

-oOo-

So, hopefully you learned a few new words, or learned what some words you've been using wrongly in the past actually mean.

Have a fun weekend, I'm going to - You see, I might be misguided, but at least I'm determined.

Peace...

Out...

(Kisses my middle and index fingers and waves them at you)

When the map was pink

So, tell me this cyberspace... Where does being a proud member of your country end and being a racist Nazi begin?

(I've used the word, Nazi, quite a lot recently haven't I? Loads of times yesterday, about flying disks and suchlike... Great word, so many possible uses - Did you know it's a contraction of 'Nationalsozialismus' or the National Socialist Party? That sounds much more fluffy doesn't it, something you could really get behind?)

Anyway, back to the question in hand, I'm an anachronistic kind of guy, I like hats, I wear a beard and sideburns completely unironically, I wear silk waistcoats and regularly use a pocketwatch... You'd be quite within your rights to think that I live in the past.

In fact, you'd probably be right. Why do I do this? Well, it's obviously because the past was a better place. There was clean air and long summer days playing in the woods, you could make a bow and arrow and your Mum knew how to make jam. It wasn't all great obviously, there was slavery and quite a lot of syphilis, but that was a small price to pay for being able to go to exciting new countries and expect everyone you met once you got off the ship to be able to speak English.

Ah, there you go - You see the first warning sign right there, the expectation that we had (and still have to a large extent) that Johnny Foreigner will speeka-da-English. At the height of its 450 year history, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world and comprised a fifth of the total planetary population, the Sun quite literally, never set on it. We sailed to foreign parts, planted a flag, claimed the land for the King or Queen (delete as applicable) of the time, enslaved the natives (but we taught them English and Christianity, so technically they still owe us), spread a light smattering of syphilis and cholera, exported all their food, rinsed and repeated.

We invented stuff though, and built things. Everywhere you went there were huge copper and brass steam engines, pumping water and mining coal to keep massive copper and brass steam engines running so that they could pump water and mine coal, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera as Yul Brynner might say. There was cast iron and battleship chain and mass produced bone china - You might counter that with 'Yeah, but five year old children were being seriously maimed in woolen mills, and young boys were catching scrotum cancer from sweeping chimneys for fourteen hours a day.' And I'd look at you funny, because no-one likes to hear the words 'scrotum' and 'cancer' in the same sentance. But honestly, wouldn't you rather see children sweeping chimneys than hanging around on streetcorners with their jeans around their knees, stabbing old ladies for an out of date tin of catfood? (And by children, I mean other people's children, obviously)

We had a Navy which ruled the waves (Which there's a song about, so it must be true) and an Army which kicked ass pretty much everywhere it went, especially when their cannons and muskets were turned on people armed with sticks and lengths of rope. We didn't have all the supply problems and the 'But I'm suing the Government because my Kevin had to buy his own body armour off of eBay and it came from China and it was made of papier mache' nonesense that we have today because we would take what we needed without a second thought... Without a first thought in some cases.

Sorry? What was that you said? Rape? do you mean of the indigenous populace or the country? Both? Well, yes, I suppose there might have been a small amount of that sort of thing here and there, I mean you get a few bad apples in any expeditionary force don't you? It's not like we exterminated anybody is it? No native tribes ever got wiped out because they were a bit close to places where we could mine copper, or diamonds, or pitchblende... *cough*

The women of the Empire (which, even to me, sounds like badly written Star Wars fan-fic) were proper women, with the big hats and skirts and parasols. Demure and cosseted, they ate bon-bons from silver trays, brought to them at 3:00pm sharp by Philip, the nice dusky gentleman that they'd had brought in from Bechuanaland especially for this purpose. Most importantly, they knew their place, which was atop a pedestal, being showered with gifts and the only thing they had to do on a daily basis was to look pretty whilst their husbands got on with the very real and worthwile job of being a good Captain of Industry and not getting gout... Or syphilis...

Wouldn't it be easier if things were how they used to be? The UK being the only real world power and thus guaranteeing no global war ever again? Children gainfully employed rather than roaming the streets like feral weasles? Women being sedate and wonderful and pretty and domesticated? Johnny Foreigner doing all the simple hard work in the hotter climates? Worthy but expendable lower-class people doing all the skilled hard work in Blighty?

You know it would, deep in your heart of hearts - A better time, a more rewarding existence for all... Well all the important people like us at least. But it'd still be best to keep a few ampules of Doxycycline about your person just in case.

　

I'd like to finish with a few definitions, see if you can guess where they fit in:

anachronism (əˈnækrəˌnɪzəm)

— n

1. the representation of an event, person, or thing in a historical context in which it could not have occurred or existed

2. a person or thing that belongs or seems to belong to another time: she regards the Church as an anachronism

　

satire (ˈsætaɪə)

— n

1. a novel, play, entertainment, etc, in which topical issues, folly, or evil are held up to scorn by means of ridicule and irony

2. the genre constituted by such works

3. the use of ridicule, irony, etc, to create such an effect

　

irony <sup>1 (ˈaɪrənɪ)

— n , pl -nies

1. the humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean

2. an instance of this, used to draw attention to some incongruity or irrationality

3. incongruity between what is expected to be and what actually is, or a situation or result showing such incongruity</sup>