Alternatives to Being a Hobbit

I’d always just assumed that J.R.R. Tolkien invented the word hobbit. And while he apparently did, his story about how he came to use it allows for the possibility that he maybe didn’t. As he recalled in a letter to W.H. Auden in 1955, “On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why.” And if that’s the true story, isn’t it wild that what amounts to a nonsense sentence grew into a book that spun off into The Lord of the Rings and was therefore responsible for the movies, worldwide awareness of New Zealand and endless debates about the dramatic strengths and failings of Liv Tyler?

In the same way that embiggen appeared in print 112 years before The Simpsons popularized it, there’s exactly one instance of hobbit appearing in print before The Hobbit was published in 1937. Excerpted on Etymonline, the passage is folklorist Michael Aislabie Denham’s extremely long 1895 list of British supernatural creatures (and thereabouts). And it’s one of those chunks of text that overwhelms language-lovers like me with dueling reactions of “So quaint!” and “So British!” and “What the hell?”

My curiosity got the better of me, and I did some poking around Denham’s list, broken up onto separate lines with links and notes explaining what weird folklore Denham is talking about. In some cases, I had no idea, and in others the term doesn’t need any explanation, but I threw in some history if it seemed interesting. Like in the very first one, for example. But here’s the thing: I could not find anything about the term hobbit, and its presence on this pre-Tolkienverse list makes for a neat little linguistic mystery. (I go on a bit about it at the very end of the post. Hit the jump and scroll to the bottom if you’re interested.)

First, the list, in strange, jumbled order that Denham wrote it:

ghosts (According to Etymonline, we get it from the Old English gast, which could mean “soul, spirit, life, breath, good or bad spirit, angel, demon” but which took on the current meaning, “soul of a dead person,” when it became the word chosen to translate the Latin word spiritus in Christian writing.)

boggles (the critter of the British supernatural world, basically, a word that’s closely related to a ton of others on this list, thanks to the Middle English bugge, “something frightening)

bloody-bones (According to Wikipedia, a boogeyman used to “awe children, and keep them in subjections” and that “lived in a dark cupboard, usually under the stairs. If you were heroic enough to peep through a crack you would get a glimpse of the dreadful, crouching creature, with blood running down his face, seated waiting on a pile of raw bones that had belonged to children who told lies or said bad words.”)

spirits (worth pointing out the connection to the Latin spirare, “breath,” and all the words we get from that, and the very obvious connection to breathing and not being dead yet)

demons (from the Greek daimon — “deity, divine power; lesser god; guiding spirit, tutelary deity”)

ignis fatui (literally “foolish fire,” but referring to the burning methane more often called will-o’-the-wisp, a natural phenomenon that appears many times on this list, with many different names)

The rest of the long, long list after the jump.

brownies (not the mini-Girl Scouts, but about as dependable around the house; a diminutive of the Scottish “wee brown man”)

bugbears (another monster made up to terrify naughty children, it will also go by the name bugboo)

black dogs (a demonic ghost dog along the lines of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and another creature that Denham lists again and again)

specters (literally “a vision”)

shellycoats (river monster whose coat is literally made of shells)

scarecrows, witches, wizards

barguests (more often barghest, and either one particular demonic ghost dog or an elf, so pick your fancy)

Robin-Goodfellows (Puck, essentially, but the name is a euphemism people would use when talking about the Devil so he wouldn’t show up. “Speak of the Devil,” and all that.)

hags (the old women who aren’t your sainted grandmother)

night-bats (as opposed to the other kinds???)

scrags (a very skinny person, apparently)

breaknecks (not completely sure on this one, but given this British adjective meaning “dangerous or reckless,” I’d guess it’s either the person of that or someone who breaks your neck, I’d guess)

fantasms (old spelling of phantasm, a ghost)

hobgoblins (Or as the hurried would call them, goblins, but the take away here is that that word part hob-, according to Etymonline, is a nickname for Rob in that old-timey, British nickname system that also calls Richard Hick or Rodger Hodge, and it’s short for the aforementioned Robin Goodfellow. According to Wikipedia, a hob is just a household spirit.)

hobhoulards (a hobgoblin that howls, basically, but that second part might be related to owlet)

boggy-boes (I’m assuming that it’s the same gang as the bugbears and the bugboos)

dobbies (a “thin and shaggy” household spirit that does cute little favors for servants and children, and yes, it’s what inspired the Harry Potter Dobby)

hob-thrusts (according to the Monstropedia, it’s a brownie which carries an iron pot in which he stirs a dish made from children’s thumb bones)

fetches (“apparition, specter, a double,” possibly coming from a different etymology than the more familiar fetch although we’re not sure, and giving rise to the term fetch candle, “a corpse candle supposed to pass between the home and the grave of the beholder,” etc., etc., Gretchen Weiners)

kelpies (a supernatural water horse — but not a seahorse — that could also look like a pretty lady)

warlocks (the boy of witch, as Cordelia Chase once put it, the word comes from the Old English wærloga, “traitor,” and went from untrustworthy humans to “giants and canniabls” to those in league with the Devil)

mock-beggars (there’s no shortage of places named Mockbeggar, but the origin of those names seem equally obscure, so I’m inclined to assume it’s someone who looks like a harmless panhandler then murders you; that said, beggar may in some cases be an alteration of the French boggard/boggart)

mum-pokers (tempted to say this is an old-timey way of saying motherfucker, but it’s actually a nursery room goblin that stalks its prey silently)

Jemmy-burties (according to this book, it’s another name for ignis fatuus, or the will-o’-the-wisp; the second part may just be a diminutive of burt, Middle English for “bright)

urchins (poor children, as dangerous as ghosts and fairies)

satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs (see, Denham got to the Greek section, though I sometimes forget that Triton from the Disney Little Mermaid is named after a Greek mythological character)

calcars (unsure on this one, though its Latin for “spur” and can mean refer in English to a small oven or furnace)

nymphs (like poor children, loose women are also dangerous; the word actually once meant “wife, young bride” in Greek, but it became more salacious and mythological over time)

imps (went from the agricultural (“young shoot, graft”) to the household (“child”) to the otherworldly as a result of what Etymonline terms “pejorative phrases like imp of Satan”)

incubuses (but curiously not hand-in-hand with succubuses, despite their interlocking natures and etymologies)

spoorns (still confused, but might have some connection to calcar, as spoorn is German for “spur,” and both words appear side-by-side more than once in the 1921 fantasy novel Figures of Earth)

men-in-the-oak (Google is just no help on this one, but couldn’t it be the Green Men?)

hell-wains (a guess: given how wain means “wagon,” which isn’t a creature, necessarily, but still wouldn’t be out of place in the company of all these other weirdos)

fire-drakes (a fire-breathing dragon)

kit-a-can-sticks (will-o’-the-wisp once again, and apparently it can also be kit of the candlestick, kitty candlestick and kitty with the wisp,)

Tom-tumblers (apparently Tom Thumb, but a less pleasant one that the one popularized by the story about the tiny boy, which itself dates back to at least 1621)

melch-dicks (I’d guess anything from a sexually transmitted disease to some mangling of the Biblical name Melchizedek, but it’s actually Melsh Dick and, a “sylvan spirit” and “the protector of hazelnuts.” And what does melsh mean? “Moist.” Yep, dude’s name is “Moist Dick.”)

larrs (Wikipedia says it’s the the lares, the Roman household deities)

kitty-witches (tragically human witches and not little cats who are also witches, though that’s still totally a thing)

hobby-lanthorns (lantern-carrying goblin)

Dick-a-Tuesdays (a goblin, though we’re not sure why a Tuesday goblin, especially because “all goblins and ‘bugs’ were created, imperfectly, on Friday”)

elf-fires (once again, will-o’-the-wisp)

Gyl-burnt-tales (and again, will-o’-the-wisp, though this one is alleged to be a corruption of jinn with a burnt tail)

knockers (mine-goblins, but also ha ha ha knockerselves)

rawheads (“specter” or “scarechild”)

Meg-with-the-wads (will-o-the-wisp)

old-shocks (a nickname for the Devil in the style of Old Scratch)

ouphs (“a fairy or a sprite”)

pad-foot (another name for those black dogs and hellhounds)

pixies (of debated origin, but notable for being responsible for one of my favorite obscure words, pixilated, which is different than pixelated)

pictrees (a ghost)

giants, dwarfs (together again!)

Tom-pokers (The Devil)

tutgots (no clue)

snapdragons (probably less so the flower and more so the mock villain this amazing parlor game in which children snatched raisins from flaming brandy, which, by the way, sounds awesome)

sprets (surely it’s sprite, no?)

spunks (unsure on this one, though it makes sense in the way that we use spunk to mean “spirit, and also you’ll be gratified to know that we’ve been using it to mean “semen” since at least 1888)

conjurers

thurses (a giant, a specter or a giant specter, and no, I’m not kidding)

spurns (which appear to just be an alternate form of spoorn)

tantarrabobs (a name for the Devil, according to Etymonline, and possibly the word that gave us the word tantrabobus/tantrabogus, a Vermont word for “any odd-looking object,” which in turn might have given us the word bogus)

swaithes (perhaps some relation to swath, but I couldn’t guess why)

tints (in the context of shade, I’m guessing)

tod-lowries (“The Yarthkins and Tiddy Muns and Tod Lowries are queer, primeval, dangerous spirits, breathing pesiltelence and having to be constantly placated,” according to this book, though I’ll point out that the Australian footballer Todd Lowry makes researching this one fairly difficult)

Jack-in-the-Wads (the will-o’-the-wisp, yet again, and quite possibly the sibling to Meg-with-the-wads, because why not?)

mormos (a “spirit who bit bad children” and a creature from Greek mythology, says Wikipedia)

changelings (a concept many people my age learned about from The Labyrinth, the word for a baby stolen and replaced by spirits was previously oaf, oddly enough)

redcaps (a goblin said to inhabit castles and murder travelers in order to dye their little hats with the blood, according to Wikipedia)

yeth-hounds (“heath hounds,” and those same devil dogs previously mentioned — “a headless dog, said to be the spirit of an unbaptised child, which rambles through the woods at night making wailing noises”)

colt-pixies (an evil spirit that leads horses astray, possibly into bogs, like what happened poor Artax)

Tom-thumbs (like the tom-tumblers, a more evil version of the Tom Thumb we know and love and celebrate every day)

black-bugs (not insects but otherworldly unfriendlies, in the sense of bugbear and bugboo, though the etymology is apparently the same)

boggarts (according to Wikipedia, either a household spirit that places its clammy hands on the faces of sleeping people or a genius loci inhabiting marshes, holes, bridges or sharp curves in the road)

scar-bugs (a harder-to-Google phrase than you might expect)

shag-foals (according to this site, “a shaggy-haired donkey with fiery eyes from the tales of Lincolnshire, England. It would appear on the sides of lonely roads only at night. When travellers passed nearby it would frighten and chase them. Other than causing terror, it has never killed or hurt its victims.”)

hodge-pochers (a nickname for Rodger plus an alternate form of poker, it looks like, and apparently unrelated to the word hodgepodge)

hob-thrushes (a.k.a. the previously mentioned hob-thrust, who is a horror)

bugs (again, not insects)

bull-beggars (either “goblin” or “bugbear” or “something used or suggested to produce terror, as in children or persons of weak mind”)

bygorns (a long shot: bygorn = bi-corn = “two horns”?)

caddies (not the supernatural aspects of golf, unfortunately)

bomen (just a contraction for bogeyman, Wikipedia says)

brags (“a creature from the folklore of Northumberland and Durham that usually takes the form of a horse or donkey; it is fond of tricking unwary wayfarers into riding on its back before throwing the rider into a pool of water or bush before running off laughing”)

wraiths (a familiar word whose etymology is uncertain)

waffs (“a wraith whose appearance portends death,” and a word that seems like it might be related to the verb waffle though not the noun waffle)

flay-boggarts (the members of the bog family that skin their victims, I’m assuming)

fiends (presumably not being assigned to the elements of earth, water, air and fire, necessarily)

gallytrots (the ghost dog, once again)

imps (again)

gytrashes (a different sort of ghost canine)

patches (current uses of the word patch have made this word pointless to research)

hob-and-lanthorns (not significantly different from hobby-lanthorns)

gringes (unsure, but I’m guessing the similarity to Grinch is coincidental)

boguests (a Yorkshire-specific demon dog; can also be rendered as barghest, bargtjest and several other ways; theories about etymology include the German Berg-geist (“mountain spirit”), Bär-geist (“bear-spirit”), and Bier-Geist, “spirit of the funeral bier.”))

bonelesses (an amorphous, Smoke Monster-y boogeything, described in a 1916 account excerpted here as follows: “a shapeless summat as slides behind and alongside in the dark night. Many’s have died of fright through his following on. They can’t never tell about him except he’s a big shadow and shapeless”)

Peg-powlers (according to Wikipedia, “a hag from English folklore with green skin, long hair and sharp teeth who is said to inhabit the River Tees. She grabs the ankles of those who wander too close to the water's edge, especially naughty children, and pulls them under the water and drowns them”)

pucks (yeah, that Puck, but also Robin Goodfellow, since that’s a name people used for him when they didn’t want to speak his actual name and summon him; incidentally, the name is related to pooka, the rabbit spirit from the movie Harvey)

fays (“fairy,” and it’s actually related to that word, as well as to fate)

kidnappers (supernatural and otherwise)

gallybeggars (a corpse-looking spirit that carries its own head and spooks travelers)

hudskins (seems like I’m only finding hits for this very passage, so I’m guessing that it’s something awful that takes your skin and wears it like a hood)

nickers (probably not underwear but the Scandinavian nykr, a supernatural river horse that’s related, supernatural-wise and word-wise, to the nixie)

madcaps (cap is “head,” and it’s meant to mean “crazy person”)

trolls

robinets (no clue, because it’s just a robin, but weirdly it’s also French for “a small sheep”)

friars’ lanthorns (yet another will-o’-the-wisp)

silkies (usually selkie, they’re seals that turn into ladies to traipse about on land)

cauld-lads (the ghost of a murdered boy that inhabits Hylton Castle and cries, “I’m cauld!” … see, because he’s cold and that’s how he says it)

death-hearses (perhaps not actually the vehicle used to transport dead bodies, since the word originally meant “flat framework for candles, hung over a coffin”)

goblins (And after all that, we come to goblin, which doesn’t need to be explained, I suppose, but it’s worth noting that we’re not sure where the word actually comes from, though it may be related to cobalt)

hob-headlesses (a ghoul residing near the River Kent who would glue people in place so they couldn’t run away)

bugaboos (the more familiar way of writing out boggy-boes)

kows or cowes (presumably the Hedley Kow, an evil spirit that can change its shape at will but prefers the form of a cow, which seems unambitious)

nickies, nacks, necks (the lady in the water, presuming this is just an alternate take on nixie)

waiths (“ownerless property, stray animal,” and apparently related to waif)

miffies (All I’ve got is “a class of spirits.”)

buckies (again, nothing aside from “whelk” or “snail shell”)

ghouls (notably from the Arabic ghul, “an evil spirit that robs graves and feeds on corpses”)

sylphs (coined by Paracelsus when he wanted to invent an air elemental, it’s supposed that it could be a combo of silva, “forest,” and nymph)

guests (probably from the time when the word meant “enemy” or “stranger” as opposed to “person you’re happy to have come over,” and despite what you might guess from this list, Etymonline doesn’t seem to say that there’s an etymological connection between guest and ghost)

swarths (I’m guessing it’s some connection with swarthy and schwarz, both of which mean “black”)

freiths, freits (My only guesses are a variation on fright or the Anglo-Norman freit, “cold”)

gy-carlins, Gyre-carling (both the queen of the fairies in Scottish folklore, with the first part either being either a cognate with the Norse geri, “greedy” or gýgr, “ogress,” and the second part being a Scots or Northern English word meaning “old woman.” )

pigmies (historically, a member of race of dwarves , as described by Homer and Herotodus, and the term is related to pugnacious, for measurement reasons)

chittifaces (one who has a thin, pinched faced; used as a term of contempt)

nixies (the same as the aforementioned nickies, nacks and necks)

Jinny-burnt-tails (a variation on gyl-burnt-tale , which itself is a variation on jinn with a burnt tail)

dudmen (a ragman or scarecrow)

hell-hounds (it’s, um, a hellhound)

dopple-gangers (those famous double-goers)

boggleboes (another variation on bugaboo)

bogies (a mysterious spirit, a hobgoblin)

redmen (unknown, but hopefully not something racist)

portunes (“the wizened and wrinled portune was a typical brownie-type fairy, delighted to help with farm work provided no payment was offered”)

grants (no clue, but maybe… giants? in the sense of grand meaning “big”?)

hobbits (of course, I haven’t got a clue what this was supposed to mean when the text was written, and it’s hard to search for the term separately from the Tolkienverse, especially at this precise moment in pop culture)

hobgoblins (yes, this one is actually repeated from the earlier mention, letter for letter)

brown-men (this also seems a little racist, but Wikipedia says it’s a reference to the Simonside Dwarves)

cowies (the Hedley Kow, again)

dunnies (if not the Hazelrigg Dunnie, which took the form of a cow to irritate farmers and terrify children, then something more or less like it)

wirrikows (more often worricow or wurrycow, it’s “a bugbear, a hobgoblin”)

alholdes (according to this book, it’s the Germanic goddess Holda, associated with spinning, childbirth, witches, hunting, winter and all sorts of fairytale tropes)

mannikins (apparently used to mean “a short person,” it’s also used to refer to those “little men” jointed models that artists use)

follets (seeing how feufollet is the French word for “will-o’-the-wisp,” I’m guessing it’s that… yet again)

korreds (red-eyed creatures who live in megalithic dolmen tombs and guard treasure)

lubberkins (a.k.a. the Lubber fiend, a Puck-like character who performs chores in exchange for saucers of milk)

cluricauns (also cluricane and clutharachán, it’s Irish spirit similar to a leprechaun who wears red instead of green and who “is dressed like a weekend gentleman with silver buckles on his shoes, gold lace on his cap, and blue silk stockings below his breeches”)

kobolds (a Germanic dwarf that occupies the linguistic space between goblin and cobalt; Wikipedia notes that “Kobolds who live in human homes wear the clothing of peasants; those who live in mines are hunched and ugly; and kobolds who live on ships smoke pipes and wear sailor clothing,” and I think that’s a very handy way to differentiate your kobolds)

leprechauns (purveyors of cereal marshmallows and Irish stereotypes; the word literally means “a very small body,” from lu, “little,” and corpan, the diminutive of corp, “body”)

mares (it’s literally nightmares personified, with the second syllable of nightmare coming from the Old English word for an incubus or succubus)

korreds (again)

puckles (Puck, puca or pooka, once again)

korigans (a Breton spirit that can either be dwarves that dance around fountains (but cannot name off all the days of the week) or sexy sirens who lure men to a watery death, so you’ve got options)

sylvans (guessing it’s just sylphs again)

succubuses (and, at long last, the girl incubuses; people realize that succubus and incubus come from the Latin for “to lie beneath” and “to lie upon,” respectively, yes?)

blackmen (for a third time, hopefully not something racist)

shadows

banshees (caterwauling ghost lady; notably, the literal meaning of the original Irish, bean sidhe, is “female of the elves,” and that bean is related to the word queen)

lian-hanshees (more often leanan sidhe, “fairy lover,” is a creature who indulges in ill-fated relationships with humans and who may or may not be a vampire)

clabbernappers (given how clabber is a cheese-like food, I’m guessing the clabbernappers are mean spirits that attempt to foil human’s delicious clabber feasts in the way that butterflies were disguised witches who stole dairy products)

Gabriel-hounds (yet another demon dog)

mawkins (variously a simpleton, a hare, a kitchenmaid, a slattern, a cat, a mop or a scarecrow)

doubles (doppelgangers, again)

corpse lights or candles (like a cross between a will-o’-the-wisp and a fetch candle, it’s a light thought to float from a dying person’s house to the cemetery… and then back again, for some reason)

scrats (Wiktionary states, without any explanation, that it can be a hermaphrodite, but I’m guessing it’s Old Scratch once again)

mahounds (the prophet Mohammed, surprisingly)

trows (a troll-like thing living in the Shetlands and Orkneys, fond of music and prone to kidnapping musicians for in-house performances)

gnomes (important to note that they once supposedly dwelled deep within the earth and not in front yard gardens)

sprites (from the Latin spiritus, which makes your video games seem a lot more spiritual, now that you think about it)

fates (those weird sisters, but in a generic sense)

fiends (again)

sibyls (classy, classical prophetesses who really wouldn’t keep company with demons and goblins, you’d think)

nicknevins (another name for the Gyre-carling)

whitewomen (more often witte wieven, “white women” but “wise women” in Low Saxon, they are “the spirits of wise women or priestesses, and haunt the forest, lakes, swamps, hills and megaliths”)

fairies (Notably, it only took on the meaning of “diminutive winged beings so-called in children's stories” in the seventeenth century, and as it’s pointed out on Etymonline, Tolkien himself notes this transition rather poignantly: “I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of ‘rationalization,’ which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.”)

thrummy-caps (a “queer-looking old man,” with thrummy basically meaning “frayed”)

cutties (more often Cutty Soames, they’re mine goblins who would cut soames, or ropes)

nisses (the Swedish tomtenisse, it’s basically a little psycho who held hostage the occupants of Scandinavian farms)

and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description (the countless others he forgot to include, but let’s be honest — most of them were probably different words for the will-o’-the-wisp)

A note: Initially, I just found the Denham Tracts list as it appeared on Etymonline, and I began looking up the stranger entries in Google Books to see what I could turn up whenever I had a little spare time. Only much later, when I started searching for the hard-to-find entries did I realize that the passage had its own section on Wikipedia, with links explaining the entries. However, Wikipedia doesn’t explain all the entries, and I’m not sure I agree with all of Wikipedia’s connections: shag-foal links to “Black dog,” for example. So I just continued.

Another note: Denham’s list is very strange, and I’m not talking about the subject matter. First, it’s based off an older text: Reginald Scot’s 1584 The Discoverie of Witchcraft. (Go here and control-F “urchens” to see the original text.) Denham added a lot, but many of his additions are redundant. He had nine entries for will-o’-the-wisp, certain words show up twice, other words reappear slightly misspelled, and he didn’t bother to sort it thoroughly, though there are attempts at grouping — a bunch of Greek mythology creatures lumped together, but not all of the Greek mythology creatures, for example. I’m not complaining, just commenting on how strange it is to have an academic resource that so plainly preserves the author’s disorganization, especially considering that the text was edited in the 1890s.

It’s especially puzzling to me that Denham would have made the list but not explained the creatures he was listing. Had he done so, we might know today whether some form of a hobbit existed before Tolkien dreamed up his big-footed characters, or at least how people used the term before Tolkien made it his own. Until we know, we just have this massively popular cultural entity based around the word hobbit, and a curious footnote predating it all but offering no answers.

And once again: night-bats? Really.

Twenty British Terms I Wish American English Would Adopt

Via Wikipedia’s list of British words not widely used in the United States, via Dina

1. agony aunt (an advice columnist who responds to readers’ problems, such as Dear Abby)
2. argy-bargy (a fight that may be more or less serious than an argle-bargle)
3. Belisha beacon (the orange flashing light mounted at either end of a pedestrian crossing, or zebra crossing, if we’re being all British — also if there’s not a British porn star performing under this name, the across-the-pond porn community is not as on-the-ball as I would like)
4. bumf (useless paperwork, from the expression bum fodder, meaning “toilet paper”)
5. chutney ferret (a homosexual, for rather obscene reasons)
6. courgette (what we Americans call by the far less elegant name zucchini)
7. dodgems (bumper cars, renamed to be even more literal)
8. fish fingers (fishsticks a la the cat’s pajamas, the snake’s hips, etc.)
9. fruit spleggins (fruit jelly, although I can’t decide whether it sounds more sexual or fantastical)
10. gormless (lacking intelligence, with a vacant expression)
11. kappa-slappa (in chav culture, a promiscuous woman)
12. nutty gum (peanut butter, although I think our term makes more sense and that this term should instead be applied to nut-flavored chewing gum)
13. plonk (cheap wine, especially red wine)
14. quango (meaning “a semi-public advisory or administrative body funded by the taxpayer the members of which are appointed by the government,” an acronym formed from quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations, though of course it should be applied to something way more interesting)
15. quiff (the hairstyle and not the more obscene thing it sounds like it might mean)
16. rodger (as a verb, “to engage in a sexual act”)
17. reverse charge call (what we call a collect call, but let’s make refer to a special sort of call you can make where the phone company has to pay you)
18. salad-dodger (an overweight person)
19. “suck it and see” (an AMAZING turn of phrase meaning “to undertake a course of actions without knowing its full consequences)
20. verucca (what we call plantar wart, made to sound as pretty as it possibly could)

Surprise Ending (by Virtue of It Being Illogical, Inexplicable)

That post on Gilles de Rais — who’s a lot of things, a possible inspiration for Bluebeard being among them — sent me down the wikihole like the good, little wikirabbit I am. Now, I’m spending the lead-up to Christmas reading about bad folklore. You know — violent, Old World stories where people tend to meet terrible ends for no apparent reason and in which the morals are only apparent to toothless peasants who think bad air causes disease. They’re great, these stories. They read like outlines to the short films David Lynch decided not to make on grounds that they’d be too infuriatingly nonsensical.

Let me tell you one. In the English ballad “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” the titular lady hears a magic horn and falls under the thrall of a bad man who plans to do to her what he did to all his previous wives: “dishonor” and then kill her. Sucks, right? But the resourceful lass takes the first opportunity to kill the bastard. In some versions, he turns away while she undresses (because rapists do that) and she “tumbles him in a stream.” In others, she makes her move when he accepts her offer to delouse him. In any case, he dies, and Lady Final Girl goes running back home.

Here’s the part that reminds you that storytellers back in the day enjoyed certain freedoms that they don’t now: Certain versions of the Lady Isabel tale end with the heroine returning arriving at her house and speaking to a caged parrot, and promising to buy it a golden cage if it doesn’t tell her father about the rapist elf who nearly had his way and then did away with her. From the Wikipedia summary: "Oh hold your tongue, my favourite bird, and tell no tales on me / Your cage I will make of the beaten gold, and hang in the willow-tree.” Bam! End of story. Personally, I learn that a new character has been introduced — and a talking animal at that — and I think “all right, sequel!” Not the medieval Brits, who just thought that was as good a point to end as any.

Personally, I think the parrot epilogue should fall back into use, narrative awkwardness notwithstanding. In fact, I can’t think of a single movie I’ve seen recently that wouldn’t improve from the addition of more wisetalking parrots immediately before the closing credits.

Pretty Phantasmagorical

May I please present the opening to the 1976 BBC miniseries Children of the Stones, the entire run of which I watched while housesitting this summer. Though the show was intended for children, it incorporates some profound and complex themes about time. It often verges into creepy, unexplained territory that I liked, even though I watched it as an adult and even though the lights and film make much of it unmistakably phony. Think of it as, let’s say, the best episode ever of Are You Afraid of the Dark, just with accents.

I’m posting this clip, however, to let you all at the opening “theme song,” an atmospheric little choral composition that nicely sets the mood.. until the singing begins building up. This would normally indicate an upswing in tension. However, in the show (and in every single opening sequence) it kinds of builds to nothing aside from boulders, clouds and a musical, chaotic babble that suddenly falls into an in-unison sigh of relief that I came to interpret as the singers simultaneously running out of air and fainting. I thought it was funny, both in how often it figured into the show and how effectively it killed any air of mysticism.

And yes, by the way, I watched this because of Lost. And yes, I, ever the logophobe, dreaded the opening production company logo. Is it bad when the production company logo scares me more than the show itself?

Return of the Urban Milkwoman

In honor of the anniversary of the birth of the United States, I offer you the entirely appropriate gift of bizarre British comedy — specifically the sketch comedy show Smack the Pony and specifically-specifically the dating agency bits.

If you’ve never seen the show, know that it’s amazing. It stars Doon Mackichan, Fiona Allen, Sally Phillips and Sarah Alexander, each of whom I’m currently stalking from California. (Easier than you think!) The show aired on BBC between 1999 and 2003, around the time the women on SNL were really coming into their own and proving that beautiful women can, in fact, be funny. (The women on Mad TV, meanwhile, were proving that they could be passably attractive. Mo Collins excluded. She’s the shit.) Spencer gave me a heads up that some kind soul has collected what would appear to be the entirety of the series on YouTube — arranged by theme, no less! — and this is a very good thing.

Please, enjoy — and when you do, remind yourself how fortunate we Americans are to have sprung off a nation as great as Britain.

Trojan War Motifs in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer

Spencer and I both saw The Ghost Writer this weekend. In discussing the movie, he pointed out something about a curious reoccurring scene: a gardener attempting to sweep up leaves from a beachside deck during a windstorm that keeps blowing more leaves into the area. A superficial viewing would lead one to believe that the scene is just comedic relief — and indeed a few people in the audience chuckled the last time we see the gardener, who eventually throws up hands in frustration with the impossible task. However, Ghost Writer is a Roman Polanksi film. And it doesn’t seem unlikely that a detail-oriented director like Polanski would stick a scene in just for giggles. Spencer didn’t think so, anyway. Via text: “So the man who was sweeping the patio is kind of a Sisyphus, yes?” I agreed.

Spencer then noted that in a later scene, Ewan McGregor’s character stands in front of a security system, the brand name of which is depicted in easy-to-read lettering as “Cyclops.” Since Polanski seemed to deliberately pointing out these elements — showing the Sisyphean gardener more than once, making the “Cyclops” brand name hard to miss — Spencer wondered if the film had additional allusions to Greek mythology. I thought about it a bit, and then it hit me: The argument could easily be made that Ghost Writer uses a series of allusions to Greek mythology to underscore the tragedy and pointlessness of the War on Terror by likening it to the Trojan War. It doesn’t fit perfectly, but it wouldn’t be as fun if it did.


So here’s a quick little analysis. Spoilers, of course. And please, go see the film if you haven’t. Hit the jump if you have — or if you enjoy being spoiled, you naughty rascal you.


Recall, if you will, the cause of the Trojan War: Helen of Troy. She’s famed as the most beautiful woman in the world, yet she’s just one person. Depending on your opinion of female beauty, she’s probably not worth a decade of war, countless lost lives and the annihilation of the city of Ilium, which I’ve heard had lovely parks. In short, the Trojan War was a war for nothing. Map the events of the Iliad onto contemporary politics and the parallels between them and the War or Terror are obvious. Like the Spartans sailing off in pursuit of a pretty woman, various international forces (but mostly Americans) invaded Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that, in the end, didn’t exist. (Kind of like how Helen probably wasn’t the epitome of beauty she’s now reputed to have been.) Neat, huh? I’m sure the comparison has been used before, but given how nicely it works, I’m surprised the analogy hasn’t been used more often.

kablammo! helen of troy: greek bombshell and weapon of mass destruction

Ghost Writer is all about the War on Terror — or at least a very thinly veiled version of the one happening in real life. The film centers on Tony Blair stand-in Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), disgraced former British prime minister, who is facing trail for war crimes for his role in delivering suspected terrorists to the CIA. In the midst of this, a writer (McGregor, whose character’s name is never revealed) is ghosting Lang’s memoirs into a book. In doing so, he stays with Lang, Lang’s wife, and various staffers in a Martha’s Vineyard mansion where Lang is temporarily hiding to escape the unmitigated hatred of the British people. By staying with the Langs, McGregor’s character gets to know them well, learns various secrets about their marriage and rise to political power and ultimately ends up investigating the mysterious death of his predecessor.

Though McGregor’s character initially suspects that the former prime minister was a plant by the United States government to guide Britain to act in the Americans’ favor, he eventually learns that the real CIA operative is Ruth (Olivia Williams) — Lang’s wife and the real political mind in the family. (Shades of The Manchurian Candidate and, of course, Macbeth.) So let’s consider this in the context of the Trojan War analogy: Just as the U.S. managed to rope Britain into participating in the War on Terror, so too did Menelaus (Helen’s legal husband) convince his brother Agamemnon to join in the Trojan War. Other than a brotherly bond, Agamemnon had no real motivation to join a war. I mean, why would anyone? In fact, the only reason that Menelaus got the support that he did is that Helen’s wise father, Tyndareus, made all of Helen’s suitors — among them, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and Patroclus — make a pact that they would honor and defend whoever should win Helen’s hand.

In Ghost Writer, Lang resigned from office, essentially sending the Agamemnon figure in the story back home to his wife. If you remember the story of Agamemnon, the homecoming was a bad one, as his wife, Clytemnestra, axed him to death as he climbed into a bath. Her reasoning? Probably about three-fourths that Agamemnon sacrificed the couple’s oldest daughter, Iphigenia, in an effort to get good winds on the way to battle and one-fourth that he returned from the Trojan War with a concubine, Cassandra (the one nobody believed), who had given birth to not only one baby but twins. (My take: One baby would have been bad enough, but twins is just too insulting to bear.) A major departure that Ghost Writer takes from the Trojan War is that Ruth doesn’t directly kill Lang. Instead, Lang is assassinated by a British man — a former solider fuming that his solider son was killed in the war Lang chose to join. So Ruth killed Lang indirectly, given that she was pulling his strings and the entry into the war ultimately caused Lang’s murder. However, the person who physically pulled the trigger on Lang is a man who is angry about the death of his son, who has been sacrificed to aid a pointless war. And doesn’t that sound a bit like Clytemnestra? It’s a bit odd to consider, but it really does seem that Ghost Writer script has essentially mapped Clytemnestra onto two different characters.

What, then should we make of Kim Catrall’s character, Amelia Bly, the sexpot aide to the prime minister? According to a Daily Mail article on the Robert Harris novel from which Ghost Writer was adapted, she’s a re-creation of real life Blair aide Anji Hunter. For the purposes of this analysis, she’s also a Cassandra figure, not because people don’t believe what she says but because she’s having an affair with the Agamemnon character. The connection between these two is probably the most tenuous, especially considering that many don’t see Agamemnon’s relationship with Cassandra as a significant motivation for Clytemnestra to kill him.

It would be great, then, if I could make one more connection between the Ghost Writer characters and those involved in the Trojan War. The obvious candidate would be McGregor’s character, since he’s so central to the story. And when you consider that he’s the one who outsmarts the politicos and gets to heart of the various conspiracies and shady dealings that went down in the Lang administration, it seems he could likely be Odysseus, renowned for his cunning. McGregor’s character is also British, but travels to Martha’s Vineyard to work on the Lang book. As soon as life in the Lang household proves to be tumultuous, he seems to want out and long for home in London, where he eventually goes at the conclusion of the film. I feel safe making a parallel between McGregor’s character being trapped in the U.S. and Odysseus’s inability to return home to Ithaca for the ten years of the Trojan War and the following ten years of the Odyssey. And the fact that McGregor’s character never gets a name would seem to be a wink at Odysseus alias in the Odyssey, “Nobody.” Remember that when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the cyclops, he identifies himself as “nobody” or “no man,” depending on the translation. And doesn’t that seem like an appropriate reference point for a nameless character whose role is to slip invisibly into Lang’s life and invisibly write up his memoirs?

In the end, the Sisyphus gardener and the Cyclops-brand security system are just tip-offs that something larger is happening beneath the surface of the film. Ghost Writer benefited, of course, from Polanski’s expert direction. But I feel enjoy it more for having these references, as they deepened the meaning of the film for me and helped me see connections between age-old stories and things happening today. I like the stories of Greek mythology. I like it when we’re reminded of why these stories are relevant. And I like it especially when they help to tell yet another great story.

A special thanks should go out to Zachary Mason’s novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which I just finished and which helped put the characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey on my mind. If you made it this far in this post, I encourage you to pick it up. It’s a joy for anyone who has ever loved the stories of the Trojan War and thereabouts and would like to see them brought to life once more.

Who Gives a Fig About Sydelle Pulaski?

Two points of verbal interest for your Friday.

First, a new term that, much in the manner of cranberry morpheme and kangaroo word, strikes me as funny and oddly informal even though it is the correct way to refer to a particular linguistic concept: false friend. It refers to words in different languages that don’t mean the same thing but resemble each other to the point that they look like they should mean the same thing. Wikipedia offers a few examples of these verbal frenemies, the one most familiar to me being the English embarrass and the Spanish embarazada. The latter sounds like it should mean what the former does, but, as anyone who’s taken introductory Spanish knows, it actually means “pregnant.” Hilarity ensues. There’s a whole list of them, but I’m far less interested in the examples than I am in the term itself, which calls to mind two words who act all nice in person but then send defamatory text messages about each other to their cognates and synonyms.

The other bit involves a thing that I assumed had been invented by my father and was unique to my family: the phrase a wigwam for a goose’s bridle. This nonsensical string of words was used often in my house as a response to any question centered around the word what. For example: What are you looking for? What are we having for dinner? What did you get me for my birthday? In retrospect, I don’t know why we weren’t more forthright in answering each other’s questions. It turns out it that the phrase has been used in all English-speaking countries, especially Australia and New Zealand. And my dad is from New Zealand, so the story checks out. According to Wikipedia, the second word in the phrase at one point was not wigwam but whim-wham, an obsolete bit of vocabulary meaning “whimsical object” or “trinket.” (Curious, then, that the word would have been made more whimsical by attaching it to a headgear for a goose.) As whim-wham fell out of use, the phrase replaced it with wigwam. This substitution strikes me as an odd one, given that the phrase was most popular in nations whose residents had little reason to know the name of a Native American dwelling unit. But that’s the story nonetheless. Over at World Wide Words, Michael Quinion has collected a few other nonsense responses used to deflect questions by nosy passersby and inquisitive children. Among them:

• a whim-wham for ducks to perch on
• a whim-wham for a treacle mill
• a whim-wham to wind the sun up
• layovers to catch meddlers
• a silver new nothing to put on your shoe
• airlos to catch medlos
• a whipple for a dooses poke
• a pair of kitty britches
• a wigwam for a goose’s bridle and a crutch for a lame duck
• a whim-whom for grinding smoke

Now please go enjoy your Friday.

Blue-Eyed, Dressed for Every Situation

The word of the week: It’s a synthpop band, a river, a tributary river in the generic sense, a city, a record label, and a lot more than most words get to be.

yazoo (YAZ-oo or ya-ZOO) — noun: a tributary that runs parallel to a river (especially when separated by a natural levee).

Excluding the hydrologists and potamologists who read this blog, this word should be familiar to most people as the name of the 80s band who released the song “Situation.”

I know what you’re saying: Drew, you idiot, the band that sang “Situation” was Yaz, not Yazoo. You’re half-right, though I wouldn’t have thought so until recently. The band does call itself Yaz in the U.S., but only because it ended up getting sued when it attempted to cross over from the U.K. to here with its original name, Yazoo. Those two end letters meant a lot of money, at least to the American band already calling itself Yazoo, about which we know nothing today. According to Wikipedia, Yazoo —the famous one, I mean — took its name from the record label Yazoo Records, which boasts all manner of roots music, including some acts I’ve heard of, like Ma Rainey and Blind Willie Johnson, and some I haven’t, like some guy who called himself Barbecue Bob.

Given that a lot of these acts seemed to have originated in the American South, it could well be that the label got its name from Mississippi’s Yazoo River, notable because it parallels the Mississippi River, which in turn gave rise to the term yazoo tributary and as well as just plain yazoo. And the river got its name from the apparently extinct Yazoo tribe of Native Americans, who formerly lived at the mouth of the river. The official site of Yazoo County lists a ton of variant spellings — among them, Yachou, Yasoux, Yasoons, Illasus, others — that eventually gave way to Yazoo. No one knows what the name meant to the people who coined it. That mystery notwithstanding, I like the that the word has persisted, if only in rivers and bands… and one more place.

In light of this past week on this blog and what I’m going to call “the big post”, I was hoping to get away from games-‘n’-names for a bit, but I Googled “yazoo etymology” and the first hit to appear, at least for me, was a link to a page explaining the Final Fantasy VII character Yazoo, which I didn’t know about until today. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

One last note: Until I looked up the lyrics for “Situation,” I’d always thought the opening line was “Though I dress for every situation.” Nope.

Previous words of the week:

• adulterine, ambeer
• barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
  
• catholicon, cecaelia, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate
  
• epeolatry, espalier
  
• fabiform, fissilingual
• gallinipper, grandgore
• honorificabilitudinitatibus
• itaiitai, ignivomous
  
• jehu, jumentous
  
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
  
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, milt, mongo
• nihilartikel, nobiliary particle
• ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pareidolia, petrichor, pismire, pong
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
  
• scrutator, shebang, sinople
  
• tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby, tyro
  
• ucalegon, ultramontane
  
• veneficial, verdigris
  
• williwaw, witzelsucht
• xenodocheionology, xyster
  
• ypsiliform
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic

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This House Was Half My Mind

The below image came from a magazine page — from what publication, I can no longer say, for it was delivered to me at work mistakenly and I threw it away slightly after. However, I tore out the below page and scanned simply because the people pictured struck me as the single most unpleasant-looking human beings I’d ever seen.

Now I want to share them with you. Gaze upon them, look into their cold dead eyes and know that they will one day come for you — and perhaps will be posed in your living room just as they are above. And before you can even ask why or how or when they’ve broken into your home, their barrage of barbed remarks will cut you to pieces.

In the meantime, you may want to give them funny names.

The Melancholy British Version of Hee Haw

Even as a kid, I thought it strange that all the Winnie the Pooh characters save for Pooh himself should be named after the type of animals they are save for Eeyore, the clinically depressed donkey whose doom and gloom could rain out even the most Disneyfied cheer.

However, a recent post at Separated by a Common Language — a blog that focuses on the differences between the American and British varieties of English — discusses the phenomenon of onomatopoeia variation and noted that the American version for the noise donkeys make — hee-haw — is essentially similar to the British version — eeyore. This might not make sense to Americans until they consider that eeyore is essentially hee-haw spoken with a silent “H” on both syllables and the ending pronounced with the typical British reluctance to pronounce the letter “R.” Just try it: Say “eeyore” out loud in a British accent.

And so, essentially, “Eeyore” is just “donkey” in the same way that a kid might call a dog a “bow-wow” or a duck a “quack-quack.” Oh bother, indeed.

And if that isn’t enough of onomatopoetic differences among different languages, check out bzzzspeak and see how India, Korea and Italy’s versions of the noise cuckoo clocks make.

And a Peach in Their Pants

So a mysterious pink cloud appeared over London on Monday.

photo via the telegrapaph

Am I the only one who wants to think it’s condensed love particles, frozen in the atmosphere and hovering visibly in the sky? Should we not harvest this love and sell it in dust form to smoothie parlors worldwide so they can crumble this physicalized love into our berry healthshakes?

Because that’s probably what it is. Love, I mean.

I’m just saying.

(via Towleroad)

Jane Austen, Devious Genius

She had no way of knowing, of course, but Jane Austen created a brilliant means of exposing lazy American high school students who attempt to avoid reading Sense and Sensibility and instead watch the Ang Lee film adaptation. If a student ignorant of British spelling just watched the film and then attempted to write the paper based on what Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet did on their TV screen, this student could easily write a paper that refers to “Mr. Edward Ferris” instead of “Mr. Edward Ferrars.” After all, why would an American assume that this character’s name had an “R” in it?


I know that a marginally intelligent student would doublecheck the spelling of the names on IMDb, but my theory more concerns the full-on idiots. Surely there’s been at least one kid in some English class somewhere who attempted to pass off their less-than-Cliffs Notes version of the book in a paper and got the name wrong, thus opening themselves up to ridicule and deserved punishment, right?

The Niddering Vilipend Exuviation

A post-worthy, word-related matter that appeared October 3 on Time.com: Britain’s Collins English Dictionary wants to give obsolete words the boot in order to make room for new ones. Though I have a soft spot in my heart for strange words, it makes sense that casual dictionaries — that is, the word compendiums that you can actually put on your bookshelf, as opposed to the unabridged ones that now can only realistically fit in post people’s houses in CD-ROM form — should, in fact, only have the words that people would be likely to read or use. English as she is spoke, so to speak.

Not everyone agrees. Some excerpts from the article:

Collins' editors know that old words die hard — and that some people will vilipend (regard with contempt) any execution without a fair trial. So they've offered the chance of a reprieve. They have made public 24 words that face deletion because editors could find no example of their use in their database of English-language books, newspapers, broadcasts and other media. If, by February 2009, a word reappears in that database with at least six "high quality" citations, it could be spared from the semantic dustbin.

Collins warns that it will discount any artificial use of the endangered words, meaning Motion's readers and Pound's constituents must actually take them up themselves. There's certainly interest in doing so. The Times of London asked readers to vote for the word they most felt should be spared from oblivion and attracted more than 11,000 votes in a week. The word embrangle (to confuse or entangle) won with 1,434 votes, while fubsy (short and stout) came in a distant second. Roborant (tending to fortify) and nitid (bright, glistening) failed to shine; they finished last, drawing roughly 550 votes between them.

Elsewhere, fantasy-game devotees have rushed to the defense of periapt (a charm or amulet), which they know from the popular Dungeons & Dragons game, and geologists have pointed out the utility of griseous (streaked or mixed with gray) in describing rocks and minerals.

Here’s a list of the words on the chopping block:

• abstergent: cleansing
• agrestic: rural
• apodeictic: unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
• caducity: perishableness
• caliginosity: dimness
• compossible: possible in coexistence with something else
• embrangle: to confuse
• exuviate: to shed
• fatidical: prophetic
• fubsy: squat
• griseous: somewhat grey
• malison: a curse
• mansuetude: gentleness
• muliebrity: the condition of being a woman
• niddering: cowardly
• nitid: bright
• olid: foul-smelling
• oppugnant: combative
• periapt: an amulet
• recrement: refuse
• roborant: tending to fortify
• skirr: a whirring sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
• vaticinate: prophesy
• vilipend: to treat with contempt

Surely the speakers of British English could make room for muliebrity, right? And I can’t help but to wonder if American dictionaries publish lists of words that are up for execution. Can we vote on them? That’s our thing, right? Voting?

(via Ryan)

Phantom of the Stupid Hat

Best Week Ever posted a countdown of the ten best silly hats from Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot. The following photo took the number two spot, though it's easily my favorite.


Unspeakably terrifying, but also hilarious, in that the Crazy British Lisa Kudrow's facial impression would seem to indicate that she has no idea what her hat actually looks like. How Best Week Ever puts it: It looks like she’s being chased by the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings. And this poor woman… look how happy she is!!! She has no idea the four whoresmen of the apocalypse are hot on her tail! Look how happy she is to see you… she’s all “Hi Bahsil! What? Behind me you say? Ghosts? Oh Bahsil, you ol’ –” THUD. El morte.

Lily Allen Is Impossibly Oblivious

I don't even remember how I ended up on this particular terrible British "news" article, but somehow I did. Reading the following caption and spot what's unusual about it:

It reads as follows, typo and all: "Lily Allen. Smoking a cigarette, Lily stopped at a fruit seller on her way to a restaurant in West London. she seemed unaware that she had a ladder in her tights."

The hell?

I realize that Lily Allen is the second most prominent British indie chanteuse right now and that only by virtue of comparison to Amy Winehouse does she get to be "the put-together one." However, even the most sugar-filled pop tart could surely realize that she'd somehow gotten a ladder dropped into her tights, no?

Spencer to the rescue: When your speaking British English, a "ladder in one's tights" means a run in one's stockings.

Now I know, I suppose. But the original interpretation of that phrase is infinitely funnier.

Rooftops of Brixton

My last day in London, back in 2003, I had to kill a few hours in Brixton while I waited for my Uncle Andy to pick me up. (As near as I can remember, this day occurred somewhere between this post and this post.) Lacking the time, money or energy to do anything else, a snapped a few photos of the buildings near where I had been staying. I didn't actually see the photos until more than two years later. This preceded my age of digital photography, you see, and the roll of film I had taken them on sat in the camera, untouched, until I finally finished it off with the Halloween photo of Kami and me that I posted a few days ago. The photos, Ive always thought, make Brixton look a little nicer than it actually was. Something about these photos seems sad to me, however, and it isn't the fact that not-so-lovingly refer to the neighborhood they depict as "the beaten prostitute district."

What do you think? Do these make you feel anything in particular?