A bit of a mixed bag blog this time, with no single theme. To start with, the write-along organised by Prompt-writing was a great success. The twelve daily assignments were based on the Christmas classic – The Twelve Days of Christmas. For anyone who’s ever wondered what exactly ‘calling birds’ are, they are in fact blackbirds. The word ‘calling’ is a corruption of the original ‘colly’ or ‘coal’ which as everyone knows is black, so blackbirds! You can still see that in the word ‘colliery’ which is a coal mine.
At some point in the last week, the word ‘pipsqueak’ popped into my mind, uninvited and without reason. But it’s such a lovely word that I couldn’t resist sharing it. Unfortunately, the word is nicer than its meaning. Pipsqueak is a rather unkind name for an insignificant person, probably also small in stature. It was also the name given by soldiers in WWI to a small German shell which made both a pip and a squeak when it came over the trenches.
The other word, well phrase actually, that I suddenly thought of was ‘it warms the cockles of my heart’ which dates back to the mid-1600s. In Latin, cochleae cordis means ventricles of the heart and the cochleae was probably corrupted as ‘cockles’. An of course it simply means, it makes me feel happy.