And today we have naming of parts.

Names and words generally are interesting. They have texture, taste and a music of their own. Take 'crennelations' for an instance. They are obviously, from their sound, small yellow flowers of the forget-me-not family. Actually they're not. Crennelations are the top of a castle wall. You know how they're built. A square block of stone, then a gap to shoot arrows though, then another block of stone. But my point is, they should be bedding plants, because that's more appropriate. Or perhaps what they are is the cascade of silver bells on a hot summer day, poured down from high above. The song of a skylark.

'Dearth' is another one similar. It means a shortage, usually of material. But it isn't really. A dearth is an old measurement surely. Ancient recipes I am confident would read: 'To make this pottage take a dearth of turnips, two smidgin of salt, a pinch of mandrake plucked at full moon and a quantity of Rhennish wine.' The measures were all standardised of course. A dearth is two handfuls. Five pinches make a smidgin. And a quantity of wine was the amount you would utilise to disinfect the dog.

What I am driving at, or more correctly rambling erratically towards, is that words don't have to possess the dictionary meaning. This is mere convention. Dialect words certainly don't. My grandma used to say 'study' meaning 'to consider' something. 'Towing' meant 'struggling to complete a task', and 'stalled' used to mean 'fed up.' 'Starved' indicated 'freezing' not hungry, because 'hungry' was 'clemmed'.


I've often thought that life must have been fraught with difficulty when language was in the process of invention. I mean like a jigsaw puzzle where you've only got half the pieces because no-one's got round to naming everything.

So Mr Grud is outside his cave with his new construction. It's made of wood. Two pieces flat and circular like the full moon with a short pole between them. He's going to call them 'the typewriter'. He's had the sudden realisation, that if you have two sets of these, you can put them under a heavy log and it moves easily, unlike dragging it. He has a vision of one of these with a draft animal in front of it and a man to guide the animal and maybe instead of just the wheels, a box structure, painted in a pale colour. He has, in fact, invented the white van and its driver. Later generations will curse his name!

There is a roaring, growling noise and his children, making mud pies, scatter squealing. Running back to the cave he looks up and sees fifty paces away -a thing. He cries out to his neighbour, 'Come quick, Larb, it's a bloody huge...er- thing.' In fact it's a woolly mammoth, but there's no name for it yet.

Actually there is. As far as the mammoth is concerned he's called Wilfred. But of course he can't talk. But he can feel hungry and he is. Now alright, mammoths, however peckish, didn't eat people, because they were vegetarians. Yes, they were all members of Greenpeace, worried about their carbon footprint and used to knit their own burrows out of homemade yoghurt and the rest of the tree hugging crap. Look, this is just a story. It's not meant to be taken literally.

So Mr Larb shoots out of his cave which he's just been decorating with three plastic ducks on the wall. In ten thousand years, these will be unearthed and pronounced to be, 'Probably religious ritual objects' which is what archaeologists say when they mean, 'I've got no bloody idea what this is'.

Anyway, the Big Thing called Wilfred is stamping about kicking up and scaring the village goats. So Grud says, ' Larb, nip back to the cave and fetch those things you made. The long wooden poles with flints on one end, what you can chuck.' This is Mr Larb's new invention. A great thing because you can strike down an animal and when it dies, retrieve it and use this weapon again, masses of times and it destroys things.

Yes, it's a weapon of mass destruction!

I do most profoundly apologise for that. I think my entire reason for writing this story was so I could do that terrible pun.

So Mr Larb distracts the 'Thing' while Mr Grud runs in with the spear and lunges at the monster's cardio vascular system or what twentieth century zoologists would call its left ear and it flees the scene in terror.

(You see things are what you call them. If the first person to see a rainbow had called it a 'suspension based refraction pattern' - which is what it is, then we'd call it that.)

Do you know that the inventor of the plastic ball point pen was the scandalous poet and libertine, Lord Byro? It's true.

By Steve Widdows. (Copyright remains with the author.)