Travelling Memories 📷 and More FREE Books! 🔎📚🔪

Travelling Memories

Last fall my husband and I traveled from Edinburgh Scotland through Wales and into England. We saw beautiful landscapes and amazing architecture, watched border collies, including a 6-week old puppy who saw sheep for the first time, herd sheep), walked around Stonehenge and saw Hamilton in London, among many other things.

I also learned some new words that just have to be shared. How many of you know what a “poppity ping” is? It’s what the Welsh people call our microwave. That made me smile. We’ve all heard the words skedaddle, ramshackle, and hullabaloo, but what about “widdershins?” It means moving counter-clockwise or in the wrong direction. And did you know that a “snickersnee” is a large knife? Some other words that we no longer use but our grandparents might have known are “snollygoster”—a shrewd, unprincipled person, “bumfuzzle”—which means to confuse, and “snozzled” or drunk.

Words are really quite fun. I recall being told I was “pulchritudinous” by a fellow student when in college. I have a rather large vocabulary but I had to look it up—it means “pretty” but it sounded more like he was making fun of me at the time. When I was in eighth grade eons ago, my favorite teacher challenged us to bring in unfamiliar words from our reading. We had to spell it, define it and use it in a sentence.

I think I’ll work in a clever word or two into my books from now on. How else will you come across words like “popple (choppy seas) or “collywobbles” (a stomach ache)?

Until next time, happy reading!