Today, I’ve been washing bricks. Seriously, washing bricks.
I don’t get any perverse pleasure out of it or anything. We’re re-painting the storage shed so that we can put an top loading, 150 litre freezer in there. This has meant that the bricks have had to be washed before we can paint, apparently. I’ve been at it, now, for nearly 2 hours.
We’ve just gotten round the the painting side of the operation and I have to tell you that, white and beige have never been mixed this badly since… well, ever. I’m not a big fan of beige, in fact I agree with Lee Evans about it (“You only start liking beige when you get to be a certain age. And that’s only because it starts to match the colour of your skin”).
I’m standing there, brush in hand, “painting” – if you can call it that. I’m not very good, you see. I feel like I’m being taught to suck eggs. Which got me thinking as to whether Nanny Ogg knows how to suck eggs. She seems to know everything else that a witch could know.
Before you all cry “shenanigans”, I know that Nanny Ogg is a character in the Discworld series of books, and it therefore not real.
You might be thinking, ‘why is he blogging when he should be painting?’ To this, I say, ‘good question’. It’s because I’ve decided to have a short break. What? It’s not YOUR shed that I’m painting.
Anyway, I’ve been catching up with what my friends are doing this morning. Turns out that some of them are having fun with their “beeeaaaiiirns” (colloquial Yorkshire English for Child or Children). This has sent me, as it usually does when some one uses that word, into a rant about the etymology of that word.
Bain – I’ve decided that’s how the colloquial version is spelt, by the way – comes from the English word ‘Bane’. Bane, as the online Cambridge English Dictionary tells me means ‘A cause of continuous trouble or unhappiness’
I am, simply, staggered by anyone who chooses to refer to their offspring using this word in a positive way. ‘I’m just off down the park with the beeeaaaiiir,” one might say. Which, to me, implies that one is taking the ‘worst thing to ever happen in my life’ to the park.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that sound terrible?
