Sunday 28 June 2009

Wizard

So, I now have a wizard's....ball. Only a wizard would use this crackled glass item. Of course, I have to work out whether a witch really is just a female wizard, or if not, what the difference is - I know what the difference is in Pratchett terms of course - duh, who doesn't - but I need to know the REAL difference. And why doesn't she have a ....wizard's ball.

Anyway, so....the wizard's...ball. It's solar-powered, as I imagine are all wizard's.... magical equipment, at night, it changes colour, it's quite, quite mesmerising.

Yesterday, Kevin and I dragged our unhappy carcasses out of bed at the crack of dawn, oh well alright, around 9.30 and schlepped over to Kitsilano for the backstage tour at Bard on the Beach.
It looked decidedly deserted.
'Oh,' said the girl at the window, resembling a gazelle caught in the headlights of a Hummer, 'didn't someone call you to tell you it had been cancelled?'
Dear God how I had to restrain my sarcasm diodes.
I WANTED to say,
'But yes, of course they did, I merely got up early on a Saturday, drove through Saturday morning Vancouver traffic and presented myself at your window because I naturally assumed the person was lying and I wanted to catch you out, having a tour without me,'
Instead, I bit my tongue and merely said,
'Oddly, I wouldn't be standing here if they had,' and then smiled, although it was probably a mad, twitching rictus.

SO instead we went and bought solar lights.

For some reason, AskOxford.com directed me to what seems like an out-of-date but fascinating page on their website. It has a list of words that entered the language in a particular year.
Apparently it wasn't in the sixties that sex was invented, it turns out it was 1929, but we didn't get sexy until 1956. Some are as you might expect, Blitzkrieg in 1939, snafu in 1941, but megabucks goes all the way back to 1946, and Wonderbra to 1947. Despite that, spellchecker doesn't recognise it as a word.
And here's how out-of-date 'awesome' is - 1961.

Wizard was the word of the year in 1922. I presume as in 'wizard prang!'

2 comments:

Sleepy said...

Ooh! Liking the Wizard Ball!

Schneewittchen said...

It is pretty funky!