There are no oddly attired prairie dogs below, unfortunately. But I did see some recently!
And it is with that pronouncement that I advise I was on holiday in America just a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. And I suppose I should really put a picture of a prairie dog in here so that this post isn’t just a total waste of your time. I’m not here to clickbait anyone, not badly anyway. That reminds me, have you heard about the one simple way to get a six pack and grow a second head? Scientists are outraged!
Et tu, human.
So the States were fun. Saw some amazing places and a load of natural beauty, and we stayed out of politics as much as possible. I traveled with my Mum and we went in a bus tour, so there was much driving around Southern California, Utah, Nevada, North Dakota, frigging a whole bunch of states. As a person with little to no sense of direction and/or ability to retain where I am or have been, I’m still having a whole heap of difficulty understanding where the heck we went to. But still.
I’ll probably randomly make reference to the USA in other posts to make myself seem well traveled and cultured (I totes am), but for now, let us talk of a word that I shall flip through and find now as I am criminally under prepared, as usual.
Aha, let’s make a massive
blunder (noun)
- A gross or stupid mistake.
- To move or act blindly, stupidly, or without direction or steady guidance.
Blunder is one of those interesting words that has a sort of onomatopoeia to it. It sounds clumsy, it sounds like a word that’s tripped its way into your kitchen, broken three wine glasses and your entire drawer of crockery right before landing face first on the floor.
Let’s do an experiment with what is expected to be delicate or graceful and chuck a blunder in: “The ballerina blundered across the stage, pirouetting unsteadily as the other dancers fled.”
I editorialised a little, but as soon as I wrote about a ‘blundering ballerina’ I could only picture the ballerina ripping across the floor like a drunken hurricane. ‘Blunder’ forces you to think unwieldy, ignorant things almost because the word itself is dorkily blunt upon your tongue.
Having performed a quick Google search (we spare no expense here at Dictionary Flip), ‘blunder’ is a Middle English word that first arose in the 14th century and likely has a Scandinavian/Old Norse origin, possibly the word blunda, which meant to shut one’s eyes. Huh. I’d have laid money on a Germanic origin, possibly an old German folklore of a troll that moved sluggishly and once erred by stepping on a princess, causing her knight errant to kill the troll in revenge.
Guess I made a bit of a blunder in my thinking there. But that’s it for the moment, I have to go shove my dog off my lap now, he’s too bloody hot.