The Joy of Cleaning

YES, I said cleaning, shut up. I got tired of Katya nagging me, so I started straightening the office today. I got one corner done, and BOY did I find some good stuff!

Besides several partially used notebooks, with some writing I had forgotten about in them, I found, among other things:

Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use, by Bill Brohaugh. It “uncovers older meanings of words that are out of joint with almost everyone’s sense of propriety.” It tells me that “drat” is a contraction of “God rot you” and “muscles” comes from the Latin for “little mouse” because muscles rippling look like little mice crawling about under the skin. Ugh!

A set of PrintMaster CDs, which I used to use to make posters and greeting cards. I don’t know if it will run on Linux, but I plan to find out. I loved it, and I haven’t found anything for Linux that comes close.

The Winter 2007/8 issue of This England Quarterly. Heaven only knows where it came from, but it’s a delight, from “Garden Flowers of England” through “Let’s Preserve Our English Dialects” to “This England’s Country Calendar.”

I can’t wait to see what other treasures I’ll unearth!

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: A character cleans a mass of clutter and finds something unexpected.

MA