Words I've learned in March

Ruminant

High on daydreams, stiffening in an awkward curl on the cheap bus to Bristol, my calves pushed against the next seat’s back because I do not like sitting on chairs properly, I briefly hovered behind a truck containing “leading ruminant nutrition”. Ruminants are multi-stomached animals, and contemplative people. What we feed them is important.

Polyennic

I was scrolling through LinkedIn, because that feels like a legitimate thing to do while being paid to sit in an office, through a post that briefly referenced “polyennic (ADHD) people”. I rewound a little. There’s a term for ADHD I don’t know? But surely I know the ADHD things. I admired the word for a moment - it’s pretty and Greek, a stylish adjective not a creepy noun. It was coined a few years ago by someone who doesn’t appear to be an authority, and it hasn’t gained much traction as an alternative to the awful acronym. But I tried it on for a moment anyway.

Nempnett Thrubwell

We stepped in matching rhythmic lollops, bathed in birdsong, garlic greenery and unusual warmth, down a dappled Bristol canal path. Henry told me amusing local place names that sounded like characters - Nempnett Thrubwell, Clay Bottom, Snuff Mills. We visited Clay and Snuff and decided they were a pair of good old lads, maybe the founding members of a jazz combo. Maybe Nempnett Thrubwell is their band. Or perhaps it is as defined in In Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff, “the feeling experienced when driving off for the first time on a brand new motorbike”.

Henry also told me that putting a pickled egg into a bag of smashed crisps and shaking it up was a common classic in British pub culture. Sometimes I google things Henry says to be sure.

Orthostat

Long barrow, capstone, dolmen. New old words. Next-level mist, impenetrable and dangerous, as though the world beyond had been erased. Jerome talked me through the site layout - where you might make your entrance, where bodies likely lie. His gentle voice was tipped with enthusiasm as our lightly hungover hands touched stone in the damp air.