There's an elderly gent whom I've never met, but who was so charming when he tried to remember whether he had torn his rotator-cup or his rotator-cuff that my brother and his wife will now deliberately confuse "cup" and "cuff". I've picked it up without meaning to and will offer people a cuff of tea and fasten my formal shirts with cup-links.
Another friend of mine works in an engineering facility which disposes of large quantities of waste packing materials. One of his colleagues breeds pedigree cats and was liberating scrap cardboard to make nests for a pregnant queen. Now neither my friend nor I can call repurposed cardboard anything other than "cat-cardboard" and I even have a favourite piece of cat-cardboard on the pad of my trolley jack.
My sister is moving house and at the weekend I moved an enormous number of cockroach-bags out of her loft. I don't even know what cockroach-bags are really called or where they come from, they're large square bags with handles and a (usually broken) zip. They're made from a sturdy woven plastic sheet, often chequered in faded blue and white. You normally see them in proximity to dust, bedlinen or old ladies. They are named for the fact that, according to my sister, the only things that will survive the nuclear holocaust are cockroaches, those bags and Keith Richards.
Richard "cuff? cup? cup? cuff?" B
we refer to cockroach-bags as refugee bags, which i'm sure is not P.C.
ReplyDelete