I saw a seesaw (27/3/24)

aside

tum-te-tum-te-tum-te-tum comes the postman up the path, te-tum-te-tum-te-tum-te-tum goes the postman down the path… well, perhaps not quite, the postman does come up the path and goes down the path but as far as I know, no tum-te-tumming is involved… I think people lately have been underestimating the privilege of having a nationwide mail service as this, one which comes most days to your door as a given time and, mostly, reliably so, despite its flaws such as the rising cost of stamps, say, it has to be so much better than relying on couriers who turn up as and whenever they like and rarely when they say even if they bother to say, and may or may not leave your delivery at your door or someone else’s, whether you’re in or not… not that I’m an apologist for them, just, imagine us not having it at all, but then perhaps you wouldn’t mind if the bulk of your ‘mail’, ‘post’, has become almost entirely electronic… anyway, where was I… I saw a seesaw… I see and seesaw… I wondered why it’s called a seesaw, being a word in itself that seems to have no obvious etymology, as such… I guessed it may be from the up and down nature of an actual saw when sawing a log, in particular, one of the two-handed pit-saws… it seems I’m pretty much correct, but why the ‘see’, and if you replace each ‘s’ with a ‘h’, you get a donkey… it’s onomatopoeic of the saw’s sound, being slightly higher in tone one way than the other… the earliest record of the word referring to going up and down on a plank balanced by a central support goes back to 1704 but the engineering of it, I might postulate, goes much further back, back to the catapult, the hurling machines, usually wooden and using a counterbalance or pivot, as opposed to the hand-held one with an elastic commonly referred to as a slingshot, which themselves came from hurling with string attached to a leather pouch spun around over your head… perhaps back in the days of hurling machines some bored soldiers one day just sat on each end of it only discover it pivoted when they did so, and voila!, the seesaw, something to occupy you in between arduous sieges and ponderous pillaging… ah, those were the days… it’s remarkably satisfying sitting on a seesaw as an adult, ensuring that you have another sat at the other end, otherwise it’s not quite the same bouncing yourself up and down and can look, and feel, a bit weird…… so who on the seesaw is sitting on the ‘see’ side, and who on the ‘saw’ side?......

beside

aside from all else I am beside myself, looking in the mirror sideways on……

seaside

oh I do like to be beside the……………

© 2024 robert greig