fluster-buster (6/6/24)

aside

word of the day… here it comes… get ready… here it is… fluster…… an anti-climax?... perhaps, if you were maybe expecting something different… to me it’s word that looks on the face of it like it shouldn’t exist, like it not actually a proper word, but it is, of course, a proper word, and whenever I get the chance to use it, I do, it’s intensely satisfying when I do too, but being a bear if little brain, I am easily entertained… confused, agitated, flurried (remember this last word as I’ll come back to this later), it derives in its current form from the Old Norse, ‘flaustr’, to hurry, and has come action-packed with a number of variants, like I could say I’m in a state of flusterment, which I sometimes am indeed, or I might say, I’ve come over all flustery, which I particularly like, I’ll make sure to use that before the end of the day in conversation (now all I have to do is find someone to have a conversation with, even if they don’t want one), or I could even say, today I will be mostly flustrate, although this is regarded as an obsolete usage which I will try my best to drag kicking and screaming out of its obsolescence… and then I may decide to go all medievally-literary and pronounce, to be or not to be in a state of flustration… there’s a lot of fun to be had with fluster, see…… and now, as promised, this leads me rather waywardly to ‘flurry’… perhaps it’s the ‘fl’ I am drawn to so much that appeals… flurry, as in a sudden blast or gust (e.g. of air), but it can also be for agitation, as fluster is, but most weirdly it is also a word that can be used for the death-agony of a whale, but what, you may ask, is that specifically?... it’s the struggle one has, or the body has, at the very point of death to give up to it, but as to why specifically in reference to a whale, well, who knows…… possibly linked to whaling days when no matter how many harpoons whalers impale them on they refuse to surrender to what all-too often had become inevitable… flurry is also used with regard to snowflakes, a flurry of, and this may lead me to the rarely-used sense of the word, to scatter, or to flurr… although the etymology of this marvellous word is not signed, sealed and delivered as such, it is likely to have come about from some kind of onomatopoeia, a portmanteau of ‘flaw’ and ‘hurry’, hence ‘fl’urry’, with the flaw here being not the one referring to a defect, but to a gust of wind, a rush, an uproar, from the Dutch, or Swedish (take your pick), ‘vlaag’, or ‘flaga’, which, incidentally, is also the word for a flake, though not of the chocolate variety… so now I’m torn between fluster and flurry for my word of the day… could I go off-piste and have two words of the day?.........

beside

confession of the week… I like fig rolls……

seaside

still hazy after all these years...

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