Arrr! There Be A Blizzard In Me Gizzard!

Except Not

If, by the way, you were imagining Your Humble Scribe pronouncing that in a West Country accent, then you have been watching entirely too much of Disney's "Treasure Island" and the iconic performance of Robert Newton as Long John Silver.  I'm sure Art can rustle up a picture of same.  Art!

Jim, John and Captain Flint

     It just seemed appropriate.  Of course, Conrad being Conrad, he could not simply leave it there, and had to dig a little deeper into pirate myth and reality.  Pretty much all the cod phrases and expressions from Newton in TI were pure invention, for one thing OMG HOLLYWOOD LIED TO US I CANNOT BELIEVE IT! and mention of walking the plank at swordpoint is also utter bosh.  Pirates hardly ever used the death sentence against shipmates, although they did resort to stranding the guilty on a desert island, with a bottle of water and a pistol containing a single charge and bullet (join the dots).  One reason Long John Silver would have retired from piracy is his single-leg status, for two reasons.  1)  Trying to keep your footing on a ship ploughing through the high seas is very difficult if you only have one foot, and 2)  He would very likely have been compensated handsomely for the loss of leg.  Art!

     Allow me to nick some content from the BBC, which will come into play later on, too:

"For those pirates who were injured, many codes set out a standard compensation. Loss of a leg, for example, could be worth 600 pieces of eight. This currency is also known as the Spanish dollar, whose value was determined by its weight in silver."

     ANYWAY all the above is wildly off-track, since I wanted to analyse the two words "Blizzard" and "Gizzard" and why they sound so similar, because BOOJUM! is nothing if not curious and we've already done this several times.

"BLIZZARD": Defined as a severe snowstorm with high winds, this word appears in the 19th Century and is of South Canadian origin - at which point the etymological trail breaks down, since neither my Collins Concise nor teh Interwebz can explain further than being originally a term used for a blow or buffet.

     Could it have roots in a Native American language?  Possibly, although since there are oodles of them, good luck tracking anything down.

"GIZZARD": Now we're on firmer ground.  The term has two meanings: in the first it refers to ornithology, and is part of a bird's stomach - we need not go into the disgusting processes that occur there; in the second it refers to the stomach and entrails, principally of Hom. Sap. though you can conjure up more poetical versions.  The word comes from Old French, 'Guisier', or 'Fowl's liver' - hopefully you're not eating dinner whilst reading this - which in turn comes from THAT DAMNED ZOMBIE LANGUAGE Latin, and 'Gigeria', which means 'Cooked fowl entrails'.  Yuck.  One wonders if they served that at gustatory orgies.  Art!

Paprika Gizzards.  Big in Hungary*.

     Motley, hoist the Jolly Roger, we're going a-pirating on the Irwell, looking for ships laden with spices and satins**!

Whilst Talking Of Guts And Gore ...

Yes, back to the adult animation (which is code for 'lashings of violence without any swear words nor sex') "Invincible", and Doctor Hope's breakdown by 'Rapid Fight Scene Trauma Diagnosis'.  As you should recall, Omni-Man has gone berserk and is killing all his fellow members of the Guardians Of The Globe.  Art!

  That's Darkwing getting scragged there, in what is classed as 'Non-survivable injury', because if Omni-Man grabs you by the ankle and swings you overhead to splatter against the concrete flooring, you are going to feature in an obituary fairly soon.  Next!

The Green Glob had red blood - who knew!

     This one isn't very clear, so allow me to explain that here we see Fishy-Wishy being dismembered by OM with Battle-Babe's big stick.  You might say - Fish Sticks.  Oh, and above?  The entirely useless Green Glob stands around busily not doing anything - either fighting or running away - and gets a faceful of fist for their pains.  Please note that the GOTG observe the usual protocol when people outnumber an opponent; they all politely wait their turn to launch attacks instead of going in mob-handed (John Woo I'm looking at you!)

     At this point the GOTG are in big trouble, since most of them are dead and all are clearly outclassed by Omni-Man.  Time for a strategic retreat?  We shall see!

"Mayhem"

Rather appropriate, given the above, hmmmm?  Of course you will be familiar with the term as it applies to conditions of alarmed confusion and conflict.  I bring it up because it was a Codeword solution - not one I can carp at - and of course - obviously! - Conrad wondered where it came from.

     No!  Neither Latin nor Greek.  It is Germanic in origin and derives from "Mahem", meaning "Injury".  There is also an obsolete legal term 'Mayhem', which is defined as " - the injury or removal of a limb, rendering him less able to defend himself."  

"That will cost you four hundred guineas, mate.  Payable in gold."

"Bite The Bullet"

I think I used this aphorism recently (code for "I can't remember if I did or not and cannot be bothered to check") in the sense of having to commit seriously to creating BOOJUM! after a great deal of dithering.

     Where does it come from?  The days of gunpowder muskets, so from the Seventeenth century onwards.  If you were unlucky enough to be wounded in those days, then you were odds-on favourite to die, because medicine and surgery were pretty much dark arts back then.  No concept of sepsis, blood poisoning or sterile procedure - the list goes on.  Art!

     No anaesthetics, either.  So, when a surgeon operated on a victim patient, they would offer them a musket ball to bite down on to help endure the pain, musket balls being made of lead, which will deform relatively easily, certainly by pain-driven human jaws.  Art!

     Lead, of course, is a poisonous heavy metal, so if the unfortunate vic- patient managed to swallow any of it, they might survive their surgery and still kick the bucket.  Food for thought.

Finally -

Not going to bother with much here, we've hit the Compositional Ton already and I've got to have a shave, get some lunch inside me and hie me hence to Royton, because that Bigos won't cook itself!

     Have a picture of an industrial meat grinder in action and ponder where the filling for that meat pie in your fridge comes from.

*  Possibly.  Possibly not.

**  Yes indeed, on our pirate pedalo.  And because it's more exciting than going to the supermarket.