PLAYING WITH WORDS
I’ve taken to
opening the dictionary at random in quiet moments and choosing one word from
the page in front of me. This time the word was hag, just a finger print down the page from haemorrhoid and haeremai (a
Maori greeting) and up a bit from hagberry
and hagbut.
The definitions
are fascinating: it’s a witch, an ugly old woman, a crone, an eel-like
parasitic fish, a phosphoric light found on horses‘ manes.
Whoa! What?
Horses have
phosphorescent manes and tails? Really?
A horse with haemorrhoids snorted haeremai as it ate some hagberries
and then emitted a strange phosphorescent hag-light from its mane and tail...
I know naughty
little boys have set light to horse farts... is that called hag? I haven’t seen one myself, but I imagine a horse fart, when
lit, might be a pretty, cold, blueish colour.
My mind
wanders.
I stabbed the
word limb in the dictionary last week
and found that one of the definitions was the
outermost ring of the sun.
Again, whoa!
So I wrote a poem
using the dictionary definitions of limb,
as you do, and now it looks as though I’ll have to have a go at hag too.