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.