What's In A Name?

It occurred to me that it's been a wee while since I did one of my silly "random-thoughts-stream-of-consciousness-open-my-mouth-and-let-my-belly-rumble" type posts, so I thought I'd share with you a couple of name related silly things that I've been thinking about or have heard of in the last few days.

First of all, I read somewhere that in the 1800's there was a Sheriff in the courts in Orkney whose surname was (and I kid you not) Shireff! Imagine appearing in court before Sheriff Shireff!

And the second thing is my friend Viki's fault... She was amused that anyone would call their daughter India. And this set us off on one of those silly conversations that you have when you've got nothing better to do... that if you were going to name your child after a country, what would be the most ridiculous one that you could pick (not that I'm saying the name India is ridiculous, in case any Indias are reading this and want to come and beat me up for laughing at their name... anyway, it was Viki who started laughing, so beat her up first, please)?

Some of the ones we came up with were:

Belgium
Twins Trinidad and Tobago
Vatican City
Istanbul (or Constantinople)

but the best one we could come up with was...

Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

Can anyone beat that?

The Hmmm... Post

Do you ever have one of those random thoughts that pop into your mind and then you just can't get rid of them?

Well, I do... and today's one just came out of nowhere as I was stumbling around, half-awake, getting ready for work.

It was along the lines of this...

"Hmmm... 'Disintegrated'... that's an interesting word. Well, 'integrated' just means joined together... so why do we associate 'disintegrated' with something that's not only separated, but is kind of blown apart so that nothing is left but dust? I mean, you would say, 'That plane flew into the side of a mountain, and it disintegrated', and everyone would assume that there was nothing left but debris. We never say that somebody's handwriting is 'disintegrated'... but surely that would be useable as a word... because it would just mean that they hadn't done joined up writing?"

Inside the head of this selkie is an interesting (albeit spacious and kind of echoey) place!

Anyway, enough of my ramblings... Gotta go!