Today’s words have me envisioning a rather large bowl with stripes of different jams– strawberry and cherry and apple and orange marmalade and plum and peach, swirling rainbow like. Yet I can’t help but think that a few good strokes with a spoon could turn that rainbow into a truly mixed mess that might taste just awful.
I’m find it difficult to focus on today’s words, as #definethis today has me raising a hue and cry, though only because I mistook hew for hue. For such short words these two have a number of meanings and seemingly endless potential for mis-understanding. While in modern usage a hue is a shade of color, it turns out that the old expression is ‘hue and cry’ (rather than ‘hew and cry’). I was not able to determine to my satisfaction how the word for a tone of color became associated with calling out a criminal on his actions, however I suppose that it is in some sense more sensible than using a word that means to cut with an axe or to adhere to principles. Or perhaps not. I suppose I could say that I remain mixed up about hew and hue.
When I was growing up in Louisiana in the 1960’s and 1970’s colored was the “polite” word for referring to those whose skin was brown. These days, here in the United States anyway, the preferred term would probably be African American. I find myself wondering what term might be considered polite in England or in Europe, since those folks certainly are not Americans of any stripe. While using the word colored in this context today would not doubt sound dated, it would still be a lot better than using the ‘n’ word, which is always an insult, even if it is used in reference to someone with pale pigmentation and spendthrift habits.
While fruit preserves were the first thing to come to mind on hearing the word jam, a jam can also be most any sort of trouble or predicament a body can get into. I can recall jam being referred to refer to everything from an unexpected pregnancy to a budget shortfall. It seems to me, all things considered, I’d much prefer to have a biscuit with strawberry preserves than to be dealing with an unwanted bun in the oven or a serious lack of money. And finally today my thanks so Savio Sebastian who suggested today’s words and to Lady Disdain whose plum jam coats the spoon in today’s image.
Libdrone's Thoughts and Musings 