The latest challenge asked for poems about euphemisms. You avoided politics and sex (mostly), preferring, like Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, to focus on the language of dying and the words and expressions we call on to avoid the D-word. And there are plenty of them — David Crystal has written that there are more than 1,000 words for death categorised in the Historical Thesaurus.
I much admired Alanna Blake’s twist on Keats’s sonnet (‘Much have I dabbled in linguistic lore/ And many inexactitudes have used…’) and Max Ross’s neat acrostic. Hamish Wilson, Max Gutmann, Ann Drysdale and David Silverman also deserve a special mention. The prizewinners printed below earn £30 each. The extra fiver belongs to Bill Greenwell.
Bill Greenwell
‘Fair maiden, may I introduce my fritz,
My percy, and my python, also peg?
It’s from my nether regions’ naughty bits:
My trouser snake, my meat and middle leg.
‘I haven’t got a wrinkle in my winkle,
My johnson, rod and pole, my horse and hose —
My harry likes to have a little tinkle,
Or hang out with my other down-belows.
‘Do talk to him, my cecil and my pecker,
And tell him he’s your favourite tom and dick,
My Black and Decker, oh my Boris Becker —
My well-hung whatsit and my Hampton Wick!’
The French sociologist Alain Touraine coined the term ‘post-industrial society’ in 1969. By the 1980s it had become shorthand for the kind of services-based, individualistic economies most major developed nations had created. Today, the UK is moving its economy beyond that. We are creating what might be called a ‘zero-industrial society’. Climate change targets, soaring
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