Pregnant pause
OVERHEARD outside a club in Clydebank, where two young men were having a smoke.
"Eh, um hivin' a wean," said one.
"Quality, man, quality," observed the other.
They were overheard by reader Alastair Stewart, who feels compelled to ask: "Who says the art of conversation is dead?"
Freeze a jolly good fellow
THE On This Day column (page 15) relates the death of Francis Bacon, who was reputedly killed by a chicken. He tried to preserve it with snow, came down with pneumonia, and breathed his last. This, surely, was the birth of the punchline, 'Fowl play was not suspected'.
Doctor who?
COLLECTIVE nouns. David Knight, a retired consultant Surgeon, writes: "When I was a junior doctor, trying to stay awake in theatre in the wee small hours (this was in the bad old days of 100 + hours a week), we used to think up funny collective nouns for our senior colleagues and bosses. Best ones included a coma of anaesthetists and a coven of nursing officers." His all-time favourite? An 'absence' of consultant physicians.
The Herald Dairy
OTHER collective nouns: A bottle of bells (David Halliday)
* a clutch of garage mechanics
* a score of musicians
* a fleet of feet
* and a dairy of readers of this column who can't spell terribly well (all Allan Roderick Morrison).
Speaking of Diary readers, we liked David McCall's suggestion: Diary Pepys.
And Moira Campbell writes: "In one school I worked in on supply many years ago it was decided that the collective noun for jannies was a fleet, as they always went about in threes, like buses."
More tomorrow.
A miner claim to fame
WE asked for job titles that flatter to deceive. Recalls Trevor Docherty: "When I was a coal miner often beefed up the job and be different to the rest of the locals by claiming to be either a 'Mineral Extraction Technician' or a 'Strata Control Engineer'." Any more offerings?
That'll be the Dai
SEAN Smith's new biography of Tom Jones relates a drunken altercation that the singer once got into with a woman on a plane.
Just as the crew was intervening, Dai Perry, Tom's friend and bodyguard, woke up from a snooze and saw what he took to be an attack on his boss.
Singling out what he thought was the ringleader, he pinned the man to the ground with a knee on his chest, growling that he'd stay put until the plane landed.
"It's not landing until I get up," replied the man, who was in uniform. "I'm the captain."
The bloke, as it turns out, was actually a steward - a quick-thinking one, at that.
Out of their league
DESPITE appointing ex-Celtic star Gary Caldwell as their manager, once-proud Wigan FC face relegation to the relative obscurity of League One, where they will presumably attract even less TV coverage than they do now. As one fan resignedly puts it on Facebook: "Ah cant wait to stay up even longer every Saturday night watching us play for 30 seconds on the Football League Show next season."
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