The name game
JET-SETTING businessman Adam Doherty was recently working in sunny California.
Being a proud Scotsman, he was horrified by the warm and pleasant weather. So after completing his wheeler-dealing, he skedaddled to the nearest gloomy LA hostelry to wet his insides with whisky.
While there, he got chatting to a barfly who revealed that he was called Cliff.
At least that was what Adam initially assumed, until the man went on to explain: “That’s Kliff – spelled K-L-I-F-F.”
Says Adam: “I thought that was a bit half-hearted of the bloke’s mum and dad. When they decided to celebrate the birth of their son by messing with the name Cliff, why didn’t they go full tilt, and call him Klyph?”
The missing links
CONFUSED sports fan Ella Smith from Giffnock makes a shame-faced confession.
“I wonder,” she says, “if I was the only person to misread the caption under the picture of the extra water feature at the 17th hole of the Old Course, on the back page of a recent Herald sport section. I could have sworn it read the Dunhill LAKES Championship…”
Ditzy dogification
OUR pooch-loving readers are doggifying people of note.
If that sounds like a confusing enterprise, it simply means that we’re giving famous people from the past and present a Fido-friendly moniker.
Iain Mills suggests a four-legged version of a famous Canadian singer-songwriter… Woofus Wainwright.
Boxing clever
GLOOMY reader Robert Gardner was chatting to friends about funerals, and how he seems to have been attending rather a lot of them recently.
“Somehow we got on to the subject of using cardboard boxes instead of traditional wood coffins,” he says.
Analysing this unusual method of final transport, Robert and his pals decided that mourners could scribble on the sides of such a coffin how much they missed the deceased.
“I further suggested,” says Robert, who was clearly giving this grim subject some serious consideration, “that the cardboard box could have stamped on it the useful instruction This Way Up.”
Crossing the line
SOME useful literary advice from book-loving Barry Hicks from Paisley, who says: “If you come across a passage in a book that you don’t understand, the key is to underline it. The next person who owns the book will not only think you understood it, but that it is incredibly important. In that way you pass on the anxiety.”
Gaming the system
FUN-LOVING reader Mandy Clark tells us: “I played Bonopoly yesterday. It’s like Monopoly, only the streets have no name.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here