Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Bed

I must admit when I first heard the phrase, log bed, I thought it had something to do with a place where you put logs, using the word bed as you might in flower bed.   Nope, wrong again.   (Story of my life.  Has brief moment of self-pity.)

Log beds are, of course, beds made out of logs.  Not big logs, mind you; little manageable ones, like those in the picture of the rustic bed on the right.  Log beds don't have to be rustic; the wood can be honed to a less natural shape.

I've just been searching through my cuttings to see what other articles I had that mentioned beds in any way.  Such is the nature of the search engine on Evernote that beds featured briefly in several items, such as a man who'd had a stroke struggling with words like bed or blanket, but being able to use words like postillion or tardigrades, or Peter Bregman writing about motivation and saying that if you want to go to the gym it's a good idea to leave your gym clothes by your bed so you get into them first thing in the morning. 


But bed picked up and turned up as part of bedevil, and bedeutung, and stabbed, and described, and slubbed, and bedraggled, and grabbed, and the discovery that bed is one of the words you should avoid in tweets.  It will get you nowhere.  


Slubbed, incidentally, for those who don't know the word, means:  of textiles; having a rough surface; "a sweater knitted of nubbly homespun yarns."   Which introduces us to nubbly, which apparently means much the same as slubbed.   Trust English to have more than one word for the same idea. 


You could use the words slubbed and nubbly about the bunk beds in the photo, couldn't you.  They have a rough surface, though they're not exactly made of textiles, I guess. 


Well, enough rambling for one day.   Onto to do the ironing.  

2 comments:

Ryan Lorenc-Haluska said...

We share a love of language, sir.

Mike Crowl said...

Good to hear!