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.  

In the preface to Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: "All art is quite useless." A student at Oxford named Bernulf Clegg was intrigued by that statement, and he wrote to Wilde and asked him what he meant by it.
Wilde responded:

"My dear Sir,

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realize the complete artistic impression.

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

Truly yours,

Oscar Wilde."

It's fortunate that Wilde writes the second paragraph, otherwise we might think he was serious about the first....