sending the biscuit

one time i had a dream that emma, the cousin of mathilde who is the fiancée of my cousin harold, sent a me a postcard from florida.

emma was working on a documentary about shuffleboard. she was researching the different styles of paddles used by devoted players in st petersburg. not all of them were old people in pastel cardigans, she wrote.

the postcard had a painting of an orange grove and the words "welcome to florida" in blue sans serif letters on it. this set me wondering about the difference between a grove and an orchard. the best thing to do in situations like this is look it up, so i consulted a lexicon. unfortunately, the scholars who compiled the big dictionary weren't as helpful as i would have liked.

our readers and definers who wrote the dictionary  claimed that the word orchard was descended from the latin word hortus and this term means garden. the word grove was germanic. but it was so old no-one knew where it came from. making the it even more mysterious, the word grove has no relatives in any other language. orchards, if i understand this correctly, always refer to highly cultivated tree farms. groves can also refer to such arrangements, but they can also refer to closely clustered trees that grow wild.

my pet-fish, bubbles, said this reminded him of the word rabbit of which no-one knows the etymology. one day people just started to use it in the 14th century without any explanation. i told him that it wasn't exactly the same. in the case of one word it was just very old and in the other instance the word was just very new. after i said that i realized they raised quite different questions. bubbles responded that they were similar since they both had problematic etymologies and that i was just splitting hairs.

anyway, bubbles said, the whole matter of shuffleboard left a sour taste in his mouth. he told me that he once won a semi-large sum of dough in a semi-professional tournament. however, he lost it in the semi-final round.