Wednesday 13 October 2010

High


It is a strange and mooreeffocish thing to look upon the photograph of a dear, bald friend in the days when he had hair. Stranger still to think that once upon a time you could be in a dudgeon without that dudgeon being high. Yet so it was, dear reader. In the sixteenth century you could simply take something in dudgeon, the altitude unmentioned.

As for jinks, well they were high before they were anything else. Originally, a highjinks was someone with a good liver and a bad conscience. The highjinks would settle down to booze with a stranger, match him drink for drink, and, when his victim passed out, would rob him (or swindle him while he was semi-conscious).

High could also mean complete or advanced and thus we have high noon and High Noon, which is the most watched film aboard Air Force One.

Now it's high time this post finished. So I shall hightail it (like a stampeding cow) to the high seas (which are high because they're deep).

The Inky Fool kills a man with passive smoke

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