Leaving aside the fact that the title of this blog entry would make quite a good mild expletive – something definitely due a comeback after all the explicit four letter words on reality TV - it reflects a frustration I’ve finally decided to finish.
Taking the dog for an afternoon walk in pale autumn sunlight, our path was crossed by a creature resembling a stretched limo version of a mouse. But was it a stoat or a weasel? Which is the mouse-sized version?
My frustrated lack of ability to remember is stoked to greater heights of fury by a friend and ex-King’s Singer (but that’s another story) I occasionally go for a walk with, who has the habit of gnomically uttering ‘a weasel is w-easily distinguished as a stoat is s-totally different’ or some such remark, which doesn’t help a great deal.
If I read Wikipedia right, the weasel as we know it in the UK is actually the least weasel and smaller than the stoat. (Don’t you just love it that an animal can be a ‘least something’?) So with natural perversity, the one with the shorter name is the bigger of the two (to help me remember). So there.
I get muddled between coots and moorhens…
Today I was caught using the phrase “goat-sheep continuum”.
To quote you in full, you’re ‘very confused about the whole goat-sheep continuum’.
Coots have white nose bits, moorhens have red ones.
I like ariranhas better then any other animal in the rat-fox continuum…
I love goat-sheep continuum as a concept. I’ll have a gheep, please.
I’m reminded of James Thurber’s children’s story, The Thirteen Clocks in which the baddy, as I remember it, threatened the parrot repeatedly that he would ‘shruck its thrug til all it could whupple was geep’ or words to that effect.
So now, at last, this is comprehensible. The parrot’s best friend was on the goat-sheep continuum, and it intended to whupple for help from said friend when having its thrug shrucked.
BTW, Bronwen, I’d like to know if that was that the goat-sheep spectrum in the biological sense, or in the biblical sense of separating people into sheep and goats.
I ought to make it clear for anyone reading that too quickly that I have no interest in knowing anything on the goat-sheep spectrum in the biblical sense.
The biblical sense had not even occured to me!
Baaa-aaaa.
Ahem.