Peter Macinnis

differential calculus.
The small pebbles and gravel which, when placed in a vehicle’s differential, serve to quieten temporarily the fatal noises being made by that part of a used car which is being offered for sale.

differential.
A device used by orators wishing to sound technical. At night, all differentials are grey, according to the well-tested differential equation.

semiotics.
Listening to something with half an ear. This particular discipline was of great interest to Vincent van Gogh, although he became over-qualified toward the end of his life.

sentence, self-referenced. This is not one.

sentience, self-reverenced. See egotist.

serious work.
Any activity, such as writing comedy or lexicons, where the creative impulse tends to fall away before the production of a finished piece.

bifocal spectacles.
Two-ring circuses.

alkali.
Any caustic substance, resembling the searing wit of Kali, the Indian goddess of finishing things, who used neither goats nor word processors, but who had advanced ideas on emulation.

aleatory.
A term used to describe art where there is a chance element in it, where a degree of randomisation is brought in. There is no need to wait for the artist to do this: simply take any painting or book, cut it into small pieces, and even the most mundane art can become vibrant and new.

This has some wisdom, as this book reveals, from time to time, it having been through a similar aleatory process, but using a word processor in place of the goat.

aliquot. A snippet from the thoughts of Ali the Wise, whose sayings were fractionated by a goat which ate parts of all of them, soon after they were written down on palm leaves. A great deal of innocent fun can be had from randomly joining the surviving fragments together.

formication.
A wildly random rushing around, practised by ants and which, when discussed, often causes hard-of-hearing aunts to behave similarly.

formation.
The act of soaking in formic acid, or adding formic acid (for example, to Argentinian merlot), to improve its clarity and palate.

ascetic.
A condition which leads to severe intestinal problems, due to the rapid build-up of ascetic acid.

muriatic acid.
‘Murine’ means having to do with mice, and muriatic acid used to be prepared by the distillation of crushed mice in the 18th century. This method has since been discontinued.

politics
Civil war by other means. It is a field which leads unerringly to the belief that all the practitioners are either crooked or stupid. It is on account of this belief that so many politicians are willing to be regarded as stupid, since they are then able to benefit in other directions.

bronze. A metal which went out of use for tools, once the Iron Age began. Recent studies have shown that bronze was still used by richer people for ornamentation, long after that. The workers may have preferred iron, but gentlemen preferred bronze. All the same, a thing of pewter is a joy forever.

glockenspiel.
A mediaeval war game, on the border area ofGermany and Holland. The aim of the game (spiel) was to place three paint marks (glocken) on your opponent, by fair means or foul. Foul means were delivered a check on population growth in an otherwise healthy, fertile and disease-free region.

emulation.
The slaughter of large mobs of emus, like the Great Emu War in Western Australia in 1932. The emus won, and now such killing is against the law.

lobster.
(Cricket) a bowler who owes his style more to his army training in grenade throwing.

armour. In the mediaeval sense, metal components attached to a fighting man, mainly to defend him against attack in skirmish and battle. Generally, armour was much harder to don than to doff, since removal was simply a matter of unlacing a few key parts, and then they could let slip the togs of war.

nom de guerre.
Historians name wars: the War of the Roses; the War of Jenkins’ Ear; the Hundred Years’ War (lasted 116 years); the War of Spanish Succession; the Serbian Pig War and the Moldovan-Transdniestrian War. The 20th century had world wars 1 & 2, as historians tired of the whole thing.

Enigma variations.
After the British discovered that German intelligence was using a musical code to encipher their dispatches, Sir Edward Elgar wrote this piece of music. While attempting to decode this piece, assumed to be the British order of battle, the Germans developed the Enigma machine.

siege mentality.
A fairly adequate description of people who are busily attempting to perfect the art of confused silence.

might.
That which war usually proves to be right, in accordance with the procedures laid down in cannon law.

He was briefly a cook in the British Army Catering Corps in the Dardanelles during the First World War. They are just as wrong as Oswald Moses was, when he assumed that the stew was still safe, though none of the other poets has died as a direct result of their erroneous beliefs.

osmosis. A scientific word much favoured by poets, although rarely if ever used in any even vaguely relevant context. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that these poets think it is in some way related to Oswald Moses, a minor poet.

That said, 97.2% of philosophers do not wish to appear in the same paragraph as an arts administrator. The other 2.8% were sleeping off an enforced bender after close contact with an arts administrator.

philosopher.Somebody who may not know very much about a subject, but they are able to discuss it at length, and generally manage to show you how it is that you know even less than they do about it. Rather like an arts administrator, in fact.

phloem
This word had its genesis in Erasmus Darwin’s frantic search for a rhyme for poem. He was the first to note the impossibility of finding any rhyme for ‘arts administrator’ or any reason why one would bother to try to do so. Arts administrators have remained without rhyme or reason ever since.

fructose.
A rude imprecation uttered by crude illiterates, or literate people impeded by an arts administrator