I’m doing one of these a day until the end of April. To send it, copy the permalink or the image file link into an email, tweet, Facebook DM, etc. — or just download and make free with the image.
Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
WAR OF THE ORANGES WON’T RHYME
Note the odd nexus
of scurvy war and citrus:
Proto-Indo-European nek-es
Internecine’s root of death
appears in nectarine –
a bloodless, fuzzfree
ascorbic saviour
Wonderful, Julia! I had to look up the etymology to get everything you were saying here — the American Heritage Dictionary has a brief essay.
Even as a child, I knew that nectarines were the most sinister of the ever-suspect stone fruits.
I’ll grant you that the smooth skin is suspicious, like men who shave their heads to hide their baldness.
:-) I enjoyed this very much.
Thanks, Dale.
Ha! I think ‘bloody internecine conflict’ is about right.
Oh yeah? The competition among academic poets reaches its apogee here in the U.S., I gather, but poets everywhere are a contentious lot. Countries with lots of poets, such as Yemen and Somalia, are not famed for pacifism.
Hmmm. This might finally explain why April is the cruelest month. (grin)
Hey, maybe so!