Wednesday 27 May 2015

Alpinist

An alpinist is a climber of high mountains (generally, but not neccessarily the Alps). I'm not an alpinist.

I don't know if there's a word for climbers of not very high mountains, only when it's sunny, the path doesn't look too treacherous and regular stops are permitted, but if there is, I'm one of them.

Wednesday 20 May 2015

Specious

Specious means either misleadingly attractive or superficially plausible, but actually wrong.

Custard made with salt instead of sugar would add speciosity to your trifle. An example of speciousness is the specious claim that as chocolate is dervived from plants, a family sized bar of Aero counts as one of your five a day. That's only true if you choose the orange flavoured one (she adds speciously*)

*mint's a plant, so the green ones are OK too.

Wednesday 13 May 2015

Monticule

A monticule is a small hill. Sounds rather friendly, doesn't it? The sort of place you'd walk up to enjoy a picnic involving ginger beer and home made cake. A monticule can also be a mini mound caused by a volcano.

Here's the view from a hill (quite a big one) I climbed up last summer. Recognise it?

Clue ... instead of climbing up, you could just swan about down the bottom.