It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

[venta]

This lunchtime, I walked with a couple of colleagues to Morrissons. To get there, we trundled along a shared use footpath-and-cyclepath sandwiched between the A33 and the canal. We came back to the office down a bridleway between the sewage treatment works and the tip. Oh yes, we know how to live.

All along the bridleway are sprawling bramble bushes, covered with fat, glossy, tasty brambles. All well above even quite large dog-height.

So, I've washed the chicken salad remnants out of my baitbox. Me, the plastic box and the bike might be taking a slight detour on the way home tonight...

Comments

[lnr]

Hang on, I let Sarah off on Google+ because she's Scottish, but in (my bits of) England the bramble is the bush, and the fruit from it is a blackberry! Perhaps we need a poll :)

I quite often do that on the way home, though there's one growing right behind our back fence which is just getting to the point where it's worth going to raid instead.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Nope. Brambles grown on bramble bushes :) I always have to think twice when someone says "blackberry". They're the things Ribena is made from, no, wait, they're something else... ah yes, brambles.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I take a similar detour to 'blackcurrant' before reaching the (correct) interpretation of 'bramble'. That's why calling them blackberries is wrong :)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Though technically, of course, the black bramble fruit of which we speak isn't a berry at all, being rather an aggregate fruit.

Anyway, the northern English often prove to be sensible people (ie similar to the Scots) where this kind of terminology is concerned :)

[lnr]

You're telling me I'm not Northern?

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Well you're not talking the lingo. You've obviously turned traitor :)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

"isn't a berry at all, being rather an aggregate fruit." - and the Beatles technically weren't a pop group, since they didn't have an associative binary operator. And as of about 1947, thanks to Jean Leray wheat technically isn't gathered in sheaves any more. So that's what you get if you allow specific jargon meanings to replace the actual meaning of English words.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

om nom nom. Yes, if I'm not working again this week, I will be going brambling too.

[venta.livejournal.com]

footpath-and-cyclepath

This is a clumsy phrase. I think I'll refer to them as footlepaths from now on.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Footlepath - I like it. Use it again and people will accuse me of making it up, as usual.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I know, it's like I've got a get-out-of-jail-free card to talk utter nonsense :)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I ended up having a minor blackberry this even. It's the ones that have been left to their own devices for a decade or so, far from humankind, that seem to emit the best fruit.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I ended up not having one, thanks to a poorly-timed outbreak of thunder shower. Attempt 2 this evening...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

As an inveterate southerner of the deepest dye, blackberry is also a verb to me. Would you say "I'm going brambling" where we would say "I'm going blackberrying"?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, there is evidence (above) that at least one person would :)

I actually wouldn't say either, I just go and pick brambles.