What’s in a Title? Is a Hibiscus Flower too much? (posting misadventures)

Experience tells me that once an error is made, it is often better to just let it go. There is an old secretary’s saying that once you mess up on handling an important message for the boss you will keep making it worse with each new contact.

So I’ll try again to explain the title of my blog. Actually the title SOMETIMES is simple enough, and so far it has escaped scrutiny. My tag line is simple enough also except that it got tangled up while it was under construction, and came out wrong.

My tag line (oh gosh, here’s where I mess it up again,) is “Who, What, When, Where, How and Why.” I think that’s in the right order. This phrase has long been a staple of teachers of writing and journalism, an easy catch phrase (there’s a word for it, but I can’t think of it now) to help students of all ages and walks of life to remember to include in their works information such as: “Who did What (to whom,) When was it, Where did it happen, How was it done….and IF the writer knows: WHY did it happen?”

Pardon my simplicity, but this would translate into a news article that would say something like this: — “A man named Joe robbed a bank yesterday, at the corner of 3rd Street and Main, with a toy gun, because he needed money.”

A third grader might write the following in response to a list the teacher wrote on the blackboard– ” A dog named Rusty dug a hole in the backyard last night with his paws, because he wanted to hide a bone.”

For my purposes my title: SOMETIMES is modified by the who-what-when-where-how-why tag. This is something of a cliché, because the whole WWWHW sequence would not necessarily be used in every post.

MUMBLETYMUSE. This nonsense word is in my url, or address, because I liked it at the time when I had to have an address.

Mumblety actually has been used for the game mumblety-peg, which is played with a jack-knife. The players performed certain tricks with the knife, such as having it tumble end over end, go up and come down, stick into the ground at various distances. The object was to have the knife actually stick into the ground without falling over.

I am not a mumblety-peg expert, far from it. My brother did boast a certain prowess in the game, and tried to show me how to do it. Nah…not one of my skills.

Once on another list we were chatting about nursery rhymes. Being English by ancestry, many of the nursery rhymes I heard as a child were of such nature. The specific rhyme…which is not actually any rhyme I ever heard…has a few lines that I think came from some other English rhyme.

mumblety mumblety, jiggity jog
I’ve been to London to buy a fat hog

the London part is a clue, no? It might have been “higgilty piggilty” in the rhyme.

Well…that’s enough nonsense for today.

OK, re the Hibiscus flower in my header. I like the color because I think it goes well with color scheme of my Bold Life theme. However, that flower is but a distant memory anyway, its base at this moment being buried under a few feet of snow. 30