Sunday, May 29, 2011

"Milk pots"

As I look out into my back garden the word pot comes to mind and not for the reasons you may think! Dandelions have reigned supreme. The post "clock" stage has left a mass of towering stems laughing down menacingly on the lowly grass and moss below. "Milk pots" I think. Such an innocent image but yet they have taken over what once used to be a fairly civilised lawn. You may think that I myself have gone potty but no. Dandelions are literally "pots of milk" in Danish. A typically literal yet imaginative way of constructing a word in the Danish language.

The word "pot" has occupied my mind since. "The world has gone to pot", "she's gone potty" or of  course you can also sit on a potty - an experience which is in store for my little one in times to come. You can smoke pot, you can eat yoghurt from a pot, you can plant things in a pot and I am sure you can do many more things with this very versatile word - as the Danes have shown.

The dandelions will be left alone for another while as the weather has prohibited any mass massacre as yet, enabling the newly planted seeds from those clocks to plunge their much maligned roots deep down in to the soil. "You have to get down to the root", I can ear my green fingered aquaintances say. I know, I know but you have to admire those milk pots and to be honest they are not that ugly to look at. Anything that resilient demands respect.

1 comment:

  1. I like that word: is that because if you break the stem of a dandelion, the juice in the middle is milky? And if so can you drink it? Or feed baby perhaps?

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