LSD

Tee hee – I’m misleading the youth of today into coming to my blog. Aren’t I clever? Well, no, not really. I will of course be mentioning the hippy drug du choix but only in passing – the real weirdness lies further ahead.

LSD (the drug) was one of four things the Swiss have given the world (the other three being the cuckoo clock, Toblerone triangular chocolate and the army knife). A Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffmann discovered it in the 1930s while working for a pharmaceutical company in Basle. In case you’re of a scientific bent, the formula is C20H25N3O. The chemical name for it is lysergic acid diethylamide, so I fail to see where the “LSD” abbreviation comes from, even though I have read texts which try to explain it. Hoffman himself experimented with the drug, which I think says a lot. If you think you’re a small petunia called Arabella, you probably aren’t in a frame of mind to name anything.

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Patois

Patois, pronounced pat-waa or sometimes pat-waa-z, is generally held to mean any language that is non-standard. The best bet seems to be that it originated from the Old French Patoier, meaning “to handle clumsily”.

In English, a patois could be a regional dialect or a form of Pidgin English, such as the English spoken in parts of Hawaii and New Guinea. Thse are not just corrupted forms of English, but have their own words and structure (although the pidgin for Air Condidtioning is “win’ machin”, which I think is very cool (pun intended).

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