b Papa Dog's Blog: Blue Sky at Night (and Faversham!)

Papa Dog's Blog

A Thing Wherein I Infrequently Write Some Stuff

Monday, May 09, 2005

Blue Sky at Night (and Faversham!)

Never let it be said I don’t do requests. This isn’t exactly the way the sky was the other night – the rain seems to have passed and taken all the fat white clouds with it – but it’s pretty close. Apologies for the blurriness. Night time exposures are a beeyatch.


Blue sky at night
Originally uploaded by papadogduvalier.



So anyway. The other day, Arak SOT sent me an email asking why I refer to this thing as a faversham. Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for eight months and he’s the first person (other than Mama Dog) to ask. I’ve only got ten minutes til 24 starts, so in lieu of thinking up something to write about, I’ll recycle my response to him.

The usage of faversham goes back to my first post. I can’t say exactly why that particular word popped into my head to use in place of “blog,” other than it’s just silly. It comes from a Beverly Hillbillies episode wherein the Clampetts visited England. Somehow or
other – I can’t remember how (but have since looked it up) – they got the mistaken impression that “Faversham” was the English way of saying goodbye. Whenever they were leaving somewhere, they’d politely say “Faversham!” to all the English folk. I guess it seemed to me it that if I was going to employ a euphemism for “blog,” I might as well select one that already had experience as a substitute word on its résumé. And there you go.

Maybe this post should serve as the beginning of a FAQ service for understanding the patois used herein. But on second thought, I guess something I was asked once in nine months doesn't really constitute a frequently asked question.

1 Comments:

Blogger Christine said...

It would have been my first question in the Blog-o-rama interview of May 5th, but I feared looking like a rube for having missed the explanation somewhere. Although I didn't know its Hillbilly etymology, it did mean just about what I thought it did. I think the french have a word that basically means "the word I can't think of, but you know what I'm talking about". It's a catch-all kind of thing, very convenient. Anyway, I just assumed Faversham was borrowed from Dickens. Those Hillbillies! They're dumb but they're smart too!

10:36 PM  

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