from my Substack archives: 4 July 2025 / Topics in this post, for reader discretion: Poultry Porn, things that lead to a lede, and drunk texting in a Town and Gown valley.
I’ve had a friend tell me I’m making a repeated typo. It’s refreshing to know there’s a person still reading my daily chaotic circle segues. She said it’s cringe, (and she’s not a bitch; she loves me).
She WhatsApped me the other night:
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go fix that naughty lead #cringe #ffs
She added a whip emoji and that winking face one with the tongue out. I didn’t reply, because it was after nine, she drinks, and she’s on those online dating things. I often get odd texts from her from 8pm onwards, and let her delete them in the morning and pretend I didn’t read. Once she sent me a terrible picture of herself. When I was growing up, older women always used to say redheads should never wear pink, and she’s much too old for that kind of underwear. I was about to go to bed with cocoa and a nice movie and so I put it out of my mind.
S’trues Bob, next night it’s:
wtf is wrong with you with the leads typo all the time? Have you relapsed? #wtf
I ignored her, because there was a string of clinking-champagne glasses emojis.
I realized at lunchtime today she hadn’t deleted either of the messages. I thought she had been murdered, so I phoned her. I hate phoning people. I told her to wind her neck in and get to a fucking meeting. I said don’t drink and scroll, you old tart, and if there’s a benzodiazepine in your life, put your phone in a locked safe before you take your pill.
She told me to calm my tits and explain about the lede. I rushed to find her a Wikipedia link, because I’m not a snob, and God knows we need a library door open for the common people more now than ever before. I have ranted about anti-Wikipedia trolls from the Gown side of the internet before.
Library doorways are essential in dark times. Please would you lot of arrogant learned pricks NOT criticise people who cite Wikipedia as a source reference in their posts or conversations Could you please not? Just fucking stop it. Like one who laughs at mispronounced words, you are a bully; how else could a beautiful clever big word be mispronounced unless it has been read and understood by the speaker in an environment where nobody speaks the author’s language? If someone mispronounces a word, it means they learned it by reading. If someone references Wikipedia, it means they decided to find out the truth about something, so they went to the most accessible public library. Your arrogance may just shoo them away. To paraphrase a really pompous old fart: NEVER before in the field of human conflict has the new non-fiction reader been needed more. Wikipedia is an open library door. People quickly learn to move deeper into the library for the really good stuff, or they soon get wind of bigger libraries with better books.
I’m never one to miss the opportunity for an info dump, and I especially like to carry on until I’m asked to shut up about WORDS.
Because of my tradesman father, a printing compositor who made up the pages of newspapers, novels, and textbooks with carefully applied taped columns and borders, while he proofread the copy, and set text from the Upper Case and Lower Case trays of letters of the alphabet, shot the bromides, and basically did everything except start the press, I know what a lede is. I’m not making it up, that’s how newspapers got made until I was racing to Isando to get material to KTM Web Print in my 20s in the early 1990s. A lede is the first sentence or paragraph of a news story, giving the most important points of the story, or a teaser summarizing paragraph. For example: Check out this lede from The Only Cin’s latest Substack post, where she rambles on about sex with poultry. Everyone’s doing it now with AI tricks, but they ought to know what it’s called, don’t you think?
My friend said, oh, did lede come from Leda and the Swan?
Now, because of her red hair and pink underwear, my Townie friend slept with quite a lot of both the English and Art Department of the university town where she lives back in 1983, and she reads heaps and heaps of quality erotic novels as a 60 year old, it wasn’t a surprise she doesn’t know her lede from her Leda. (“Town and gown are two distinct communities of a university town; ‘town’ being the non-academic population and ‘gown’ metonymically being the university community, especially in ancient seats of learning such as Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and St Andrews, although the term is also used to describe modern university towns as well as towns with a significant public school. The metaphor is historical in its connotation but continues to be used in the literature on urban higher education and in common parlance.”)
The centuries old, very scandalous tea about fine Lady Leda and her long-necked randy bird is a real cracker, but go read for yourself. I put some rabbit holes at the bottom of this post. There are naughty pics. Here’s a Wikisplice:
The subject undoubtedly owed its 16th-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man. The earliest depictions show the pair love-making with some explicitness—more so than in any depictions of a human pair made by artists of high quality in the same period. In April 2012 an art gallery in London, England, was instructed by the police to remove a modern exhibit of Leda and the Swan. The law concerned was Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, condemning “violent pornography”, brought in by the Labour Party government of 2005–2010.
Pass it on Wandering Wondernauts, that’s all you can do. Take time off the WWW now and again to explore a different WWW; go out and Walk, Wonder, and enjoy sharing Words with friends. Learn new words. That’s all you can do; and pass them on. Have a fab weekend, be careful.
Happy birthday to Bill Withers, and thank you for the music.
Grandma’s hands
Used to issue out a warning
She’d say, Billy don’t you run so fast
Might fall on a piece of glass
Might be snakes there in that grass…
Refs and other lekker Rabbit-Holes for Wondernauts who love to trawl for gobbets:
· https://www.thisdayinmusic.com/on-this-day-in-music-july-4/
· https://www.neilbensonmedia.co.uk/home/writing-journalism/the-lost-language-of-newspapers
· https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bill+withers+grandma%27s+hands
· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown
· https://www.historyhit.com/culture/leda-and-the-swan/
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