Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.
I have been waiting for this post all my life.
They are indeed purple, But one thing you’ve missed: The concept of “purple” Didn’t always exist.
Some cultures lack names For a color, you see. Hence good old Homer And his “wine-dark sea.”
A usage so quaint, A phrasing so old, For verses of romance Is sheer fucking gold.
So roses are red. Violets once were called blue. I’m hugely pedantic But what else is new?
My friend you’re not wrong
About Homer’s wine-ey sea!
Colours are a matter
Of cultural contingency;
Words are in flux
And meanings they drift
But the word purple
You’ve given short shrift.
The concept of purple,
My friends, is old
And refers to a pigment
once precious as gold.
By crushing up molluscs
From the wine-dark sea
You make a dye:
Imperial decree
Meant that in Rome,
to wear purpura
was a privilege reserved
For only the emperor!
The word ‘purple’,
for clothes so fancy,
Entered English
By the ninth century
.
Why then are voilets
Not purple in song?
The dye from this mollusc,
known for so long
Is almost magenta;
More red than blue.
The concept of purple
is old, and yet new.
The dye is red,
So this might be true:
Roses are purple
And violets are blue
.
While this song makes me merry, Tyrian purple dyes many a hue From magenta to berry And a true purple too.
But fun as it is to watch this poetic race The answer is staring you right in the face: Roses are red and violets are blue Because nothing fucking rhymes with purple.
Are you sure you know what you’re asking of me? Are you sure? Well, okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. This post is long and contains description of genital injury.
So as you’ll know, I worked three and a half long, hilarious years at an NHS sexual health and contraception clinic. I loved that job, and packed it in because the Tory cuts to the service meant running it became hideously untenably stressful, but that’s a story for another time.
One of my duties at the clinic was to take phone calls. Patients liked me on the phone because I have a nice voice and I’m basically completely unflappable, and they felt happy to tell me things. A vital skill in the wang biz.
One day, a man called. This was not unusual. “Hello,” he said. “I need to see one of your nurses about my, er, my chap.”
“Righty-oh sir,” I said, “are you experiencing any symptoms that you’re concerned about? It’s just a yes or no kind of question.”
“Well,” he said, and I instantly felt a dark and terrible energy pulsate down the phone. “Well… sort of. But, uh, it’s not symptoms of anything, it’s just…”
I would come to regret what I said next. “Is everything all right, sir?”
“Well.” There was a pause. I heard fidgeting. “I got a yeast infection.”
Phew, easy peasy. Yeasties are easy to fix. I sounded reassuring and buoyant. “Well that’s nothing to worry about, sir – if you don’t want to get anything over the counter from the chemist, we can-”
“No, no, that’s not the problem. Listen -” he sounded serious. “Listen, I’ll just tell you what’s the matter, and you’ll see what I mean.”
This is where, whenever I tell this story, I like to ask the listener to play a little game with me. The game is “Where Would You Tap Out?” I’d have already tapped out by going to the chemist and getting some Canestan.
“I didn’t want any chemicals on my chap, so I decided to go for a home remedy. Internet said garlic was good for yeast infections, and I’ve got a lot of garlic, so I figured that’d be all right.”
I made sympathetic noises. Home remedies for yeast infections are normal, and garlic is actually quite effective. “Oh good,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure how much to use, but I figured, I have a lot of garlic usually, so I minced a whole bulb.”
The dark energy wafting down the phone intensified.
“I packed it all over my, you know, knob, made a poultice. Packed it all over the head, like a hat. But, uh, I wasn’t sure how to keep it on..”
I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to scare him off by sounding judgemental.
“..so I just duct taped it all on. Wrapped duct tape all round it.”
Still with us? Tapped out yet?
“So er, that worked, kept it on nice and tight, and I left it on over night.”
Over night. All night with your cock mummified in garlic paste like some sort of fiendish chicken kiev.
“But, uh, when I took it off the next morning, well… garlic is…”
“Caustic,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Garlic is caustic.”
“Yeah! Yeah, it is!” he said, sounding cheerful that I, too, understood the Way of Garlic. “So I unwrapped my dick and, well, it looked kind of like… melted.”
I sat, silent, on the phone. Already I’d missed 6 other calls, watching them sail by on the other line while this saga unfolded.
“So I figured,” he continued, the terrible juggernaut barrelling unstoppably through this phallic disaster, “I should probably exfoliate it.”
“Exfoliate,” I echoed weakly.
“Yeah,” said this abject human disaster, misinterpreting my echolalic expression of horror as hearty encouragement. “So I had a look around the kitchen -” he was in the kitchen for all this “- for anything I could use and got my brillo pad-”
For anyone not in the UK, that’s what we call one of these:
I must have betrayed myself and given a gasp of horror at that point, because he quickly reassured me – “No, no, no, it’s okay – it was a new one!” before going on to describe scrubbing the affected area to remove the alkaline chemical burn that he’d inflicted on his poor, blameless cock.
“So you want to come in because of… this?” I said, assuming he would want a new dick by this point.
“Oh no, no -” he said, jovial again. “No, it’s all fine – it just, my knob’s gone all… well, it kind of looks camo print now. I was wondering if you could do anything about it looking camo print.”
No, sir. No, neither we nor anyone else can do anything about your camo print garlic cock mistake.
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