Following last week's item concerning "wobbly spelling", I would like to thank an Australian reader for sharing his experiences when he was the sick leave clerk at a large railway workshop. He received all sorts of weird and wonderful spellings of illnesses from employees.
Unsurprisingly, influenza, or flu, was a common complaint but the workers struggled with the spelling of the abbreviated form. Among the offerings he received from sick employees was floo, flew, flue and flow.
Another regular complaint came from workers suffering from diarrhoea, which we noted last week can provide quite a challenge spelling-wise. The sick leave clerk received so many wobbly variations of the word that he gave up trying to correct them and let everything through. His favourite came from a fellow who claimed he was suffering from "die rear", which actually is not such a bad description of this distressing ailment.
Regarding sick notes, the company CareerBuilder recently held a survey, asking human resource manager what are the strangest excuses given by employees for being absent.
Among one that caught the eye was the fellow who explained his false teeth flew out of his car window while driving down the highway. Then there was the fellow whose wife found out he had been cheating on her and he had to spend the whole day retrieving his possessions from a dumpster.
But there were plenty more excuses to raise the odd eyebrow or two …
Beware toads
It's amazing how often animals are blamed for someone's failure to show up to work. Possibly the oddest is the one from someone who said he had suffered a broken leg after being kicked by a llama. More believable was the fellow who said his dog ate his bus pass so he was unable to travel. A more bizarre offering came from a gentleman who said he slipped on a toad while taking the dog for a walk. Another said he was bitten by a duck.
Perhaps the most dramatic sick note featuring a creature came from a lady who said she was experiencing traumatic stress after a large spider invaded her home.
Food is the other main culprit when it comes to absenteeism. Perhaps the weakest excuse came from someone who said they had eaten too much birthday cake and had become immobile. Another was feeling quite ill after eating cat food he had mistaken for tuna. One young worker even claimed he had been poisoned by his grandmother with a dodgy slice of ham. Perhaps the most absurd food-related excuse was the fellow who said he had broken his arm while trying to catch a falling sandwich.
After all these painful excuses, you to have to admire the frankness of several people who admitted that they simply "didn't feel like coming to work."
How tickled he was
Someone who contributed in an unorthodox way to the English language was British stand-up comedian Sir Ken Dodd who sadly died earlier this week at the age of 90. With his buck teeth, uncontrolled hair and madcap performances featuring his "tickling stick", he was an iconic performer for more than six decades.
Dodd was a regular face on television when I was a kid. He invariably began his act by walking on stage and delivering his traditional opening line: "First of all I would like to say how tickled I am,'' before pointing to a lady in the audience and asking, "Have you ever been tickled, missus?" It always prompted roars of laughter from the audience, even though everyone knew it was coming. Importantly, his jokes were never smutty, although there was plenty of innuendo.
He also created a language of his own, coming up with such offerings as "diddy" meaning something that is small and lovely, "plumtiousness", a combination of plump and sumptuous, and "tattyfalarious" which can mean anything you want it to be.
When he was awarded an OBE in 1981, the Liverpool Echo reported Dodd's response: "I am delighted. I am full of plumtiousness. The jam butty workers are discomknockerated and the Diddymen are diddy-delighted."
Now that's English how it should be spoken.
The pride of Knotty Ash
When Dodd first appeared on stage as a professional in 1954, he was billed as Professor Yaffle Chucklebutty, Operatic Tenor and Sausage Knotter.
But it was under his regular name he put the area of Liverpool known as Knotty Ash on the map.
He had a wonderful imagination and in his shows talked about the Diddymen of Knotty Ash working in jam butty mines, black pudding plantations and, best of all, broken biscuit repair works.
He was essentially a music hall entertainer, preferring the feedback of the theatre audiences rather than television. He used to tell his audiences: "This isn't television, missus -- you can't turn me off."
A bit like Tommy Cooper, Dodd's jokes were not particularly funny in themselves, but it was the way he told them. A couple of random efforts:
"When my kleptomania gets bad, I take something for it."
"I haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for 18 months -- I don't like to interrupt her."
Last word
As there's an awkward little space to fill, we'll let the aforementioned Tommy Cooper round things off with one of his classics:
"Two aerials meet on a roof -- fall in love -- get married. The ceremony was rubbish, but the reception was brilliant."
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