SOME people will believe any words that they hear, particularly on the telly. Take my own wife. The windscreen of her van was badly damaged recently outside the Creagorry Hotel on Benbecula. Bad crack, that.
However, rather than mope and fret and throw plates at me saying it was all my fault, as she usually does, Mrs X became very excited because of three words: Gavin from Autoglass.
She wanted him to come round and start smearing his stuff all over the glass like he does in the TV commercial.
I think the best she can hope for is someone from Bells Road to do a full replacement job. And, sadly for her, I am not even sure that the boys at Hebridean Coachworks do house calls.
In the aisle at Tesco the other day, I heard a forgetful housewife call to her friend saying she hadn’t got the paper towels. She asked her loud pal to get them for her. But which ones, boomed the pal. The ones that are always on the box was the reply.
She was talking about the ones promoted by a Hispanic-looking gentleman called Juan. That name is so apt because it is, of course, pronounced so very like the word One.
And the surname of this dashing Zorro-type figure happens to be Sheet. And one sheet, because you can wring it out, is all that the makers of this towel claim is required for any job.
How lucky for him and his future career that Mr and Mrs Sheet decided to call their lovely new babby Juan?
So when her piercing, and pierced, pal by the washing powders screeched back asking if the amnesiac housewife, indeed, meant the ones advertised by Juan Sheet, she did not elongate the vowels in the surname sufficiently.
She said . . . well, you know. The muzak had been turned down. We all heard it.
Our housewife could only bawl back: “His name’s Sheet. Did you get that? It’s Sheet. S-H- . . . ”
It is important to check words and get them absolutely right, which is what they should do at the Lord’s Day Observance Society (LDOS). They are frantically trying to stop Stornoway Golf Club opening on a Sunday. It’s all made very clear in the Fourth Commandment, they say.
Yet the LDOS, and some other preachers, have been very crafty. They choose not to mention the other passages where the message is very different.
In fact, the Good Book suggests that the last thing we should do is even listen to people who think they know better when it comes to telling us what to do.
Not written for so-called scholars to put their own spin on it, the Bible says we should not let anyone judge us by what we eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a new moon celebration or – wait for it – a Sabbath day.
That’s clear enough for me. So the golf club should have a drinks licence and serve grub better than those sandwiches turned up at the edges. You will find it all there in Colossians 2:16.
If the licensing board disobeys that biblical mandate for seven-day opening, will its members be headed for a very hot place?
If the Free Church is right, they could well be.
So forget the LDOS. Check the truth out yourself. It’s fantastic what you find if you actually read the old manual yourself instead of letting barmy sabbatarians with silly agendas frighten the pants off you.
They just pick the bits that suit their population-manipulating ends.
Wait till I tell you this one. The Almighty is really not that bothered about people getting married. In fact, he goes so far as to say it is good for guys not to even touch a woman. I found that in Corinthians. Who knew?
Maybe that’s just my Bible. It’s obviously not in the Free Church version.
Words are important and we can use them how we want. Sir Sean Connery, for example, carved a glittering career out of not being able to do other accents while also suffering from what is usually regarded as an impediment by not being able to pronounce the letter “S” very well.
Typical SNP supporter
It will be the nationalistic knight’s 80th birthday in August and, wait for it, there is to be a Talk Like Sean Connery Day. That’s when everyone will be expected to talk like him.
Shir Shean has decided that imitation is the best form of flattery. So fans will pout and say stuff like: “It’sh good to shee you,” in a faintly East Lothian kind of way.
I am not making this up.
I think I’ll sit that one out, as the wrinkly thespian might say.
It is easy to get our words wrong at the best of times. We all do it – in speech and in writing. Even me. I once actually wrote that a London fruit and veg merchant had lost a watch made of 24-carrot gold. No one else noticed, either, and that vegetarian nonsense is what appeared in the paper.
There’s a man in Stornoway I will not name, because I value my life, who also sometimes gets some words just a wee bit wrong. One of his best was when he announced to a colleague that we should all vote Labour because conservatories do nothing for the working class.
And you know, in a funny way, he was absolutely right.
The same fellow makes no secret of the fact that he is very wary of women drivers. He was telling a gaggle of his workmates that he found the fairer sex to be very unpredictable on the road.
However, the way he put it was: “I was behind a woman driver at the Macaulay Road roundabout last night and she had no idea what lane she should be in. She kept switching from one to the other.
“But that’s women for you. The way they drive is very erotic.”
