Aniseed Balls

Recent events in Devon have made me wonder if I am becoming an aging grumpy: my incredulity is genuine. How can the media report the escape of wild boar without even a passing mention of the glaringly obvious question? I have bought wild boar products occasionally - and now it transpires that I have been completely naive to imagine that the animals were as described: wild. Is this complete ignorance on my part? Does everyone else already know that wild boar are not wild at all, but in fact the complete opposite of wild, namely penned in? Is it too obvious to mention? Perhaps only the British would put up with such a deceit of nomenclature. I know Yorkshire pudding isn't all made in Yorkshire. But surely it isn't transparent that wild boar is farmed. Please tell me that I'm not a complete dunderhead. If I do turn into a grumpy old man, animal liberation will be high on my list of invectives.

What is Self Storage? Self! Reflexive! I wash myself; I feed myself; I talk to myself; I play with myself. But it's not that simple. Some uses require a more intimate cultural perspective. A self-adhesive pad is not one that sticks to itself (though ironically that annoyance happens quite often), but one that sticks by itself without you having to apply adhesive. What about the recently introduced self-adhesive stamps? They already had glue on them. This time they stick by themselves without you having to lick them. Stretchy stuff this self business. The BBC used to irritate me with its persistent use of "self-declared demilitarized zone". Presumably the justification is that the warring factions agreed amongst themselves to limit the hostilities, rather than being imposed upon. The coup de grâce is "the self-declared war on terrorism". What the self is for in this construction is beyond me. But I posit the following. In his Complete Plain Words, Sir Ernest Go...

The capital of Madagascar is Antananarivo. This is pronounced 'Tananarive' because in Malagasy you don't bother with the first or last syllables of place names. The French changed the spelling to Tananarive, but the old place name spellings were restored in the 1960s following independence. Of course many assumed that they had restored an old name rather than an old spelling, so you invariably hear Europeans pronounce the capital with six syllables instead of four.