I’m very slowly making my way through my list of random words which I created as prompts to writing. The first one was ‘last’ and having rejected the idea of it as a cobbler’s last, I wrote about a group of people, probably students who were spending their last evening together. The next word was easy – ‘donkey’, and I toyed with the idea of my dad’s story of during the war, I think in Italy, when he had a donkey which he called Starlight which carried equipment. I decided this would need more research so I wrote about donkey stones, bars of crushed stone, sand, cement, formed into bars or stones, to use as a scouring block.
The next word is ‘spiffy’. Now, I have included in the challenge to write using the words in order – the random order that was generated, and spiffy is number 3. The next word is lumber which has far more potential, but spiffy I have, and spiffy I must use. It means stylish and fashionable, well-dressed, smart, up to date – and that’s it. I could write any story and use it, but because it’s so unusual – in fact I’d never heard of it, only ‘spiffing’ – as in great, wonderful, marvellous – that I want it to feature in some way rather than be just included.
It dates from the nineteenth century, etymology unknown, although it may come from spiffing which was apparently coined or used by Rudyard Kipling, or come from a similar Scottish word meaning drunk, or it may be much older, 1847 is one date I saw. There is an on-line shop called ‘Spiffy-the happiness shop‘, but I haven’t explored it. I did find a quote from a nineteenth century book, but unfortunately I’ve mislaid it.
This isn’t the first time, I’ve done a writing challenge like this, my writing friend Richard Kefford and I tried to write from a list of seventy-three random words. I think I managed fifty odd, but we actually published the first twenty-five:
“A challenge… can two bloggers each write a post from every one of seventy-three random subjects?
Book 1… so far… so good… just about…73 blogs… 2 writers… 1 book”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/73-1-25-blogs-Book-ebook/dp/B0842164D5
Lois Elsden 