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Friday, June 4, 2021

June 4, 2021

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| | nippy, kudos, gambit, jangle, "buy" design.
Image from the Internet.

The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed! And couching them in Poetry is definitely NOT required.
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.

5 comments:

Ol' Man Keith said...


"Hypothermia by Design"
When the winter was wrackingly nippy,
Marshal Ney led his troops to destroy the foe's trenches.
It was a gambit that won him kudos,
exposing enemies to the cold--with their bare, naked senses.

They had help neither from frostbite nor the effects of jingle-jangle.
Jaws shuddered, morale was shot; mass surrender was Ney's angle.
~ OMK

Misty said...

"Pups"

My college friend was a hippie
with two dogs named "Skippy" and "Nippy."
To support them she managed to jangle
a job with an interesting angle.
It involved a bit of a gambit
that also required a scam bit.
She taught them to bounce doing judos
that were funny, and got them kudos.
It was enough to buy her some time
to give their game a brilliant design,
and they're now on TV online
where they're famous and where they shine.

Ol' Man Keith said...

Nicely done, Misty ~
You do find original ways to rhyme. I especially enjoyed "gambit" and "scam bit" and finding the way to pluralize "judos" to go with "kudos."
I am not sure how you mean "jangle," as it seems to be taking the place of "wrangle."
But overall, this is a truly fun poem--and a much happier way to start a day than my frozen effort.

You are giving me a brilliant idea in naming your dogs. Why not use our pets whenever we're stuck with one of those weird outlier words the Jumble likes to hand us? We can just pass it along to a fictional cat or dog--or guinea pig or tortoise for that matter.
~ OMK

Misty said...

As always, thank you for your very kind response, OL' Man Keith.
Yes, you're right that 'wrangle' would have made much more sense than 'jangle'--but JANGLE was our Jumble word so I had to go with the flow. And I suppose the hippie could have engaged in some noisy quarreling (one of the meanings of 'jangle')to get her dogs a job after she gave them some training--but not the best way to read those lines.

Didn't occur to me that I use dogs to help with awkward rhyme words--but, by all means, go for it. I'll look forward to those future pups' names.

And, of course, you can't come up with a better poem title than "Hypothermia by Design."
Brilliant.

Ol' Man Keith said...

In the interests of historical truth, let it be noted that I invented the martial "gambit" assigned in my poem to Marshal Ney.
Michel Ney, the warrior "Prince of the Moscow River," was one of Napoleon's chief generals. Napoleon called him "the bravest of the brave."
The tactic of destroying enemy havens in winter isn't entirely off the mark, as one of his famous battles was at frozen-over Kaunas (Kovno) where he was reported as the "last Frenchman to leave Russia."
"Jingle-Jangle" is real, but probably not the precise term for a stimulant used by soldiers in the early 19th century.

FLN:
Sandy pointed out the path to answer Wilbur's request to "count the ways."
In the famous tongue twister, there are nine distinct ways to pronounce words starting with "B" and including a medial or final "T."
And over 30 separate enunciations, concluding with
"...so 'twas better Betty Botter / Bought a bit of better butter."
~ OMK