This Week’s Word: Curry

Curry (vb.) To groom (a horse) with a rubber or plastic
curry-comb.

‘Your Balti horse is most enjoyable’, I observed to Mr Bennett at breakfast over my bowl of The West Midlands Cereal Co.’s Oatmeal Clusters (Mrs Spelling having refused to purchase Dorset cereals, claiming them ‘overpriced gravel, in my opinion, sir – besides, Aldi don’t stock ‘em’). At this point my back molar made fierce contact with a particularly compacted cluster.

‘Careful, Mr Teed’, my colleague offered, not entirely helpfully. ‘You should opt for softly poached eggs like me. No danger of dental misadventures here’. I grunted in agreement. ‘As for curry, I wondered why you didn’t ask me to illustrate ‘curry favour’ or something equally disempowering from the illustrative standpoint, as is your usual wont’.

Here I grunted again, in what I hoped was a conciliatory tone, but Mr Bennett was seemingly heartened by my temporary lack of voice and accompanying dental discomfort.

 ’Indeed,’ he continued, warming to his theme, ‘I took the liberty of examing the great Dictionary myself on the subject of ‘curry’, and the first definition my eye alighted on was, and I quote, ‘portions of animal slain that were given to the hounds; the cutting up and disembowelling of game; trans. any prey thrown to the hounds to be torn to pieces, or seized and torn to pieces by wild beasts; see QUARRY’. Now why, I wondered, did Teed not give me that one to do? I could have had much fun with curried entrails’. Mr Bennett paused, and what can only be described as a smirk passed across his ginger jowls as he dipped his oven-bottom muffin in the runny yolks before him. 

Finally I had succeeded in dislodging my offensively interdental cluster, thus enabling me to counter my colleague:

‘I think, Mr Bennett, that our dear Readers might object to your colourful renditions of disembowelments so early in the morning. It might, how should I put it, disincline them towards their breakfasts’. Here I pushed my own bowl away from me, unable to face another cluster.

My friend shrugged. ‘Only a thought’, he mumbled with mouth full.

‘Besides which’, I continued, ’the meaning is obsolete and archaic’.

Mr Bennett guffawed, bespattering the table with shards of egg and muffin.

‘Obsolete and archaic? Sounds heaven-sent for you, Mr Teed, heaven-sent!’