Sofas and Skunks

As of this morning, the old couch is still out on the street. I'm not sure what happened -- the council was supposed to collect it yesterday and I scheduled and paid for that pickup. I expected it to be gone by the time I got home from work. When it wasn't I called and was told there were "delays" in the scheduled pickups, but I was indeed on the list.

Of course this morning I'll call them again, but meanwhile we look like the Beverly Hillbillies of West Hampstead.

My tendency to catastrophize is running rampant: Were the items too large, and thus uncollectable? Will it cost more than I've already paid? Will we have to reschedule, leaving the items out there for another week, or will the trash guys simply put us on today's list? So many questions.

Writing yesterday's post, in which I used "sofa" in the headline but "couch" in most of the post itself, made me wonder about the difference between the two. I think most modern English speakers, at least Americans, think of the words as more or less interchangeable. I generally prefer "couch" myself -- no idea why.

According to Google' AI bots, "a sofa is typically a more formal, structured piece of furniture for upright seating, while a couch is more informal and designed for comfort and lounging, stemming from its French root, coucher, meaning to lie down." Apparently couches sometimes don't have arms, while sofas do. And then there are settees, basically also a sofa.

My grandmother used the word "divan" to refer to her couch. She had an elegant curvy specimen from the 1920s with sort of gray-pink-brown nubbly upholstery that my mom, as a little girl, knew as the "cocoa divan." According to Wikipedia it's a word of Middle Eastern origin -- just like sofa. "The divan in the sense of a sofa or couch entered the English language in 1702 and has been commonly known in Europe since about the middle of the 18th century. It was fashionable, roughly from 1820 to 1850, wherever the romantic movement in literature penetrated. All the boudoirs of that generation were garnished with divans."

There were also "fainting couches," for Victorian women whose corsets were too tight. And there are still other words for specific types of couches: sectionals and loveseats and the dramatic chaise longue.

I suppose ours, both old and new, are properly known as sofas, since they have arms and structure. But I'm still sticking with couch as my term of choice.

How many of you are familiar with these books? If you're not, let me just tell you that they are all the rage among the elementary school set. I have learned this working in the Lower School library, where the kids clamor for this series. It features various animals facing off with one another, describing their behaviors and diets and defensive skills. Sometimes dinosaurs are involved, or sea creatures like lobsters and crabs, and sometimes there's a "jungle rumble" or "battle royale" featuring multiple animals all at once. It's kind of the zoological equivalent of a cage fight. (In the book above -- SPOILER ALERT -- the skunk wins, defeating the jaguar with its overpowering scent.)

Speaking of animals, yesterday I finally unlocked the library cabinets holding our ceramic animal heads and cleaned the glass shelves. Remember how dusty they were?

(Top photo: A autumnal seed pods of the stinking iris are giving bright orange color to our flower beds.)