Granny's 70th birthday this week is stirring memories, including this from Robyn Slattery of Heathcote. "In the 1950s at an Earlwood public primary school fancy dress night, a student wore a long dress made completely out of strips of the Granny column." Well, history shows we cover whatever takes your fancy.
At the optometrist an assistant "arrived" me by taking my details, writes David Grant of Ballina. "When I mentioned this to an acquaintance, she said she had not only been 'arrived' but also 'resulted' at the radiologist recently. I tried to discuss with her whether this transitivisation of the intransitive was acceptable or even necessary. She said I should get out more."
My gripe is ridiculous over-packaging, says Graeme Lewis of Williamtown, after buying a new laptop. "It was in a box. Big box. There was another box. Then yet another box. Why? One box was sufficient!" Must be a cover-up.
Stephanie Edwards of Wollstonecraft is worried. "The slip slop slap message has clearly not reached tennis fans. Many in the crowds on TV are sitting in full sun in singlet tops and without hats." If they're courting trouble, then so are the players, warns Gregory Abbott of Macleay Island. Repeated use of sweaty "germ-sponging towels" handled by ball boys and girls, and even thrown to the crowd, is a recipe for enteric bacteria and E. coli. He calls for sanitised one-use-only towels.
A story on pirates seizing a ship off The Philippines got Patrick Sutcliffe of Wahroonga thinking. "Why do we call it that, as well as The Netherlands and The Falkland Islands? Why not The Australia or The New Zealand?" He'd like your definitive help.
Almost, David Wilcox (C8) ... Lynne Cook says students of Class 3B at Grafton High School have been in regular contact by letter, phone and now email with her parents, former teachers Rex, 91, and Jill Cook, 89, since 1952. "A relationship very much cherished by both parties."
If it's a riot of kookaburras (C8) for just laughing uproariously, Gordon Drennan's mind boggles at the collective noun for cockatoos. "They screech deafeningly. They fight with each other. They destroy everything. And, other than that, they're lovely birds."
Finally, reading the string of gift gaffe stories (C8) reminds Denis Minehan of Cooma of the daughter who gave her father an iPhone, the mother who gave the daughter an iPad and the father who gave his wife an iRon.
Twitter: @Column8SMH