A thanatologist is a designated thinker about death. He spells out the obvious and the not-so-obvious; he classifies; he taxonifies; he divides and subdivides; he takes a long view by stepping outside his home and outside his church to look from intellectual space free of terrestrial gravity and the baggage of everyday thought.

It was an Appalachian phrase, he said, or maybe it was Ozarkian – a saying that emerged from a hardscrabble landscape, a realm of rural poverty that always brought to my mind quilts and bonnets and hand-made brooms.

My left leg has fallen asleep!

SWIFT was an apronym, an acronym that spelt a contextually meaningful word. It was meant to be fast. Indeed, SWIFT messages are literally lightning fast, travelling over wire at the speed of light, basically instantaneous.