My left leg has fallen asleep!

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.

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.

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.