Sometimes when rushing through a puzzle app, swiping words so quickly, the actual words can become a blur. I am used to telling Anne about alternate American/English versions of words, like COLOR (Am) vs COLOUR (Eng) and NITER (Am) vs NITRE (Eng). So I got into a blur where I ended up thinking BYRE and BIER were the same word, just different dialect spellings.
But no, a BYRE is a shed for a cow, and a BIER is a typically wooden platform for carrying the dead. So, if you have cattle, you can get them into the BYRE, but if you have a corpse or coffin to carry to a gravesite, a BIER would be the thing.
In German, BIER is just BEER.
And while swiping those letters, I misspelled BIER as BRIE, which is a soft spreadable cheese, like cream cheese. I can't remember the last time I actually had some, but I seem to recall it looked like cream cheese but tasted skunky and awful.
Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
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