"Like thin, strange, secret frogs" -- the bizarre and memorable simile with which T. H. White introduces the brothers Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth in his Arthurian novel The Once and Future King. (This is Gawain of Green Knight fame; The Green Knight is also the title of an Iris Murdoch novel.) They live in Orkney, in the extreme north of Scotland, and speak Gaelic.
"Thin, strange, secret frogs" could also be yet another name for the "monkeys"/"bugs" of my early childhood. Thin, check. Strange, check. Secret, check. Frogs? Well, my 2013 poem "The Bugs" appropriates for its title characters the distinctive onomatopoeia from The Frogs, and in a comment I speculate that "Aristophanes might have been acquainted with this same riffraff, whom he dubbed 'frogs' for those same 'orrible starin' eyes which led me to call them 'bugs.'" The poem also has an epigraph from another Murdoch novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and connects the bugs with the "minor presences" that haunt the character Tallis Browne. In a memorable scene, Tallis pushes a wheelbarrow around the city; "a useful wheelbarrow for putting things in" is one of the "three mysterious gifts" Tim and Patrick give William Alizio. Tallis's estranged wife is called Morgan; Morgan le Fay is the sister of Morgause, who is the mother of White's four thin, strange, secret frogs.
Basidiumites, the Mushroom People in Eleanor Cameron's novels, also have frog-like characteristics, being baldish, greenish, and big-eyed. Frogs are associated with mushrooms ("toadstools"). Mycetians -- "resident alien" Mushroom People, like Tyco Bass, who come from families that have been living on Earth for generations and who can pass as human -- consider Wales to be their Earthly homeland, and most of them have very Welsh names and speak with a Welsh accent. (Tyco eventually reveals that his original name was Tyco ap Bassyd.) This ties in with White's Celtic "frogs."
Contemporary memes (I saved this one on November 13) also associate frogs with a word suggesting Bassyd and Basidium:
Little Green Men with Celtic names are of course a link to the leprechauns that came up in "William Alizio's links to other stories." In fact, the dismissive way the news reports the story of Tyco Bass's "blowing away" reminds me of the "Crichton Leprechaun" incident. Even when a leprechaun shows up in Mobile, Alabama, it's in a neighborhood with a Scottish/Welsh name. Who all seen da leprechaun say yeeaahh!
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Something I have come across lately is a tendency on the part of "based" online commentators to substitute "brd" for based. I have mostly noticed this proclivity at The American Conservative, where an editorial decision has apparently been made to write "brd" instead of "based" in any context whatsoever (though it also seems that I've encountered this elsewhere). For example, just this morning I read an article at TAC that included the following clause: "The Economist magazine, the London-brd weekly..." I have relentlessly googled brd vis a vis based to no avail. Given your previous musings on R = ay, etc. I couldn't help wonder if this might somehow be relevant.
I've never seen "brd" anywhere. Do you have any links?
I used to write my initials as ВЯТ (for Вильгельм Якоб Тихониевич), which is quite close to BRD.
Here's the link to the quote I referenced above. Strictly speaking it isn't behind a paywall, but they do ask for an e-mail address and don't let you proceed without rendering one. Drop the link into removepaywall.com for easy access.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/berlin-balances-budgets-while-washington-drowns-in-debt/
Interestingly, if you do a ctrl-f for "brd" you'll find both the quote about The Economist and another use of the expression in a more technical context at the bottom of the page.
Also: with an eye toward covering all "bases" whilst taking a sidelong glance at the context of the linked article, another instance of brd is Bundesrepublik Deutschland, which is commonly initialized BRD.
P.S.S. I couldn't help but wonder about brd as a Semitic consonant string--something you'd be infinitely more capable of researching than I. For whatever it's worth, it apparently connotes the idea of cold.
https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/dictionary-of-deities-and-demons-online/barad-DDDO_Barad#Barad_3
https://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=brd
An update on the "brd / based" phenomenon: I'd assumed that substituting brd for based was the province of "based" or based-adjacent commentators, such as TAC. Tonight, however, I was reading an article from The Washington Post when I came across the following: "This examination of the lead-up to Ukraine’s counteroffensive is brd on interviews with more than 30 senior officials..." When I subsequently clicked through to get the archive.today version, it was there printed "based" rather than brd. So now I've no idea what's going on.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/04/ukraine-counteroffensive-us-planning-russia-war/
P.S. Lol. It finally dawned on me. The "based" culprit is removepaywall.com, which I often use to try and get behind paywalls. They must have a hack or whatever that respells every instance of based with brd.
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