Monthly Prompt: December

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The prompt for this month is:


Gift



If you think about it, we’ve got Watson’s ‘grand gift of silence’ [TWIS] and Holmes’ ‘gifts of instinct and observation’ [VEIL] and his ‘remarkable gift for improvisation’ [SIGN, Chap. 8].

There are Christmas gifts of course and, looking ahead, the gifts of the wise men. Gifts for other festivals, for anniversaries and birthdays.

A gift as a bequest, or a ‘gift’ as a bribe.

Or if you want to go for something darker, ‘gift’ is used as the word for poison in many Germanic languages. ‘Gift’ is related to ‘give’, and to quote the Online Etymology Dictionary: This shift [of using ‘gift’ to mean poison] might have been partly euphemistic, partly by influence of Greek dosis "a portion prescribed," literally "a giving," used by Galen and other Greek physicians to mean an amount of medicine (see dose (n.)).


So make your choice and like Watson, let us use our ‘own gift of words’! [ILLU]



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