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Grunger, I'm delighted that I was responsible for you finishing off the crossword...I'd have been even more delighted if I had actually been the correct answer to 22 D. I did feature as a solution in a crossword once, but I can't remember which one.

I enjoyed the recent chatter about ships... sorry, about -ships.

Malone

It was one of my last in, and I did think of you!

The ship stuff was fun - grunger has a great imagination.

I have been told that my spelling of "governessship" is wrong as it is claimed that no word in English has the same 3 letters in succession. Yet I see that The Times final had:

25D It's fresh book with basic school skills? (4)

There is a priestship ... but no priestessship?

Thanks Grunger, I like the clue, makes me want to put the heating on :-)

I was reading today of this chap who struck me as something of a pedant (in a good way of course)…

…it was the story of Sahib ibn Abbad, a first century Grand Vizier of Persia, a scholar, poet and polymath. During his work he accumulated a substantial library of over 117,000 books (some accounts say 200,000).

When the Samanid Emperor invited Abbad to travel to Khorasan to serve as his Vizier, Abbad replied that he would require 400 camels to carry all his books, including sixty for his dictionaries alone. The catalogue of the library itself comprised ten volumes.

Accounts suggest that during the journey the camels were trained to walk in alphabetical order so as to preserve the structure of the library. Very sensible, I thought.

However, I was concerned that there was no mention of a system for the ordering of books on each individual camel, though Abbad strikes me as the sort of chap who would have had one :-) 🐪

Regarding triple letters, apparently the OED lists:

brrr, countessship, duchessship, frillless, governessship, grrr, grrrl, hostessship, postmistressship

as valid (unhyphenated) words. I could check this but am far too lazy.

Hmmm... could there be others?

I am surprised at the OED's triple letter words. They look so ugly and wrong. Only BRRR acceptable at Scrabble, which uses Collins. GRR also ok.

Browsing the news stand at W H Smith today (24th October). Daily Star front page main headline: Is there mice on Mars?

Having now actually looked in the OED, this sentence appears from 1819:

His Princeship and her Princessship; his Dukeship and her Duchessship, may also find a place in his…

Frillless last appeared in 1883; hostessship in 1616; the other "ship" words are in fact hyphenated in OED. Pretty safe to say none of these are going to reappear in popular usage.

grrr, grrrl and brrr are all in there. Brrr's first citation is from 1898; grrrl from 1991.