Disclaimer

    When I can’t think of the word I want I can usually come up with a word like it, which I then plug into my favorite synonym site, WordHippo. Other sites give you a handful of words, but WordHippo yields a plethora. And if the word you want is not among them, it will generate another batch and then another. 

   Just the other day I couldn't think of the word disclaimer. I knew that my word was a kind of a warning so I plugged warning into WordHippo and the deluge began: notice portent Mayday, handwriting on the wall. I hit the try again button: tip alarm harbinger admonition. And again: cautionary reminder cautionary tale shot across the bows. Hippo was hot, in fact it was burning up, but it was not hitting the bull's eye.

  So I did what I used to do before the Internet was invented  I got off my butt and pulled my Roget's Thesaurus off the shelf. Of course Roget's provided many fewer synonyms than WordHippo. A search under warning did not produce disclaimer. But it did toss up caveat which I perceived as boiling hot. So I plugged caveat into Hippo and up popped disclaimer. Easy as pie.

  This whole process had taken a quarter of an hour, but it was fun. Roget's gives lots of old fashioned synonyms such as Cassandra and Mother Carey's chickens. I knew Cassandra was the Trojan priestess who had the gift of prophecy, but was cursed with no one believing her. But who or what we're Mother Carey's chickens? 

   The simple answer is that the seabirds storm petrels are called Mother Carey's chickens by sailors who see them as harbingers of storms. And Mother Carey? Mother Carey is the wife of Davy Jones. She and Davy send storms to wreck ships and she and Davy dine on drowned sailors. So I learned something interesting and got a blogpost for my troubles.

The backup team