Today's word: three-pipe (adj.) extremely complex, requiring much thought.

My much-treasured Christmas present for 2017 is a book by Paul Anthony Jones: "The cabinet of linguistic curiosities". Each page contains a descriptive story about some obscure or archaic word. It occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to try and write, each day, a poem featuring the "word of the day" from the book.

This was inspired by two very different stories. The first is Conan Doyle's The Red-Headed League, in which Sherlock calls a particularly difficult piece of deduction a "three-pipe problem", referring to the time needed to solve it -- the time to consume three of bowls of tobacco. The second is the description of the promised land in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy as "a land flowing with milk and honey" -- a phrase indicating great beauty and abundance.

Thanks for reading.

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