The publicity department here at Casa Maywrite continues to pull out all the stops in its unceasing efforts to make more than a handful of readers aware of the John the Lord Chamberlain series.

Today, in The Devil's Nine Questions at the Dames of Dialogue blog, Mary writes about riddle songs from a 19th century collection of English and Scottish popular ballads.

Riddles are similar to mysteries in that they are puzzles whose solution requires some exercise of the intellect. I'm sure everyone knows that a newspaper is black and white and re(a)d all over. But what's green and all over?

Well, apparently our winter. Aside from a couple of four inch snowfalls both of which melted within a week it's been green since the beginning of December, and I think it is safe to say that once April has arrived winter's over.

Now the mystery is where did last winter go? I hope it didn't just leap ahead to team up with next winter in an Apocalypse of snow for 2013.

Words can be mysterious too but in the case of a new word you don't need Sherlock Holmes but merely a Dictionary. This week I ran across the delightful word: tergiversate.

The definition is to change sides: to make deliberately unclear, ambiguous, or contradictory statements

It caught my attention coming around the same time as the news about Mr. Etch-a-Sketch. Does this mean we should call the candidate, the Great Tergiversator?