Today's word: equestrienne (n.) a female horse rider.

Anyone who knows me well knows I'm not a fan of horse racing. Still, when Michelle Payne won the Melbourne Cup in 2015, riding Prince of Penzance, it was a big deal, as she became the first female rider to do so. "Ride like a girl" is a movie due out next year about her story.

In terms of prize money, the Melbourne Cup is the richest turf race in the world, and second in total prize money only to the Dubai World Cup, which is run on dirt. In comparison, the Kentucky Derby ranks nine, and the Grand National ten, in prize money.

Worldwide, that's a lot of blood money.

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.

Thanks for reading.

Photo by Tmaggs1 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.

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