Lucy the elephant

Lucy the Elephant as pictured on three postcards, each from a different postcard era.  The linen era postcard proclaims in the bottom border:   THE ONLY ELEPHANT IN THE WORLD YOU CAN GO THROUGH AND COME OUT ALIVE.   Lucy was recently in the news; a tent that was blown from its moorings by high winds on September 11 gave Lucy a smack on her backside that broke her tail!  Hmmm, do you call a vet or an architect?  This architectural quadruped is being submitted into the Festival of Postcards, coordinated by Evelyn Yvonne Theriault. 

 

Elephant Hotel. White border era.

Elephant Hotel. Linen era.

Elephant Hotel. Divided back era

A tip of the hat

This inaugural entry in the postcardiness blog gives a tip of the hat to Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report show on Comedy Central for using some grammatical creative license to append the -ness suffix to nouns.  It was he who blew the dust off of the obscure word truthiness, and rejuvenated it in the lexicon of the English language, in “The Word“  segment on his very first show (October 17, 2005), four years ago last Saturday.  Truthiness was named the 2005 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.  In this blog, I will explore the “-ness” of postcards, and relate the discoveries and stories that ensue.