So how do I measure the oil level in my car?
Electronically, of course! I remain in the car and fiddle with the end of the indicator rod and it gives me a digital dashboard readout of the oil situation without the need to soil my hands.
Lest you should think that I'm quite up with the play in matters digital, I should point out that I only learned how to do it after months of owning the dipstick-free car.
I saw one of the same model pull up so I stopped behind it and asked the driver if he would be so kind as to show me how to check my oil.
He kindly obliged though he probably went home that evening and told his wife about the dipstick of a bloke he had met on the road during the day.
In my defence, she may well have been ignorant too.
A member of this very household has just poured a glass of wine from a narrow-necked bottle and that has thrown up another good word - glug.
Not all wine glugs from the bottle but glug is the sound if you are pouring from a narrower-than-usual neck. Standard necks will produce more of a gurgle.
Another member of the family likes four-syllable words which have the stress on the first: percolator, melancholy. So we're all different.
Others might choose lithe, lissome, svelte or velvety and I'm sure everyone would agree that to express the idea of wrong way round it's hard to go past widdershins.
"The coracle whirled round clockwise then widdershins" is a sentence someone once wrote.
Of course, the coracle shares a characteristic with my own mode of transport - it lacks a dipstick. You never see anyone checking the oil in their coracle.
In fact, the coracle seems to have declined as a means of water transport except perhaps in remote parts of Wales.
In earlier days in Britain it was considered unlucky to travel round a church in an anticlockwise direction.
"He turned to his right knowing it is unlucky to walk about a church widdershins" is another sentence someone else once wrote.
One survey I found during the research process offered the following choices of pleasing words (in no particular order): serendipity, epiphany, vivacious, fudge, cinnamon, flip-flop, mellifluous, haberdashery, shenanigans, phosphorescence, languorous and discombobulate. I'm sure Rowan Atkinson could get good mileage out of that last one.
And here's a random one from another language; the Swedish for marblecake is tigerkaka.
Feel free to send me any other words you, the readers, find particularly pleasant or agreeable.
I'm also willing to hear words you can't stand even though I know that moist will come out on top.
But, as I approach the end of this piece, I am realising that I haven't really used dipstick as much as I should have so please allow me to finish in the following manner: dipstick, dipstick, dipstick.
- Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.
