We Certainly Have Made a Hames Out of This

I mentioned earlier that for anyone going along with the ruse that Lake Ontario is now named Lake America, the HOMES mnemonic no longer holds, the only two valid words in English with the new five letters are hames and shame , and that hames is rather too obscure. But it’s not so obscure in Ireland, where they use it in an idiom : to make a hames of something is to make a mess of it. With that in mind, it’s hard to say which is more apt for this embarrassment, hames or shame . (The other longsta