Hornby A.S., The Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English — 1963
This is a Dictionary of Current or Contemporary English, the kind of English used in the twentieth century by well-educated persons in Great Britain and the U.S.A. It includes also certain archaic words that are likely to be met with it literary, especially poetic, contexts...
It was hot in the bush and everythung was sizzling - especially the bottersnikes, who hated drought almost as much as they hated rain. The heat made them restless and mutinous... What would really make things better was a new king! Clever Chank poisons the bad-tempered old King and takes over himself - only to be out-smarted by the giggly Gumbles and their dry-water swimming pool. Globnsnorg are sure that joint rulers are what Bottersnikes need - one to do the bossing and one to do the bawling - until their reign is ended by those interfering Invisigumbles! But worse was to come... Oh, if only they had a proper King, and could catch those silly, slippery Gumbles or, best of all, feel a cool breeze again...
Deep in the bush live some very strange creatures... Bottersnikes have green, wrinkly skin, cheese-grater noses and long, pointed ears that go red when they're angry. Gumbles, on the other hand, are cheerful and friendly and can be squashed into any shape without being hurt at all. This was handy for the Bottersnikes who, with cries of 'GOT YOU!', grabbed the Gumbles and popped them into jam tins, ready to be taken out and put to work whenever anything needed doing around the Bottersnikes' rubbish-dump home. So began the battle between the Gumbles, who kept on escaping from jam tins, and the Bottersnikes who kept capturing them again. The trouble with Gumbles, is that when they go giggly the're silly enough for anything...
Bottersnikes are very unpleasant creatures. They live in rubbish heaps on the outskirts of the Australian bush and grumble and mutter their ways through life. With green wrinkled skin and ears that burn red with anger they are off-putting to the most charitable of characters, even the Gumbles who also live in the bush. Gumbles are squashy, shape-changing creatures who spend much time protecting weaker creatures than themselves particularly birds. Bottersnikes devote a great deal of energy to hunting down Gumbles, squashing them into old jam tins and releasing them only to act as slaves. Bottersnikes and Gumbles introduces the two species and each chapter is a separate episode in the attempts to capture and escape. Gumbles on Guard tells especially of the Gumbles' attempts to protect a lyre-bird chick from both the fox and the Bottersnikes.
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