SEVERAL mornings this week as I’ve stepped outside the front door, I’ve been greeted by a mean, miserable sprinkling of snow. It’s not been enough to get excited about, but it has been enough to be irritated by – it blankets the car and carpets the ground.

While chipping it from the frozen windscreen, I noticed how all the snowdrops had disappeared. Their bell-shaped little flowers had been chiming so prettily in the chill wind, but now they were camouflaged by the cold carpet.

The only plants bravely – defiantly, even – standing out against the snow were the sunshine-coloured winter aconites. Their tight flowers held proudly aloft appeared like a smattering of yellow pinpricks which created a pattern on the carpet.

But oh, what a horrible story tells of their creation. For all their beauty, aconites are poisonous – the winter ones only mildly so, if digested, but there are more deadly members of the aconite family like wolfsbane and monkshood.

Their Greek mythological story tells how the twelfth and most difficult of the labours of Heracles was to bring Cerberus, the monstrous watchdog of hell, up from the underworld without using a weapon. Cerberus had three terrible heads which charmed people as they entered hell but then ripped them limb from limb if they attempted to escape.

Heracles, though, dragged the devil dog up from the deep using brute strength. When Cerberus saw daylight for the first time, it intensified his fury. He filled the air with his barking, turned all three of his heads from the sun and started frothing at the mouths. As he barked madly, spittle and spume spewed from him, splattering onto the ground.

From it grew the smattering of aconites, the poison from the devil dog’s saliva found in the heart of their bulbs.

The name aconite is said to derive from a Greek word akone, meaning whetstone, either because of the hardness of the flowers or because they grow among the frozen stones.

Now I know this nugget, it is difficult to look upon these pleasant pinpricks in quite the same light.

I COULD draw a discreet – and not discrete, as I learned in this column a couple of weeks ago – veil over the fact that I have made a mistake, but that would be pointless.

“Under a picture of a Georgian woman in Durham City, you mentioned the 'broach' at her neck,” emailed Jean Sokell. “Sorry, this is the wrong spelling – it should be ‘brooch’.”

And so it should.

As I prepared the case for my defence, I thought it would present the Oxford English Dictionary page on brooch which begins: “The same word as broach, the differentiation of spelling being only recent and hardly yet established.”

Then I noticed the page was last edited in 1888.

Both words came from the Latin, brocca, meaning a spike or pointed instrument. A brooch is an ornamental fastening that often has a devilish-looking spike at its rear.

A broach is a pointy thing which you can pierce, stab, broach or thrust at someone or something. For instance, you used a broach to tap a cask of ale. A broacher, therefore, was someone who dealt in casks, although we today would know him as broker, a dealer in stocks and shares.

Thank-you for pointing it out, Jean, although it has been a difficult subject for me to broach.