Should words ever fail you in an argument, you will find the plays of Shakespeare rich in personal insults. For example, "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!", says Macbeth to an intruding servant: "Where gott'st thee that goose look?".
Hamlet, too, is less than respectful to his would-be father-in-law: "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool," he calls Polonius, as he stabs him through the arras. And Richard II describes his erstwhile allies as "Villains, vipers, damned without redemption Dogs easily won to fawn on any man."
Having won your argument, however, you will not find a better put down than the Duke of Cornwall's in King Lear: "Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now." And thereby, as Othello's clown remarks, "O, thereby hangs a tail!"
Now and then, it seems, after a small meteorite has hit the Earth, eye witnesses have claimed to have found a foulsmelling jelly-like substance near the site of the fall. It is known as pwdre ser, a Welsh expression meaning "star rot", and the material has also been known variously as star jelly, rot of the stars, or gelatinous meteors. The French, evocatively, call it "moonspit" - crachet de lune.
One example of pwdre ser was described thus in the American Journal of Science in 1819: "It was circular in form resembling a sauce or a salad dish, bottom upwards, about eight inches in diameter and something more than one in thickness; it was a pulpy substance of the consistency of a good soft soap, with an offensive and suffocating odour producing nausea and dizziness."
Apart from its revolting appearance, its smell and general rottenness, pwdre ser has another interesting feature: it seems to evaporate rapidly, removing all evidence of its brief existence.
Scientists, of course, are keen to find a terrestrial explanation for this alleged phenomenon. An immediate objection to any connection with meteorites is that anything as soft as a jelly would be burnt up as it passed at astronomical speed through the Earth's atmosphere. They incline to more mundane solutions; perhaps credulous observers have found a half-digested meal regurgitated by some animal, and concluded that it came down in the meteor just seen to blaze to Earth?
Whatever the truth, the relationship between meteors and jelly is deeply embedded in legend, literature and folklore. Like the ignis fatuus and ball-lightning, the descent of pwdre ser is one of those strange and rare events which have been reported sufficiently often to give them plausibility - happenings whose essence lies in the grey zone of uncertainty between fact and folklore, between the apocryphal and the wild fantastic.