Words

     I finished reading Michael Frayn's novel Headlong which will be discussed at the next Round Valley Book Group  meeting in April and took the time to find out a little more about these words:

soteriology;  
irenic (I've already mentioned eirenic here);
tipstaff, self explanatory really;
lapsarian, the OED quotes a heading from the Dictionary of Christian Theology edited (?) by my theologian name-sake.

     And another painting term to keep chiaoscuro company: grisaille.

Lexicon

     The English language collects words enough that one may read a new word each day and never exhaust the lexicon. The word I read today which caught my imagination is larrikin which, of course, has to be added to the spell check dictionary. Here's part of the OED article about larrikin:

     The word seems to have originated in Melbourne not long before 1870; but the story that it was evolved by a reporter from an Irish policeman's pronunciation of larking, heard in a Melbourne police-court in 1869, appears to be a figment, no trace of the incident being found in the local papers of the time. (See Morris, Austral Eng., s.v.) A guess that has been proposed is that it is short for Eng. slang leary kinchen. Wright, Suppl. to E.D.D., cites larrikin ‘a mischievous or frolicsome youth’ from informants in Warwickshire and Worcestershire; see also quot. 1882. Cf. E.D.D., Larack (larack about, to ‘lark’ about), cited from C. C. Robinson's Dial. of Leeds (1861).]

eirenic

More Greek . . . tut, tut.

     I've been reading through a college textbook of essays and found this word. A new word to me. An unfamiliar word one comes across through reading is more likely to be remembered . . .

     What does it mean? Do you think I can remember where I read the word to find the sentence in which it was used?

The story so far . . .

     Thinks: to save money on postage and to let friends and family have some idea of what I'm doing in England I'll start a blog. In the process of setting up the account I needed a name. Oh, what the hell: Thrupnybits. (I know, I know, stop sniggering behind your hand there) And a name for the blog? Mmm . . . how pretentious can I be? I don't think I'd browsed many blogs at this time I just jumped in. I can't remember now if I made a list to choose from. Mmmm . . . seeking something . . . how about epistēmē? Mmm . . . how can I have lived through so many years and still not answered the question "who am I?" or kept in mind the adage to 'know thyself'? Should I throw away all the books and start again? Pestered again and again with the question, “What do you want to be (or was it 'do'?) when you grow up?” I have the fuel (fertile? or mere wind-egg?); do I have the fire that consumes? 

     I can only know of my early life from what I have been told and the few pictures of me. I have no memory of that time; I do not have a memory of my sitting looking at the camera, only the memory that I was told this is a picture of me with Mr. Foster. My earliest memories, which are remembered as me being the centre of my universe, occur later as consciousness awakens. I do not have an eidetic memory. What about olfactory or auricular memory? The sense of smell, though the weakest of human senses, holds the key to many early memories: the smell of the kitchen on wash day; mum’s eau-de-cologne; the orangey-whisky-evergreen smell of Christmas at home; to this day I do not like the smell of gin as I took a swig of the stuff from a bottle I thought contained soda water, ugh! Sounds from childhood include the early morning crowing of cocks; the whining hum of the milk float; the swish of cars passing down the High Street; birdsong, particularly summer skylarks and evening blackbirds and thrushes warning ‘tchick’. So, of the first two years or so of my life I have no memory and therefore no knowledge but what I was told. I don’t know what my first words were; I never asked and wasn’t told. Boys are well known for staying mum until they are about three and then spouting complete sentences . . . does that mean by inference I think girls start off babbling and then never stop? I see pictures of me when little and I think I often look slightly puzzled viz:

2+ years old with Mr. Foster, our next-door neighbour, in Kelvedon, 1953.

 

Book on the desk 28

I need to pay more attention to Keith 's little book, especially now he is no longer with us. The title echoes A.G. Macdonell's England, Their England; and England, My England a collection of stories by D.H. Lawrence first published in the United States in 1922. This is the second printing. The pages are yellowing. The book fits nicely into a pocket.

From the bookshelves 23

Not quite done with Mervyn. This is a first edition published by Peter Owen, London in 1972.

Try saying Footfruit several times in a row!

And here is another favourite word, tsk tsk Latinate again: propinquity

Out of the book-case: History Lite 21,22

How about a couple of books to make you chuckle if not burst out ROTFL? Mr. Mills nods reverently to Sellar and Yeatman in the title he chooses for his romp through the history of that great British invention (after cricket): the Railway, especially the London and North Western Railway unless you are a G.W.R. devotee.

From the introduction to 4'8½" And All That : "What is the Englishman able to do which lesser breeds find impossible, apart from watching cricket matches? Why, of course, he can laugh at himself! though I must warn anyone outside the pale that it is not permitted for him to laugh at us."

I learned this word from 4'8½" And All That: Voussoir and from 1066 And All That I learned what AEGROT means. And here's another Oxford word to show off: hebdomadal, which is not at all as common as the Old English fortnight but it comes around twice as often.

Another word or two of which I am fond . . .

Inchoate : How I feel tip-toeing or more often stumbling around the bloggosphere. Just trimmed the list of blogs I follow and changing some I've been following from 'anonymous' to 'public'. I notice that like a living organism like minded blogs and followers tend to cluster . . . then there are the two per-centers who refused to be catalogued, pigeon-holed, categorized, typed or ordered into any kind of taxonomy . . .

Words, words, words

I dipped into Poets of Our Time this morning and read John Betjeman's London. Here is the last fourteen lines:

'Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God
That brought me to these dim forgotten fanes.
Largely it was a longing for the past,
With a slight sense of something unfulfilled;
And yet another feeling drew me there,
A sense of guilt increasing with the years -
'When I am dead you will be sorry, John' -
Here I could pray my mother would not die.
Thus were my London Sundays incomplete
If unaccompanied by Evening Prayer.
How trivial used to seem the Underground,
How worldly looked the over-lighted west,
How different and smug and wise I felt
When from the east I made my journey home

I consulted the Chambers English Dictionary see what it said about "fane". Dad had a copy of Chambers 20thCentury Dictionary he dipped into when completing cryptic crossword puzzles. He said it contained a good selection of unusual words more often found in larger dictionaries. I've since obtained a copy of the compact OED and in the past had a copy of the American Heritage dictionary. I've never had the inclination to buy a Merriam-Webster . . .

Words, Words, Words I thought was the title of Jean Paul Sartre's autobiography but a quick search disabused me of that notion. It is Les Mots (Words).

Some words I've had to look up in the past include desuetude, crapulous, pranked, caducity, esurient, catamite . . .
And some of my favourite words - mellifluous, horizon, crepuscular, amanuensis (I wish I had one of those)

The dictionary is always close by. I need to use it more often. Fane? a temple. Oh I miss John Ciardi.

Acting the pedantic twit . . .

Oh, I don't have to act do I?

The overuse of the prefix pre- caused me to think about other thoughtless phrases uttered in unguarded moments that are now finding their way into print and typed on the web without the benefit of sharp eyed copy editors.

Pre-plan: "I pre-plan a visit Alaska later this year".

Pre-register: "So, if I pre-register for the course now I won't have to come back and register later? Why don't I just register now and have done with it?".

Irregardless. Different than. I have to laugh when I catch myself saying un-thaw: "What? You want to freeze it? but it's already frozen".

I could care less: "Then care less until it hurts. Care less until you have no more care to give".