Category Archives: the language

Giddiness

poetry, the language, , ,

I have described myself as “giddy” when I am euphoric or joyful, but the sense of the word in the following poem is more along the lines of dizzy or flighty. The poet muses about his giddy state of mind and how he needs God to save him from it.

We Orthodox are often exhorted concerning this problem of the mind’s whirlwind, and the way to calm it, as in this post: Be Still and Know That I Am God, in which we read: “This constellation of desires and feelings is a constant swirl within the mind. Since it consists of desires and feelings, it is extremely ineffective in guarding against outside desires and feelings. We are deeply vulnerable.”

The human condition has not changed much since George Herbert wrote the poem in the 1600’s. Herbert (1593-1633) was a Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest. Another more famous poet and priest, John Donne, became Hebert’s godfather when his own father died.

What has changed more is the English language, and besides the word giddy I found in this poem one that had been completely unknown to me: snudge. Merriam-Webster speculates that it is an alteration of snug, and basically means to snuggle or nestle.

But there may be more subtle and unpleasant connotations, having to do with antisocial attitudes or behavior. Crooked Talk: Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime quotes a 1676 use of the word related to robbery: “[He] gives it to his snudge, who snudges away with it to his [fence] who buyes it.” By the time Robert Nares included it in his Glossary in 1822 he said it meant “a miser, curmudgeon, a sneaking fellow.”

Obviously I am attracted to this word snudge, describing something I am prone to doing, which might be perfectly wholesome — or not. I won’t try to determine which, because that effort sounds like too much temptation for my giddy mind.

GIDDINESS

Oh, what a thing is man! how far from power,
From settled peace and rest!
He is some twenty sev’ral men at least
Each sev’ral hour.

One while he counts of heav’n, as of his treasure:
But then a thought creeps in,
And calls him coward, who for fear of sin
Will lose a pleasure.

Now he will fight it out, and to the wars;
Now eat his bread in peace,
And snudge in quiet: now he scorns increase;
Now all day spares.

He builds a house, which quickly down must go,
As if a whirlwind blew
And crusht the building; and it’s partly true,
His mind is so.

O what a sight were Man, if his attires
Did alter with his mind;
And like a Dolphin’s skin, his clothes combin’d
With his desires!

Surely if each one saw another’s heart,
There would be no commerce,
No sale or bargain pass: all would disperse,
And live apart.

Lord, mend or rather make us: one creation
Will not suffice our turn:
Except thou make us daily, we shall spurn
Our own Salvation.

-George Herbert

Springtime in the Soul

Lent, quotes, the language,
Dogwood In Yosemite Park

If you are stopping by here during Lent, you probably won’t find anything new. I put some links in the sidebar to things I’ve written before and that bear re-reading, so I humbly declare. I will be reading other blogs and thinking about your comments, so I hope that you will feel free to send along a note, even on the oldest posts, which are often about timeless subjects after all. Or an e-mail — my address is on my profile page.

About those security words that Blogger wants us commenters to decipher: I squint and guess at them, and half the time get them wrong once or twice while I am trying to comment on someone’s blog — so just in case any of my readers feels the same deterring effect here, I have removed that part of the commenting process on my blog. I always put comments through the filter of my visual approval anyway, so unless something terrible happens I’ll continue to use only that means to keep ugly things off these pages.

In Latin and other Romance languages the word for lent has something to do with 40 days, but Wikipedia tells us that “in the late Middle Ages, as sermons began to be given in the vernacular instead of Latin, the English word lent was adopted. This word initially simply meant spring (as in the German language Lenz and Dutch lente) and derives from the Germanic root for long because in the spring the days visibly lengthen.”

Of course, on the southern half of our globe, it’s Autumn during Lent, but even there, the repentance that is the central theme of Lent can be, as Metropolitan Kallistos says, “an opening flower.” Springtime in our souls!

The Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian
O Lord and Master of my life!
Take from me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness,
lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility,
patience, and love to Thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King!
Grant me to see my own errors
 and not to judge my brother;
For Thou art blessed unto ages of ages. Amen.

Journaling about footling

home, housework, nicknames, play, the language, women, writing

When I’m writing in Word, the program often tells me that I am spelling a word wrong, or that it doesn’t exist. So I head on over to dictionary.com and check it out for myself. Today it was journaling, which even they tell me doesn’t exist. Oh, yeah? Just look at my blog and you will see that it does indeed exist, though I of course did not invent it. Even dictionary.com can’t keep up on everything.

While I was on that page, I noticed their Word of the Day on the left sidebar, and footle seemed to me a curiously cute and appealing word (which Word also does not know), so I took the time to read about it. This is what I read:

footle \FOOT-l\ , verb: 1. To act or talk in a foolish or silly way. 

noun: 1. Nonsense; silliness.

Quotes:

Sometimes, on a good day, I would go upstairs with my duster and footle around the parlor, adjusting paintings and straightening cushions, knocking them into shape with such military precision that even my mother would have saluted them.
— Marion McGilvary, A Lost Wife’s Tale: A Novel 

“I say, Charlie, for any sake do play up tomorrow, and don’t footle.”
— Rose Macaulay, Abbots Verney; A Novel
Origin:
Footle has an uncertain origin. One candidate is the French se foutre, to care nothing.” Another possibility is the Dutch vochtig, “damp or musty.”

Not much to go on here, and it’s confusing. What the narrator in McGilvary’s book (I wonder if she is the Lost Wife…that might pertain to my discussion.) is doing doesn’t seem to me either silly or foolish. It just reads like housework, done with energy.

I don’t quite know what “play up” means, in the other quote given, so how am I to infer the meaning of what is given as the alternative behavior?

(One thing is clear, that people who add the subtitle “A Novel” to their book titles are more likely to use the word footle in the text.)

This all matters to me, because I’ve long been on a quest for a word for what some of us housewives do sometimes, on those days when I’m not under a deadline or working doggedly on a single big project. Instead, I do a little of this, a little of that, one thing leading to another; I am not in a rush, nor do I have urgent goals for the day, but I end up accomplishing quite a lot.

Do we just call this “housework”? I used to call it puttering, until I learned that there is too much of aimless, ineffective, and loiter in the definition of that word. When I am engaged in the behavior I am trying to find a word for, I am never aimless, and if I am not getting any physical work done for a few minutes, I am at least thinking hard or praying. And another question: As my computer and word processor are in my house, shouldn’t I consider the work I do using those tools “housework”?

It gets complicated. Keeping the housewife healthy and able is part of the maintenance of the house, just as taking care of tools is a necessary part of the work of a carpenter’s shop. So all those things I do that restore my soul are also housework. Voilà!

Once I was discussing this issue with my friend Herm, and told her about a word I coined to describe my style of puttering. It is serendipping. But it hasn’t proved terribly useful to me, since only two of us in the world know it. I don’t often need the word anyway, do I, if I am busy doing it?

Anyway, it appears that footle will not yet be of any help. Discovering it was part of my serendipping today, but did it accomplish anything? It gave me something to think and write about, and whether it was work or play, it was not aimless and it was fun!

Soul-nourishing gift from Mr Glad

Substantive 11th Day

the language

I don’t think I ever knew what a substantive was before today, which is surprising, as tuned in to grammar as I try to be. (Don’t laugh, all you truly educated people.) I was looking up a word in my French dictionary, the original one I bought as a freshman in high school for my original French class. Just the kind of thing one might do during Christmas — it is still only the 11th day of Christmas! — and I wanted to know if this particular word is feminine or masculine. However, the first abbreviation after the entry was neither f. nor m. but s. … S? The list of abbreviations in the front of the book said that  s. stands for “substantive.”

I had to look it up on dictionary.com. I wonder if any of my many language teachers ever told me that it means noun? Or, why did that word never enter my radar all these years, and demand an explanation, hanging around as it was right there in my tattered dictionary?

Not a half hour passed before I was reading an editorial on a news site, in which the word substantive jumped out at me, in that case being used as a synonym for “substantial” and having nothing to do with grammar.

It’s a very small thing to write about, especially during this week of the year when everyone is exhorting or inspiring or discouraging me with talk of goals and change and revolutions — oops, I mean resolutions. But it’s the most substantive thing I could come up with today.