Category Archives: writing

April Has Nearly Blown Through

Maui, Pascha, travel, writing

April is almost past, but we are still in the Paschal season, thank God, and I say, CHRIST is RISEN! Indeed He is risen!

Since Pascha I have been able to spend time debriefing myself on our trip to Maui that was completed a month ago today, and I’m ready to start sharing with the world some of the highlights of that exalted holiday excursion. The posts will be labeled with “Maui Diary,” so that anyone not interested the topic can know to pass on by and wait a couple of weeks for something different.

Yes, I’m afraid I do have about two weeks’ worth of posts on this one trip!

So…here we go….

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

More Writing and Friends

friends, writing


The last year flew by, and now my blog is TWO years old. I feel like giving a party for all my blogging friends, to celebrate. But that kind of thing does not belong to Blogland, so the best idea I can come up with to mark the occasion is — what else? — to write a long and possibly boring blog post.

What did I ever do before I started writing a blog? I wrote long e-mails, and real letters with ink, and articles about this and that which hardly anyone read. (And there was a homeschool newsletter.)

When I started Gladsome Lights I expected it would give me a convenient format for sharing recipes and garden happenings and such like with my longtime friends and family. At the time I did already have a manila folder full of scraps of paper on which I’d written thoughts that might turn into something, if I ever took the time to sit and ponder over them with pen in hand, but the potential was for more thinking with myself.

Suddenly I was connected with people who for various reasons actually take time out of their day to read what I write, or at least to check in and look at my garden or pie pictures, and it’s not just because they are my children or feel otherwise obligated. I’ve always had several real-life friends like this, but there wasn’t an easy platform for sharing. I’ve also had the third kind of friend, the authors with whom I interact, but reciprocity is lacking in that case.

If you are reading this, you might be one of these people who has been wonderfully stimulating to my mind and heart, just by offering occasional feedback. At some level you know me better, from reading my ramblings, than my nearby friends who aren’t the blog-reading type, because it’s a rare personal encounter in which I can find the words to express the things I do in writing.

Of course, words aren’t everything. It might be wise to ease off, and spend less time exulting in the fun of working to crank out a few decent paragraphs every week. But my manila folder has only been getting fatter, and my Blogger drafts folder is virtually overflowing. Reading other blogs of homeschoolers, philosophers, gardeners and homemakers (some of you are all of those together) gives me even more things to think about, to read, to try and to do.

It feels like I’m just getting into the swing of this writing life, and I don’t think I’ll stop anytime soon — unless God makes it clear contrariwise. It’s an inestimable gift from Him, this time I have to think and to enjoy all the things I do, and to write. And if you are still reading this, know that you are a gift to me, too.

Grousing About Grammar – Bad Sentence

quotes, the language, writing, , , , ,

One thing I didn’t tell you in my recent review of Wordstruck by Robert MacNeil is how he gave an admonition that made me wonder if I am the right kind of influence on people:

“If you love the language, the greatest thing you can do to ensure its survival is not to complain about bad usage but to pass your enthusiasm to a child. Find a child and read to it often the things you admire, not being afraid to read the classics.”

MacNeil quotes a man named Hugh Kenner, who said of some people that they “took note of language only when it annoyed them.” In the days when I frequently read to my children, especially when they were older, I must say in my defense that I do remember stopping at least occasionally to point out particularly well-written sentences. But when the bad sentences force you to stumble or pause or halt completely as you try to figure out what is going on, you can’t help but be annoyed and take note of them, too.

This happened to me just today, and once again I will reveal myself in full nitpickerliness. The sentence that held me up fails in more than one way, so it’s very useful. I’m not going to tell you where it came from, but the author has a (recent) doctoral degree in Intellectual History. I’m not sure why I think that should mean something pertinent to my complaint…but let’s just get on with the beginning of his article:

F.M. [abbreviation mine] lived his life as a poet, a playwright, a novelist, a journalist, and a Roman Catholic. Born in Bordeaux during the year 1885 to a bourgeois family, M.’s mother tenaciously held to her religiosity. His father’s side of the family, on the other hand, sported Voltairean, republican, and anticlerical sentiments.

You can probably guess what happened to me as I was reading briskly along in the first sentence, then cruising through the stop sign period and on to the comma in the second sentence, fulling expecting that M. would be there after the pause — Oh! M’s mother is here, how odd…that must mean the author was talking about the mother’s birth in Bordeaux…strange that he would start out telling us about M., and then in the very next sentence start in on the mother…and there is his father in the following sentence…hmm…I don’t know much about M., but I don’t actually think he is recent enough that his mother could have been born that late…the author must be talking about M.’s birth, then. Too bad, now I have stopped thinking about M. and his mother and am all focused on this writer, poor boy, who spent so much effort in school and can’t get his lovely article off to a decent start.

Before moving on to find out more about M., I had to skip to the end and read the blurb on the author… next I began a rewrite of his problematic beginning in my head — so many times I have done this for myself and five children, trying out different arrangements of words and clauses so that you say what you mean and your reader can read you as effortlessly as possible.

What happened here is called a dangling participle or dangling participial clause. The “Born in Bordeaux” clause actually has no subject (it’s dangling there unattached), but we naturally expect the subject to be close by, so we try to attach the clause to M.’s mother, but it doesn’t really belong to her. The Wikipedia article to which I linked tells it all very clearly, along with other examples that are often funny.

One way that this particular beginning could have been rescued would be to make it slightly longer. Sometimes it just gets awkward, trying to pack too much into a sentence, and the best thing is to make one or two more sentence so you don’t muddle things. To put his birth and his mother’s religious attitude into one sentence seems to be hurrying along too fast, as though the author were just stringing his notes together.

And don’t try to be too clever in switching the order of your clauses and phrases. That’s partly how this writer got into trouble. It’s only the second sentence of your whole article, so certainly you can afford another sentence with the direct and simple subject-verb order.

To say that M. was born “during the year 1885″….It must just be a careless wordiness, because “in 1885” would do nicely, and during gives the impression of an ongoing activity. The time of birth is a date, not a duration.

How about this re-do of the second and third sentences, putting the mother into the father’s sentence, and we don’t even have to add lines. Taking out some commas makes it a  little cleaner, too:

He was born to a bourgeois family in Bordeaux in 1885. M.’s mother tenaciously held to her religiosity, while his father’s side of the family sported Voltairean, republican, and anticlerical sentiments.

Now that I’ve got that settled, I can go to bed. I’ll take the article along and hope I can keep my mind on M. this time.