Something Borrowed

English is scarce homegrown, a scant 5,000 Saxon words remain. Everything else is either borrowed or stolen. The poetry of John Gower, Johnson informs us, is the first that can bde said to have been written in English. A Vaticide is a murderer of poets. You should read Sir Thomas Browne, a nut case, Johnson quotes him over 2,000 times, mostly from an extremely confusing book "Pseudodexia Epediemica" that only muddies the water in its attempt to straighten fact from fiction. Scientific writing, as it existed at the time, was mostly wrong, rehashed from misinformed sources. Herbals and Bestiaries were not trustworthy. A 'boramez', for instance (Browne) was a strange plant-animal or vegetable lamb of Tartary, which wolves delight to feed on. Most of the evening doing word searches, fielding phone calls. Met D early today and loaded the large puppet dolls into a rental car. He's off to Cincy, to pick up a new Cater and take it to the conservor; those dolls live in Cincy. Two birds. Very funny carload: three of them sitting in the back seat and one in the passenger seat. The fifth one we had to put in the trunk. The guys from the furniture store next door thought the whole thing was hysterical as they watched us loading and getting seatbelts around the girls. Got him on the road, then played a game of finding the loan forms for Pegi. They were confusingly in several different places. Got that straightened out, then started a list of the ten thousand things that need doing before Thursday. This is going to be a week from hell.