Just Saying

Greenblatt, in his fine book on Shakespeare, Will In The World, weaves a cogent and interesting narrative. His knowledge of the life and times is truly astounding. His grasp of the plays amazing. A wonderful way to have spent the day. A word popped into my head yesterday, in the pub, having my Saturday mid-day pint. There was a beautiful woman waiting on a bar stool for her to-go lunch order, lovely long straight auburn hair, and I thought zaftig when I went over to pick up her keys, which she'd knocked to the floor getting money out of her purse. I told her that her hair was very beautiful and she flashed me a hundred watt smile and demurred a 'thank you', almost under her breath, which took my breath away, because it was so much a bedroom voice. The pub was nearly deserted, but there was a former bank VIP down the way, the only other person at the bar, Michael, and we've started, recently, having short conversations. He's smart and liberal, and also enjoys a mid-day Saturday pint; and when I sat back down at my stool, just in time to watch Renaldo score a goal for Real Madrid, he said that she was a very attraction woman. Zaftig, I said, without a moment's hesitation, and went back to watching the replays of the goal from every possible angle. He had his phone thing out, as most people do, and I peripherally noticed he was typing something. Then he said to me that the word I had used was exactly correct, and I said, yes, that I knew it had been, that I actually stored words against their future use. Auburn is an interesting word also, from either the Yiddish or Old High German for 'off-white' to meaning 'light brown'. In the 17th century it was albrown. Someplace in that word-search I got side-tracked into ablate, which led to trying to remember what the fuck the ablative was in Latin. Nothing if not confused. In geology it means erosion, to erode, to ablate; in literary terms I'm not so sure. When I'm unsure, in language, I always try to imagine an actual situation, what was said there. It's a conceit, that I could imagine, but I play around with that. Once I was a weaver. Falstaff, Henry The Fourth, Part Two. By 1600 Shakespeare, writing Hamlet, was moving into the intensely personal, forging the language he needed, hundreds of new words in that one play alone. His son, Hamnet (twin of Judith, named for neighbors in Stratford, who named their first son William) had died in 1596, and in 1601 his father died. We know he played the ghost in productions staged in 1601. And he still had some plays in him, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest, some late collaborations, before he retired to the farm. A row left to hoe.