Unknown Words

This book from Jude is excellent, The Lost Beauties Of The English Language, is a real hoot. I'd expect nothing less, as for several years I was the only recipient of her "Bizarre Book Of The Month Club" which included a field guide to amputation. 'Deave', for instance, means to deafen, stun, or perplex with loud noise. I just read, in another context, that the military was pursuing a sound loud enough to kill an enemy, or in their words, to turn the gut to jelly. Running a chainsaw can be 100 decibels, 150 decibels can do serious damage. A strong storm moved through today, I saw it coming, and closed down everything, and sure enough lost power for several hours, so dark I had to read with a headlamp, 'deftster' is one who is deft. Of course. I have a lot of dictionaries, you wouldn't believe, and entire table, because most of them have to stay flat because they're so large, and what I find is that most of these new words (I'm sure I'm to become insufferable) fell out of usage before 1900, except for a lot of the Scottish words that came from the French. I come back, many times, to how difficult it must have been to codify English, a vernacular language that borrowed from everywhere. Those early printers had work to do. A dene is a woody valley of small extent. Rain hammering on the roof, an early glass of whiskey, and I spend the whole day reading words. Edward Gorey told me once that you should everything as if it were a 19th century novel. I called Glenn, for an ETA, and he'll stop south of Indianapolis for the night and should be here Sunday noon, so I'll need to go to town tomorrow, to lay in supplies. He'll bring a couple of good single-malts and I've arranged a couple of meals in my head, ribs, tenderloin, a chorizo dish, and I can get most of it tomorrow, but we'll have to get to town, to see the exhibit at the museum and stop at the pub. I'll be off-line for a week, it doesn't mean that I'm dead, it just means I'm having a conversation with an actual live person. Call it a vacation. Writing is so difficult and I write so fucking slowly, it'll be a treat, to engage with such a sharp intelligence. Mostly I talk with crows and rabid coons. The coons I kill with a steel spade that has a five foot handle, the crows I run off, when I want to be alone, and turn off the radio. Everything is interference. Twissle is that place where a branch emerges from a tree.