From Wikipedia, about James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room:
After a year in Paris, penniless, he calls Jacques, an older homosexual acquaintance, to meet him for supper so he can ask for money. (In a prolepsis, Jacques and David meet again and discuss Giovanni's fall.)
A prolepsis is a scene that temporarily takes the narrative forward in time from the current point of the story.
“Our father invented orbisculate in college to describe when a citrus fruit squirts in your eye, then proceeded to use it so often when we were growing up that we were shocked to discover it wasn’t in the dictionary…”
Jonathan and Hilary Krieger, about their father Neil Krieger
Read the story, use the word and sign the petition!
1 archaic : given to melancholy
2 : marked by bad temper, malevolence, or spite
Merriam Webster
Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as oink, meow, roar, and chirp.
HUMAN VOCAL SOUNDS
Achoo
Chomp
Cough
Hiccup
Hum
SOUNDS MADE BY DEVICES OR OBJECTS
Bang
Boom
Beep
Ching
Clatter
Clink
Crackle
Crash
Creak
Ding dong
Fizz
Flutter
Honk
Kaboom
Knock
Oom-pah
Ping
Plop
Pop
Rumble
Sizzle
Slosh
Snap
Splat
Splash
Squish
Swish
Tap
Thump
Tick
Tick tock
Toot
Vroom
Whirr
Whoosh
Zap
ANIMAL AND BIRD NOISES
Bark
Bleat
Buzz
Chirp
Chirp
Growl
Hiss
Hoot
Howl
Meow
Moo
Purr
Quack
Ribbit
Roar
Screech
Tweet
Woof
"Rabbit rabbit rabbit" is a superstition found in Britain and North America wherein a person says or repeats the words "rabbit", "rabbits" and/or "white rabbits" aloud upon waking on the first day of a month, to ensure good luck for the rest of it. ππππππππ
Source: courtesy of Sheryl MacKay, host of CBC Radio’s North by Northwest
According to Mirriam-Webster, a grass widow can mean:
- a discarded mistress
- a woman who has had an illegitimate child
- a woman whose husband is temporarily away from her
- a woman divorced or separated from her husband
It feels very archaic... and it is. The first known use was in 1699 (the illegitimate child).
I’ve also seen more modern definitions in which the grass is a metaphor for a golf green, where one’s spouse might disappear to.
I love a new-to-me word. Recently, it was semaphore.
Around New Year’s Eve, I was telling a colleague about the time I was living in downtown Vancouver, in a high-rise, and on New Year’s morning I saw a woman’s long, elegant evening gown flapping in the wind, perhaps thrown aside near the window in the wee hours, where it slipped out, and then caught. It was the old BC Hydro building, so there were no balconies, so I don’t even think they knew it was there. I always imagined the confusion and mystery they ensued.
My colleague said, perhaps it was a signal known to few... perhaps it was a semaphore.
Courtesy of Britannica:
Semaphore, method of visual signaling, usually by means of flags or lights. Before the invention of the telegraph, semaphore signaling from high towers was used to transmit messages between distant points. One such system was developed by Claude Chappe in France in 1794, employing a set of arms that pivoted on a post; the arms were mounted on towers spaced 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 km) apart. Messages were read by telescopic sightings. Modern semaphores included movable arms or rows of lights simulating arms, displayed from towers and used to signal railroad trains. Semaphore signaling between ships, now largely abandoned, was accomplished by persons who held a small flag in each hand and, with arms extended, moved them to different angles to indicate letters of the alphabet or numbers.
"Ruth's curiosity was piqued. It was clearly a diary of some kind. She examined the cover again. Should she read it? Deliberately now, she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper, or a peeping Tom..."
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| Definition of prurient from Lexico |
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
