Tag Archives: word tasting notes

sylphlike

Posted on December 8, 2013 | 1 comment

In my note on svelte, I used the word sylphlike (ahh) and said “I have to catch my breath after the frisson that runs down me saying that word.” As you can see, this is persistently true.

What is it about this word that gives me such a flash of soft delight, so unselfconscious? No doubt it has something to do with that softest of fricatives /f/ between the two liquids /l/ and /l/, like the sensation of sliding between two silk sheets. In fact, watch how you say the /lfl/: your tongue most likely stays touching its tip behind your teeth while your voice cuts out and your lower lip makes that delicate, hesitant but wanting gesture against your upper teeth as I described in svelte. The net effect is like a hand touch being surreptitiously maintained while lips brush your cheek accidentally on purpose. And at the beginning of the word is a whisper, and at the end the /k/ makes the tongue kiss the palate at the back, near the neck.

I think, too, that this word has a strong taste of snowflake, which is the most sylphlike form of water. There is also the airiness of soufflé. And that’s appropriate, because a sylph is, originally, an air spirit, a light sprite, the waif fashion models of the spirit world.

You may reasonably think that a sylph is a figure from Greek mythology, source of naiads and dryads and fauns, language that has given us so many ph and y words. And indeed sylph (and from it sylphlike (ahhh)) may owe something to Greek. But the word itself, like the thing it names, is a creation of Paracelsus, a 16th-century German physician and alchemist and generally interesting person (do look him up, won’t you). He described them as invisible elemental beings of the air, and the word appears to have come from a blend of Latin sylva ‘wood’ and Greek nymph (I am just going to assume you know the word nymph).

The modern application of sylph to a light, lean, svelte, slender, graceful girl no doubt owes something to the airiness and to the nymphiness. It is worth noting that Paracelsus’s sylphs had no soul, which adds further to the air the word has of waify fashion models.

But even if sylph has too extreme a sense for many a person, sylphlike (oh) may be applied with less self-flattery or self-flagellation, a word for a person who is not quite so airy-fairy or soulless but still occupies the ethereal realm of your mind and eyes, and a word that dives into the soft heather but does not stay there; it flies out again, a brush with a fleeting touch and withdrawal, a flicker, a flirt, a soulful afflatus. A word that is made to be whispered softly and closely into the ear. A word that looks as though its hair is standing on end – and that makes my hair stand on end. But in the best way possible.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

frugvolous

Posted on December 7, 2013 | 2 comments

My wife is a generally frugal person, but she does like to blow the occasional wad on something frivolous. I wouldn’t say she’s penny-wise and pound-foolish – she’s generally pound-wise too – but she has her breakout moments from fiscal restraint. We were talking about it today, and I confected a word for it. Fruval? Frigolous? No, let’s blend just a little bit more. Frugvolous.

And of course you have to know the two words blenderized into this one or you won’t know how to pronounce it. After all, the frug is obviously a closed syllable, so we don’t normally do the “long” sound – indeed, we usually do a whole other sound altogether, the sound in drug. But English is a language with a rather frugal set of letters (not much more than half as many as we have sounds that they represent) but a frivolous way of using them to represent sounds. So this frug is the same sound as in frugal – and in the dance called the frug, which is frugal in the footwork and frivolous in the arm movements.

Where do the two bits of this word come from? From Latin, both of them. The frugal part is from frugalis, ultimately from frux, ‘profit, utility, fruit’ (yes, fruit and fructose come from it too). And frux is properly pronounced to rhyme with cooks. The frivolous part is from frivolus ‘silly, empty, trifling, brittle’, ultimately from friare ‘break, rub away, crumble’. So somehow frugvolous derives from crumbly fruit.

I guess you could also spell this word frugvalous – why don’t I let the readers (and any future users) vote on that in action. But I wonder which of the two would tempt more to mispronunciation: i.e., to putting the stress on the second syllable instead of the first.

No surprise that anyone would do that, though. The two consonants /gv/ back to back make it harder for the second syllable to be entirely reduced and unstressed. We don’t normally pattern sounds that way. But there’s no specific rule that forces stress to be on one syllable and not another in English; we have general patterns, but so many exceptions, largely thanks to having stolen so many words from various other languages.

I guess we could look for a single word that would express the alternation of frugal and frivolous. But that word would not, in form, actually be constructed from an alternation of frugal and frivolous. Why not be frugal with the available word forms and frivolous in how we combine them?

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

svelte

Posted on December 4, 2013 | 2 comments

Oh, to be svelte. To be as light as felt, a suave fellow or a lass as light as a velleity, not swelling like Elvis but sweltering hot: no thicker than the drop of sweat that falls down your brow at the sight or the plucked eyebrows of a stylish lady. And stylish, yes, svelte always seems stylish, fitted, bespoke tailored.

For this is a word thick with connotation. Look on Visual Thesaurus: svelte connects to three nodes, one of which branches to slight, slim, slender, another to lithe, lissome, lissom, supple, sylphlike (I have to catch my breath after the frisson that runs down me saying that word), lithesome, and again slender, and the third to polished, refined, and urbane. The svelte person may be lean but is not meagre; this is a person of substance as Cognac is a beverage of substance. To be svelte is to have the air of an eau-de-vie of humanity: a special one plucked out from among the many. I was in my youth slender by nature but could barely manage svelte at even the best of times.

Obviously the word seems to privilege leanness, although I would not say it necessarily implies that a person who is not lean cannot be attractive or of substance – there are other words for them; this just isn’t a word for those with much more than a whippet’s physique.

Look at the word: you can read into its forms the traits of its object if you wish, the lithe s, the plunging v-neck on the evening gown or the lapels of a tuxedo, the svelte tall man l and his svelte consort t, and the eyes e e that watch them pass. Say it: your lips barely move but your lower lip just lightly brushes against your teeth, making the small gesture that might pass over the soft, light lips of a lean beauty as she thinks carefully whether she can keep herself from kissing this dashing fellow, or over the fellow’s lips as he, too, uncertainly prepares for possible osculation with this sylphlike (ahhh) lass.

You can also guess that the word may have roots in Italian and French. The silent e ending that doesn’t make the previous vowel “long” is a sign of French, but the sv onset is not – much more likely Italian, since the word doesn’t overall look Sanskrit or Swedish. And in fact English got this word unchanged from French, which modified it from Italian svelto, past participle of svellere ‘pull out’, originating with Latin ex ‘out’ plus vellere ‘pull, pluck’.

There aren’t too many other words that have made it into English with sv at the start; the OED lists 12, of which half are proper nouns, and four are from Sanskrit, four Scandinavian, only one Italian. The fictitious character Svengali is one of the remainder: the mesmeric impresario of the chanteuse Trilby. The least svelte term of the bunch is the linguistic term svarabhakti, which is borrowed from Sanskrit. It names the insertion of an excrescent vowel sound into a word, as when one says “fillum” for film – or “sa-velt” for svelte: an unfashionable thickness.

Thanks to Hal Davis for suggesting today’s word.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

hallmark

Posted on December 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

I recently told a friend that Henry of Pelham’s Baco Noir was one of Ontario’s hallmark wines.

In retrospect, that may or may not have been the best word to use. Tell me what you think of first when you hear or read hallmark.

Um-hmm. Speakin’ of which, Christmas is coming, with all those greeting cards, many (though not all) of which are made by Hallmark. And some days – especially non-vacation-day “holidays” such as Secretaries’ Day and so on (is there a Project Managers’ Day or an Administrators’ Day or an Editors’ Day?) – are referred to derisively as “Hallmark holidays” because they seem to exist just to sell five-dollar pieces of cardboard.

Ah, what hath Joyce Clyde Hall wrought? J.C. Hall (a guy; Joyce was not always a ladies-only name) was the businessman who, in the first two decades of the 1900s, decided that greeting cards were going to be a big thing and started making and marketing them. In 1928, already well established, his company was renamed Hallmark. And thus a word for an attestation of quality started on its roll down the commercial hill to being a synonym for something trite, saccharine, and commercial. I imagine people named McDonald (and those uncommon people named Disney) have some empathy with this.

What, after all, is a hallmark? Well, in London, there is a building called Goldsmiths’ Hall, the home of the Goldsmiths’ Company, which was created to regulate the trade of goldsmiths in England and, since 1300, has been responsible for testing the quality of gold and silver articles – and, since 1975, platinum, and, since 2010, palladium. (The architecture of the current Goldsmiths’ Hall, built in the 1800s, looks just vaguely Palladian, but for no good reason.) The mark that is put on gold, silver, platinum, and palladium to indicate that its quality has been officially tested is the mark of Goldsmiths’ Hall, which is to say, the Hall-mark – now rendered hallmark.

It’s a nice word, really it is. It has that echoing thrall of hall, which can be many things (Kids in the Hall, hall pass, study hall), including some rather positive ones (deck the halls; all those noble buildings called ___ Hall). And it has the mark, which is a similarly common word that can name a blemish or a seal of approval (bourbon drinkers will think of Maker’s Mark) – or a person, including the author of a gospel. Hallmark starts with a breath, then rolls into a dark liquid /l/, firms further into the pillowy nasal /m/, and passes through that retroflex liquid /r/ to a hard stop at the end /k/. In short, its sound is reminiscent of the sight of the logo of a movie production company emerging through clouds or blur to resplendence at the beginning of a film.

And hallmark has good uses. A little searching on Bartleby.com pulls up a couple of examples of common figurative use: “Turgenev became the idol of all that was eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a hallmark of good taste” (Maurice Baring); “the desirability of the aigrette as the hallmark of wealth and fashion” (Edward Bok).

An indicator of quality. Of good taste, perhaps. A stand-out; emblematic. A distinguishing trait. Imagine giving someone a Christmas gift that you consider a hallmark of taste or fashion: the perfect brooch or tie, perhaps.

Now imagine saying that you are giving them a hallmark.

Sigh.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

usher

Posted on December 1, 2013 | 1 comment

In my note on terpsichorean I mentioned that I met my wife ushering at a dance festival. Laurie Miller commented in response that I should taste usher.

Uh… sure! Why not? Usher is something I have been and done many times in my life. It comes with being a theatre person and, in my younger years, sufficiently impecunious that I couldn’t afford tickets to all the performances I wanted to attend. Ushers, you see, at least in Canadian and American society, are very often volunteers whose only recompense is getting to see the performance they are ushering, and occasionally getting tickets to other performances. And of course in university drama departments ushering is done by students under obligation. It’s part of that set of theatre functions known as front of house.

So I got very good at pointing things out using a flashlight, and at encouraging people to comport themselves appropriately (including occasional hushing, assuring, and keeping people from rushing), and at navigating vestibules and stairs in the dark. That last skill was essential, because you would not want to treat the audience to an impromptu performance of The Fall of the House Usher.

Usher is indeed a family name as well, probably based on the occupation of its first holders back in medieval times. Noted bearers of the name, also sometimes spelled Ussher, include the Irish bishop who determined through some Biblical number-crunching and interpolation that God created the world at the nightfall before October 23, 4004 BC. There was also Hezekiah Usher, of Boston, the first bookseller in British North America. And there’s a popular singer of our times who goes by the one-word name Usher (it’s actually his first name; his family name is Raymond).

But never mind bishops and booksellers and singers and horror-novel title characters. What everyone seems to want to know is, do ushers ush?

That seems sensible, doesn’t it? Editors edit, after all, and porters port and doctors doct and barbers barb and… hmm, wait, no. It doesn’t always work. Ushers usher. But it’s a very common jocularism among ushers to speak of ushing. In theory, an usher could threaten a noisy patron with “If you don’t hush up you’ll be ushed out.” Which looks like pushed out with the p left behind. But we know that people are not ushed out, they are ushered out. Out what? The door, of course; ushers are first and foremost doorkeepers.

That’s where the word comes from, in fact: Latin ostiarius, from ostium ‘door’. “Aw, sure,” you say insincerely, “that’s obvious.” Well, here’s how it got from there to here: the Latin was worn down to Old French huisier (modern French is huissier); that had variant spellings such as ussier; it came into English and became usser or uscher or ussher or usher. And for what they did they simply used the same word as who they were. Well, if you can doctor, why not be able to usher? Backform it to ush and you have a word that’s a little too close to hush – and it sounds like “a shh,” which of course ushers have been known to utter… in between the ushering in and the ushering out.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

terpsichorean

Posted on November 28, 2013 | 3 comments

I first heard this word in an episode of the CBC comedy radio show Doctor Bundolo’s Pandemonium Medicine Show – a couple of pretentious types were making love talk and one of them referred to “the terpsichorean twilight.” I didn’t really know what it meant, and the context was utterly unhelpful.

Also, they pronounced it with the stress on the chor. Which is probably how most literate Anglophones would say it on seeing it for the first time: “terp-si-cor-ee-an.” But that’s not the approved pronunciation.

Nope, it dances around some. What you need to know first is that this word is an adjective formed on Terpsichore. Does that look like it should be “terp-si-cor”? Nuh-uh. In the original Greek, it was Τερψιχόρη, “ter-psi-kho-ré.” But in the great (awful) English classicist custom of putting the accent on the antepenultimate in all Greek words, it came to be “terp-sickery.”

And since in English we usually try to avoid putting primary stress on the preantepenultimate syllable, especially when there would be no secondary stress after it, for terpsichorean we move the stress to the penultimate syllable because we can’t have it on the syllable before that because that one is utterly reduced and unstressed and it would be just so wrong to have it get full value after being reduced to zilch (even though it was the long syllable in the Greek original). So it’s “terp-sicka-ree-an.” As I said, it dances.

And dance is where the back half of it comes from: χορός khoros ‘dance’, root of choreography but also of chorus (because choruses in Greek dramas dance). The first half is from τέρπειν terpein, verb, ‘delight’. Together they made the name of the muse of dance: Terpsichore.

That’s a nice, light-footed word, isn’t it? Tapping as it does on the tip of the tongue, the lips, the tip, the back and tip again. It’s often used to refer to dance in general: “Do you fancy a bit of Terpsichore?” But it has a bit of hidden ill in it. Right in the middle is “sick”; in terpsichorean the end has an uncomfortable echo of diarrhea. And I can’t remember when or where, but I remember seeing twerpsichore. Which I guess is douchebag dancing.

Or maybe it’s a term for my efforts in undergraduate dance classes. I bet you didn’t know I took introductory classes in modern dance, ballet, and jazz dance. I got something in the order of a C in modern dance. My worst mark ever. Obviously it was a course I needed to take, because I knew nothing of it at all! And I was very tense and uptight. All my muscles were tight, everything was jerky. I showed a bit of what I had learned to one of my roommate’s friends, a dancer, and she burst into laughter.

In ballet, that kind of tension can pretend to be self-control. Sure. I got a B+, which was an A for effort and a B– for technique. In jazz dance I think I got a B or B–. Those courses destroyed my GPA (well, OK, not destroyed; they just kept me off the Dean’s List). And I’m really glad I took them. I’m still not a great dancer, but I’m better than I was, and I learned a lot more appreciation for it. And I love to watch dance.

So does my wife, who has a BA and MA in dance. In fact, dance is how we met. Not actually dancing – I don’t think my twerpsichore would have charmed her. We were just ushering a dance festival. And now we can usher ourselves out to a nearby theatre in the terpsichorean twilight to watch dance performances.

Thanks to Dawn Loewen for suggesting today’s word.

3 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , ,

drecky

Posted on November 27, 2013 | 1 comment

Ah, sleep: the nightly frontier. To boldly, or at least relaxedly, go where one has gone before, and yet every night a new hypnagogy, every morning a new hypnopomp leading to brekky. Dreams are when your brain takes out the trash, and every day’s dump brings new junk for the dogs of dreamland to strew over the lawn of your subjunct consciousness. Sometimes dropping into the nightly trek to Never-Never Land is as easy as splitting an infinitive. Sometimes it is rather more tricky. Last night was one of the latter for me. And today I felt drecky.

Drecky? Like junk. Like crap. Rubbishy. As though my hypnagog got run over by a dumptruck, and instead of hypnopomp I had an unappealing circumstance, washing back and forth over the limen while trying in repeated dreams to remember the Chinese character for ‘play’.

OK, so have you never seen this word drecky before? If you search it on the web you will find a few definitions, among which the Urban Dictionary one stands out – the others will tell you it means ‘trashy’ in a literal sense, but Urban Dictionary hews to the derogatory sense of trashy as applied to young women. Given that most of Urban Dictionary appears to have been written by adolescent boys, this is not so surprising.

But obviously drecky is an adjectival form of dreck. And dreck is what? A word I first learned long ago from MAD Magazine (which writer I can’t remember, but it may have been Mort Drucker). It’s a word we got from Yiddish (often spelled drek there; in German it’s Dreck). It’s normally used to mean ‘junk, garbage, trash’. Actually in Yiddish it literally means ‘excrement’ or ‘dregs’. It appears to have a common Indo-European etymon with Greek σκατός skatos as in scatological.

It’s a good word for derision. The /d/ grinds into an affricate and the lips round as it growls into the /r/ and the sound of a “wreck.” The tongue pulls back and crashes at the velum; the lips widen apart. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the motion of trash being swept into a dustpan.

And today I felt like a dustpan that hadn’t been dumped. My mental trunk was full of junk. The porcelain bowl of my mind had not flushed clear. I felt like dreck. I felt drecky. Fortunately, like Dracula, I come to life after dark no matter what. And the taste of a word will always do the trick for me.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , ,

lumbago

Posted on November 26, 2013 | 1 comment

“Oh, my lumbago!”

You know, I used to see that line in cartoons and other fictional things fairly frequently. When? A lumberjack’s years ago… back in the time when Winnebagos were a big thing. But who talks about lumbago now? There’s a whole generation that probably doesn’t even know what it is.

So what is it? Just what’s now commonly referred to as lower back pain. Picture a person stooping forward a bit, hand on their lumbar region, little cartoon stars popping away from it like fireworks. When afflicted by lumbago, you lumber around, bagged, glum and stooped as Gollum, barely ambulatory and most unlikely to gambol. You are like one of those marionettes that are miraculously cured by the oh-so-crisp-sounding Robaxacet (a product of a time when no one says lumbago, though).

But what is the etiology? (Not the etymology – I’ll get to that in a moment.) According to the dusty definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s “A rheumatic affection in the lumbar region of the body.” But if you ask the newer entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Lumbago is considered by health professionals to be an antiquated term that designates nothing more than lower back pain caused by any of a number of underlying conditions.” Muscle strain, herniated disk, sciatica, scoliosis, even some osteoporotic kyphosis… all fall into this catch-all. No wonder it’s not used much anymore.

Well, it really is not a new term. It’s been in English since the 1600s, coming from Latin unaltered in form or sense (except that we say “lum bay go” rather than “loom bah go” as Latin would have it). The root is Latin lumbus ‘loin’. Which provides a good opportunity to remind everyone that although we often use loins to refer to the pubic area, it really in the main is the part of the torso between the hips and the ribs (on comestible quadrupeds too: this is where loin chops come from). The loins are the part you gird – for example, with a weightlifter’s belt. The vertebrae of this stretch are called the lumbar vertebrae. If the lumbar region is in good order, you are limber; if it is as stiff as timber lumber, you may have lumbago.

Except no one really uses that word anymore.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

lingonberry

Posted on November 25, 2013 | 1 comment

“KVALITETSGARANTI: Denna produkt är utvald och kvalitetstestad. Skulle du ändå inte vara nöjd med dess kvalitet, ber vig dig höra av dig till oss.”

What’s the lingo? What’s going on? It’s just the quality guarantee on the lingon.

Lingon? Do I perhaps mean Klingon? Not at all. Although the contents of the package are a gory colour, they are altogether vegetable. Or, more precisely, berry. The front of the plastic tub bears the legend LINGON SYLT and then, below a picture of the eponymous berries, 1,5 kg.

Yeah, baby. It’s a 1.5 kg tub of lingonberry sauce. And only $10 at the annual Swedish Christmas Fair (just $1 more than three styrofoam cups of glögg)! It may be the only cheap food item ever to come out of Sweden (and yes, although the brand is Eldorado, it is made in Sweden). But when 1.5 kg is probably about a week’s supply for a typical Swedish household, you have to price it to move…

Oh, the lingon is the hot centre of Swedish cuisine, its pulsing red lingam. OK, maybe that’s a slight overstatement, but think of the role of ketchup in American cuisine. Lingonberries are something in that line for the Swedes. You’d think that they kept them healthy. And maybe they do.

I first heard of lingonberries in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook my mom had when I was growing up. In the instructions for our single most-used recipe in the book, Swedish pancakes, was the final admonition, “Pass lingonberry jam.” Which, however, we never did. Look, we were in Alberta in the ’70s, OK? Also we weren’t Swedish. Sorry. Reg and I just buttered the pancakes, poured quarter-cups of white sugar on them (you think I’m exaggerating but I’m not), rolled them up and ate them. So it was years before I discovered the wonder that is lingonberry. Discovered that it’s really pretty much a small cranberry.

Indeed, lingonberries are also called mountain cranberries, and they are a related species to cranberries. But they’re also called csejka berry, foxberry, qualiberry, beaver berry, red whortleberry, bearberry (though I’m pretty sure what we called bearberries in Alberta were another thing… hmmm…), cougarberry, mountain bilberry, partridgeberry, and cowberry. It’s that last one that reveals its link to cranberries.

You see, the Latin word for ‘cow’ is vacca, and the related adjective is vaccinium. Yes, as in vaccine – the first vaccine was cowpox virus used to stimulate antibodies against the related smallpox virus. And the name of the genus of both the lingonberry and the cranberry is Vaccinium. It does make them sound like health food, doesn’t it? But it’s just because apparently cows liked them.

I gotta say, though, if cows can eat these berries straight off the bush, they have a pretty good tolerance for tartness. These things need quite a lot of sugar before they’re palatable to human tongues – though once they are, they’re wonderful. (And who doesn’t want a little tart tongue from time to time?)

The word lingonberry doesn’t really capture the crisp, fresh tartness quite as cranberry does; cran has a crisp start, but lingon is soft – think about the Chinese fruit called longan: much more suited to its name. But lingon does have that sticky, bouncy ng in the middle, which is good for a Swedish sound. And if you’re speaking Swedish, you don’t need that berry bit; it is indeed lingon just by itself. It’s related to ljung ‘heather’.

But enough linguistics. It’s time for some lingonguistics. We still have probably 1200 grams left to eat (we bought it on Saturday)… Jag behöver en sked! (I need a spoon!)

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

shallow

Posted on November 24, 2013 | 2 comments

Fill a shallow pan with water, not too deep at all. Tap your fingertip lightly on the surface: it will send concentric ripples out, and a little droplet will fall off your digit. For no particularly good reason, this little gesture is what the sound (and saying) of the word shallow makes me think of, and vice versa.

There is much to this word, though. It hushes “sh” to start with, and its parallel ripples ll that come with the soft tap of the tongue tip could at any time harden just a little to reduce the thin to no thickness at all and make the shallow a shadow. And at the end the tongue recedes to the depths of the mouth, pulling back as the lips round to make as deep an articulation as we have in English. And yet the word’s sense is some level as low as you can allow.

Well, it all goes to show… actually, when all goes into show, we get shallow again. We do not get something hollow, but we do get hallows a bit out of place. And in the middle, the ll – oh! walls? How shall we account for all this? The word’s form is so deep in colour, even as its object seems sallow.

Its history goes straight back into the Germanic roots, and it seems to be cognate with shoal. As Laurie Miller has reminded me in suggesting this word, you won’t find an equivalent word for this in French. Whereas in English we have a scale with two directions, deep and shallow, in French there is only one direction, profond (deep); something that is not very deep is… well, not very deep: peu profond. So the existence of our word shallow adds a bit more depth to our tongue.

But so what if English has one word for ‘shallow’ and French has none? It’s not that France lacks shallow waters or shallow people. Not everyone there is Jean-Paul Sartre. This is a country that has given us as many foppish courtiers as scheming Richelieus. Their famous studied insouciance and carefully carefree fashions present many a person as deeply shallow, but in the end they’re just people after all. And they live in the world and use the language they have. Languages are variously deep in their various ways, and the store of words is not a solid guide to the store of reality they have to represent; the world is always deeper than the word.

So we learn our words, we learn about our words, we learn to use our words, we learn the relations of our words to our worlds. And in all this we should remember what Alexander Pope told us:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

2 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,