You won’t know these words from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, but I bet you’ll recognize the feelings: He’s since created a website that one writer called “delightful for etymologists and wordsmiths…a beautiful experiment on the fine line between babble and Babel.” The idea was that it would contain all the words he needed for his poetry, including emotions that had never been linguistically described. He was trying to write poetry and instead created The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It was coined by a John Koenig, a student at Macalester College in Minnesota. I am filled with a deep, delicious feeling of chrysalism.ĭon’t know that word? It means the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
I’ve taken the laptop out to sit on the screened in porch so I can listen to it. The rain is still coming down hard here in Tally, a steady tattoo backed up with a low rumble of base drum thunder. You love to stitch them together to make stories. That is true of any of you who are reading this post now. Mostly, I love the process of trying to put a bunch of words together in just the right way so as to make someone else try to understand the world as I do. The aged woman evidently “has bats in her belfry,” and will be tried before Judge Bishop at 3 o’clock this afternoon. Jane Jones, who stood guard over the putrid remains of her daughter, Ella Jones, at her home on South Fourth street yesterday, and would not suffer them interred until Coroner Nance went to the house with a police officer, to enforce a burial, was arrested this morning by Constables Patton and Futrell on a writ of lunatico inquirendo and taken to the county jail. Jane Jones Seems to Have Bats in Her Belfry.Ĭonstables Patton and Futrell Have a Time Taking Her. It dates back to 1897, from an article in the Paducah Daily Sun: You fellow crime dogs are gonna like this. I had to go look up where that came from, of course. Which makes me think of our own idiom bats in the belfry. Which means she has a spider on the ceiling. Or as the French say, elle a une araignée au plafond. And from my Tupelo-born friend Philip: If she were any dumber we’d have to water her. And there are all the great variations on a theme for not-so-bright folks: He’s not the brightest bulb on the tree, sharpest knife in the drawer, a few fries short of a Happy Meal, dumber than a bag of hammers. A CEO might be a big wheel, but in France he’s une grosse legume (a fat vegetable, which seems very fitting in many cases). Same in French, by the way: oreilles en feuille de chou. Metaphors and similes tickle me to death. I love how we take a word that means one thing and make it stand for something else. Miam Miam is French for yum-yum although to my ear it sounds like a cat who’s digging his Fancy Feast. Badaboum! means crash! Patati patata is their version of yada yada yada. The French, I have learned via Babbel, have their own versions of sound-effect words. There is a ten-dollar word for this I learned in high school - onomatopoeia. (The weather would have gone to the dogs). If I were in Toulouse, Il fait un temps de chien. If I were in Tupelo, where my friend Philip was born, it would be raining harder than a cow pissing on a flat rock.
Like I said, it’s raining here in Tallahassee today. They give special spice to the places where we live. Unless you’re British, then it’s just slang for bloke. So a word that was used in the Middle Ages to refer to an actor now means a crabby old dude. It comes from the obsolete word guiser, meaning someone who walks around in disguise, a performer in a masquerade. I love finding out where words come from. This morning, reading a newspaper opinion piece on the grid crisis going on in Texas, I found out what a kakistocracy is. Both things made me realize how much I love words. And I just finished my French Babbel lesson, which happened to focus on weather.
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