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Dusty definitions
Dec. 15th, 2007 02:55 pm... I resolved that I wouldn't pretend to myself any more that I knew what a word meant when I didn't, or that the context was enough to understand it, or that I'd find out what a word meant one day, but not today. I would set my rudder against the prevailing attitude, which is that anyone who doesn't know a word we use is a fool, and anyone who uses a word we don't know is a snob. I'd look the words up then and there, and write the meaning down. I might even learn them; so help me, I might even use them, although I doubt I shall live long enough to work "banausic" and "threnody" into the same sentence (Margaret Boerner of Villanova University: it is you and your website that I refer to).
Particular interesting is the way that Meek's list of unknown words formed a negative image of his own background. Had he been a scientist — he admits to having been a literature student — I doubt he'd have had any difficulty telling his abscissa from his albedo. And had he been a philosopher of science or a student of architecture, I doubt he'd have left spandrels — although he gets kudos for mentioning squinches, always my favourite form of corbelling — out of his final paragraph, a coruscating cascade of architectural argot:
Sometimes, when you look at a building through the eyes of a writer, it is right to to be urged to see the caryatids, the loggia, the narthex, the parterre, the pilasters, the squinches; sometimes it is better to read "house" or "cathedral", and be left to construct the rest yourself.
Pure joy from start to finish.
