Rainy days and Tuesdays
Dec. 15th, 2009 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceIt may, possibly, have stopped chucketing down out there. Certainly they have fished the drowned car-corpse out of the gutter and towed it away, which is all to the good.
Even so, even if it is not raining, I am still not going out. I have coffee, and the fire's on. Also, I have as much work to do here as in the library, and days are running out on me. Onward.
Sometimes Wikipedia is a good thing. I was just sitting here thinking "the broad flat end of an oar is called the blade, but what oh what is the other end called? 'The other end' is ... inelegant," I thought. "Haft? Shaft? Who knows?" And cast vaguely about for my pictorial dictionary, which is what I usually turn to first when I don't know what the word is for a thing (because I can't look it up elsewhere if I don't know what the word is, y'know?); but I never can find my pictorial dictionary when I want it. So I went to Wiki and looked up "oar".
The shaft, it says, or loom.
Loom! How lovely...
And then of course I am smitten by anxieties. "Closer at hand, here was Pao taking one hand off the loom" - not every reader sits with a dictionary at hand or will stop to look up an unfamiliar word. Many readers will sit there thinking "Loom? What is this nonsense, loom? He's in a boat, not weaving! Moron!"
So, for this draft, a compromise: "Closer at hand, here was Pao taking one hand off the loom of the oar," and people can look it up or not as they choose.
Actually, of course, I shoulda known it anyway. It hath a vaguely familiar feel to it, but more than that: I grew up in Oxford, damn it. Oars are a feature of an Oxford childhood, or used to be...
Even so, even if it is not raining, I am still not going out. I have coffee, and the fire's on. Also, I have as much work to do here as in the library, and days are running out on me. Onward.
Sometimes Wikipedia is a good thing. I was just sitting here thinking "the broad flat end of an oar is called the blade, but what oh what is the other end called? 'The other end' is ... inelegant," I thought. "Haft? Shaft? Who knows?" And cast vaguely about for my pictorial dictionary, which is what I usually turn to first when I don't know what the word is for a thing (because I can't look it up elsewhere if I don't know what the word is, y'know?); but I never can find my pictorial dictionary when I want it. So I went to Wiki and looked up "oar".
The shaft, it says, or loom.
Loom! How lovely...
And then of course I am smitten by anxieties. "Closer at hand, here was Pao taking one hand off the loom" - not every reader sits with a dictionary at hand or will stop to look up an unfamiliar word. Many readers will sit there thinking "Loom? What is this nonsense, loom? He's in a boat, not weaving! Moron!"
So, for this draft, a compromise: "Closer at hand, here was Pao taking one hand off the loom of the oar," and people can look it up or not as they choose.
Actually, of course, I shoulda known it anyway. It hath a vaguely familiar feel to it, but more than that: I grew up in Oxford, damn it. Oars are a feature of an Oxford childhood, or used to be...