Word of the day
Jan. 31st, 2011 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceActually, it's not a word of the day, it's a definition of the day.
One of the happy coincidences about what I'm working on and where I'm working: here in the Silence Room of the Lit & Phil, right by my table is a shelf of old dictionaries. I would almost say redundant dictionaries, except that they're not. I may be the only one who uses them, but I do it all the time. It's like linguistic research, all done for me; my particular favourite is an edition of Nuttall's Standard Dictionary from 1930. Basically, if a word's in here, it would have been available for use in the early '40s, which is when my current novel's set. If it's not in here, not so much, and I have to be more careful.
I would have said "in common use", as it's clearly meant for a popular dictionary (it even has pictures, occasional little line-drawings, like a cyclopaedia); but actually the other reason I love it, besides its usefulness? It is full of words I don't know. Words that have plunged out of use, even out of dictionaries, in the eighty years between then and now. I can't look in this book without discovering new stuff.
Today's word is "fatiscence", and its definition goes like this:
a gap or opening; a state of being chinky.
A state of being chinky. Hee.
One of the happy coincidences about what I'm working on and where I'm working: here in the Silence Room of the Lit & Phil, right by my table is a shelf of old dictionaries. I would almost say redundant dictionaries, except that they're not. I may be the only one who uses them, but I do it all the time. It's like linguistic research, all done for me; my particular favourite is an edition of Nuttall's Standard Dictionary from 1930. Basically, if a word's in here, it would have been available for use in the early '40s, which is when my current novel's set. If it's not in here, not so much, and I have to be more careful.
I would have said "in common use", as it's clearly meant for a popular dictionary (it even has pictures, occasional little line-drawings, like a cyclopaedia); but actually the other reason I love it, besides its usefulness? It is full of words I don't know. Words that have plunged out of use, even out of dictionaries, in the eighty years between then and now. I can't look in this book without discovering new stuff.
Today's word is "fatiscence", and its definition goes like this:
a gap or opening; a state of being chinky.
A state of being chinky. Hee.