He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

–A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic pose?

–Excerpted from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Continue reading »

Popularity: unranked [?]

My adopted word

Mes amis, I have adopted a lovely word in attempts to save it from extinction.

The word I adopted is vampirarchy, which refers to a set of ruling persons comparable to vampires.⁽¹⁾

It is now my solemn duty to “use this word as frequently as possible from this day forth in conversation and correspondence”.

Given the state of the world, this should not be a terrible challenge, though I staunchly refuse to employ it in reference to ancient sparkling stalkers of young women. That would be quite inappropriate. (Italy’s right out.)

Adopt your own ailing word at savethewords.org. As you hover over various artfully depicted words, they cry out to be rescued from obscurity. It’s lovely.

Plus, you get a nifty certificate!

Popularity: 9% [?]

Footnotes:

1. Is this a favourable association or not? I can’t tell. [↩]