Ray Bradbury on books

Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451 says:

    I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name ’em, I ate ’em.

Came across this very 'feelings' phrase

....that somewhat MELANCHOLY changing time between Day and Night...

~ Maira Kalman –  My Favorite Things

Beautifully encapsulated

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,” the pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote.

The words I'm looking at and which have gone home are "....one lives alone in a world of wounds."

An apt word

This word instantly caught my fancy. Plus, it's not too difficult to use and expresses the idea evocatively.

Oorie - Dismal, gloomy; cheerless; miserable as a result of cold, illness, etc.

Vape: The word of 2014

As a noun - ‘an electronic cigarette or similar device; an act of inhaling and exhaling the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device.’

As a verb - to ‘inhale and exhale the vapour produced by an electronic cigarette or similar device.’

Vape, the word, came into existence in 1983 when an author named Rob Stepney, writing in the pages of the now defunct UK magazine New Society, described a hypothetical device being explored at the time: “an inhaler or ‘non-combustible’ cigarette, looking much like the real thing, but… delivering a metered dose of nicotine vapour. (The new habit, if it catches on, would be known as vaping.)”

Rebecca Solnit's definition of a book

"A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another."

~ From her beautiful essay on reading and writing.

Evocative phrases

“The sere and yellow leaf” (from Macbeth.)

Sere and yellow is for I'm old.

And another one I came across:

I shall peg out one of these days.

Peg out - meaning die

Okay

In the years before the American Civil War (1861-1864), journalists thought it was great fun to misspell words for comic effect.

Writer Charles Farrar Browne (1834-1867), for example, who wrote political humor under the byline Artemus Ward, was not the only writer to adopt deliberate misspelling as a stylistic device.

Take OK. The most likely origin of OK is as an acronym for “Oll Korrect.” By 1839, this misspelling, had been compressed to O.K. Now, OK is taken as a word and not an acronym.

The word OK has found its way into just about every language on earth. It’s usually written in all capitals, and pronounced as separate letters.

Robert Ludlum

is a favorite author of mine.

I am totally in love with his Bourne series and no matter how many times I read them, I always find something new.

And I wondered what kind of a person Ludlum was. Got my answer from Paul Garrison about the Robert Ludlum he knew:

The big fellow with his arms wide, a scotch in one hand, a smoke in the other, flashing the hope-filled smile of a man who celebrated everyone's dreams. No man ever loved a wife more madly than he loved Mary. He was thrilled by her existence.

What a man!!!

And more new usage

Optics - this word is being used to express how something is being viewed. For instance - One should anticipate the optics of one's behavior, so as not to cause misunderstanding.

The theatre of it - the inbuilt drama of one's position. E.g. - Part of the job of those in authority is the theatre of it.

Agnostic - in a non-religious context it means having a doubtful or non-committal attitude towards something. For instance - He was agnostic to the decision made by the members of his political party.

New use of words

A Fox News announcer used the word 'amnetize' to mean granting amnesty to.

'Take a listen' is commonly used by news announcers on CNN.

Another uncommon-becoming-common usage I came across on Facebook is 'inbox the details'.

Two more very attractive phrases from Holy Fools

When Juliette or Soeur Auguste was shut in the storeroom, she says: 'It is past noon now, and the storeroom is dark except for half a dozen slices of sunlight against the back wall from the ventilation slats...'

And

'Time's black rosary counts the interminable seconds.'

Holy Fools

Joanne Harris has this wonderful style of delving into areas unknown, of even if they are known, talk about them does not come easily...and she turns them into lovely tales - remember Chocolat?

In this book, while telling us about how a child's mind can be changed, she writes:

'A moment comes when even the most acquiescent of them may reach a point beyond which the cartographers of the mind can map nothing more. A declaration of independence, perhaps. An affirmation of self.'

Michael Ondaatje's book

The English Patient

There are many interesting descriptions that I came across, but these word-pictures gripped me:

The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treatises quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember.

and,

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

An interesting phrase

The 'whole nine yards' is a phrase we often use without wondering where it came from. Essentially it means the same as 'the whole hog'.

There are many theories of how it may have originated - makes for interesting reading. Check out this link - it's great fun...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27477422

Wonderful reading

Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.

I particularly love the way he uses words - they are colorful, paint the picture in your mind, and yet his words are very perceptive and penetrating.

Distinction between Faith and Belief

We often use these two powerful words interchangeably. These words are powerful in that, what they represent runs deep in our veins.

Alan Watts made the distinction clear in the simplest possible way:

Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.

Faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.

Where belief clings, faith lets go. Faith is the essential virtue of a religion, provided you are not using that religion to deceive yourself.

Have you read The Pied Piper lately?

The imagery! and the rhythm of the words!!

Robert Browning's Pied Piper wears a long coat “from heel to head” which is “half of yellow and half of red.”

Pied is actually an adjective which means 'of two colors.' Originally pied was used for the colors of a magpie, which is black and white - in fact that is where the 'pie' comes from. Now it stretches to include all animals (piebald horse, for instance, which has black and white patches), especially birds with two colors.

The word is also traced back to the Middle Ages as the Carmelite monks were called 'pied friars' because their habit was a brown tunic and a white cloak.

From Uncle Tom's Cabin

......for, so well is the harp of human feeling strung, that nothing but a crash that breaks every string can wholly mar its harmony.

A gorgeous word

Feilamort: the colour of a dead leaf.

I got this beautiful word while reading about Anne Donovan's 'The wonders of Scots Thesaurus brought me closer to my characters.'

She uses the Scots Thesaurus 'occasionally as a reference, but mainly for the pure pleasure of the sounds of the words,' she says.

An ingenious new browser plug-in

This plug-in replaces the word "literally" with "figuratively" on articles across the web.

Unfortunately, the plug-in is not able to spot the correct usage of the word literally, "so if you install it, you'll also start seeing the word 'figuratively' to describe things that are literally true, as in, 'White Sox Rookie Abreu Figuratively Destroys a Baseball.' (The baseball was in fact destroyed)," says Slate.

Interested? You'll find more on this at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/apr/22/literally-figurative-program-misuse-plugin-browser?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

Mubble fubbles

This word describes a state of depression or melancholy, despondency, low spirits.

Let me take you out of your mubble fubbles would mean let me help you get over your low spirits.

I'm charmed by this word, because I think just using it - I'm in mubble fubbles - would help lift the dark curtain that occasionally falls over the heart.

Deeply affected by Asra Q. Nomani's 'Standing Alone in Mecca'

What a book! What courage and most importantly, what honesty.....amazing honesty. This book cleared all the cobwebs in my head about Christianity, even as it clearly defines the beauty of Islam.

Some thoughts beautifully crafted...

I spent my young adulthood trying to understand the amalgamation of identities within me.
(Anyone born in India would be able to identify with this)

The deepest boundaries we have are within ourselves. We are often most constrained by the fears that keep us from crossing the boundaries.

The present and the future define us not the past.

Gorgeous imagery

Reading about Maya Angelou (my favorite author, role model and the person I admire the absolute most) on How to Write—and How to Live on Oprah.com, I came across this line


"Good morning," she says, her voice like black coffee with a splash of bourbon. Even over the phone, you can hear her smile.

So important to use the right words

According to today's Daily Writing Tips - http://www.dailywritingtips.com/ -

The Internet existed before the Web.

The internet - i in the lower case - was “a computer network consisting of or connecting a number of smaller networks, such as two or more local area networks connected by a shared communications protocol.”

The Internet - I in the upper case - is a global computer network that offers a range of communication facilities, one of which is the Web or the World Wide Web created in the 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford University. He created a system of interlinked documents (e.g., web pages) that could be easily accessed by anyone using a browser.

Besides the Web, the other services that run on the Internet are the email, FTP, and Skype.

An eloquent sentence

from Vicki Archer of the fabulous blog French Essence.

I won a vintage print in one of her competitions. She sent me a personalized card with the gorgeous print. She wrote -

'It is with such great pleasure that I send you this vintage print. I am sure that it will feel completely at home...'

Somehow, this sentence - 'I am sure that it will feel completely at home' touched a deep chord, and instantly linked me, in far-off India, with the world of French Essence.

Rahul Singh

in his book Khushwant Singh...in the name of the father

hit the nail on the head when he said that 'Indians, perhaps, do not have an adequate sense of history.' Authentic accounts of India were all given by travellers from other lands who came here. Further, Singh says, 'The most objective and authoritative books, for instance, on eminent Indians have largely been written, not by Indians, but foreigners.

From Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote's bestseller captivated me. It was not only the complexity of the human beings he has portrayed that captivated me, it was his turn of phrase. Here are some examples:

About the songs Holly Golightly played he says:  'Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of piney-woods or prairie.'

The rich, handsome Brazilian whose work was 'obscurely governmental, vaguely important,'.....'was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture....'

Spring actually come alive in your mind's eye: 'Of the seasons, spring is the most shattering: stalks thrusting through the earth's winter-stiffened crust, young leaves cracking our on old left-to-die branches, the falling-asleep wind cruising through all the newborn green.'

I totally, totally love the way Capote defines Tiffany's - not only for what it is, but for what it stand for, for Holly Golightly.

It (Tiffany's) calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name. (The cat didn't have a name because he didn't belong anywhere, same as the suitcases and unpacked crates in Holly's rooms gave the impression that she was not yet 'home').

Chuffed as chips

I came across this phrase while reading the March newsletter for women writers. You'll find it at https://www.mslexia.co.uk/.

I'd known of the use of 'chuffed,' meaning delighted. 'Chuffed as chips,' caught me. My search led me to a delightful character - Blathers of Animal Crossing. He is an owl scholar. Blathers is an owl with brown feathers. His face is white and he has a yellow beak. His arms are wing shaped and he has yellow talons. His eyes are very big with small black irises. He also has big pink cheek circles on his cheeks. His belly appears to be checkered in diamonds with light brown and white squares. He wears a green bowtie. (http://animalcrossing.wikia.com/wiki/Blathers).

He is the curator of the Faraway Museum, and when City Folk bring a donation to the museum, Blathers will tell you he is 'chuffed as chips.'

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's...

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Am reading this book for the second time. It is incredible how a book looks, feels and reads at different stages of our life.

For sheer power of words, phrases that can paint whole pictures, Marquez is a master craftsman because nothing is more palpable, more real than the immeasurable solitude of his characters.

Don't read it if you are young....wait to grow up so that you get the most out of this book...

The handwritten note...

I subscribe to Daily Writing Tips, and there's always something to learn, everyday...

This one hit me hard, because I remember there was a time when I used to pride myself on writing letters and notes - used to make my letter paper attractive depending on who I was writing to. When my brother was in hostel (AFMC) I used to dip the paws of my dog, Sultan, in ink and send it to him, and I remember his telling me how his friends used to rib him saying 'not only do your parents and sister write to you, but your dog does too!' There were letter papers on which I used to stick dried flowers and leaves, and to some there would be a small drawing in glitter pen or colored felt pens...There was always something to make letter paper attractive and personal. Then I discovered handmade paper which could be personalized too, and I remember my mother getting a letter pad with each sheet dipped in colored ink - there were swirls of colors on each paper forming their own designs...fabulous.

There were also writing instruments that one would collect to use on different paper...the thick-nibbed fountain pen, the dip pen or holder pen,the quill, the calligraphy pen, the felt-tip pen, the rollerball pen, and the different kinds of ballpoint pens...

With email and msging, the handwritten note has all but disappeared. Strangely, beautiful letter paper and small writing cards with exquisite designs are now available in stationery stores.

I was so happy to read this post and want to share it with you. It's at http://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-handwritten-note/

While watching the film 'Pretty Woman'...

this phrase caught my fancy - cop a squat. Though I understood the meaning of the word 'cop' from the context, I wanted to know what exactly the word meant. The search opened up a wealth of meanings with 'cop' used in different ways.

Cop means: a) A failure to fulfill a commitment or responsibility or to face a difficulty squarely; b) A person who fails to fulfill a commitment or responsibility; and c) An excuse for inaction or evasion, along with avoid, shirk, skip, dodge, sidestep, skirt round, bypass, steer clear of, evade, escape, run away from, shrink from, slide out of, back out of, pull out of, turn one's back on...

But,

There are also other ways in which cop is used:

Cop a squat means to have a seat, sit down and relax.

In 'cop a look at this' or 'cop one of these' cop means to take.

He'll cop it means he'll be caught or he'll be blamed.

To cop a plea is to plead guilty to a lesser offence to not be tried for a graver charge.

Cop-on is used to mean Irish shrewdness or practical intelligence.

Cop it would mean get into trouble or be killed.

In 'She copped an award for her role in the film,' copped means receive or attain something that is welcome.

Fascinating, wouldn't you say?

From...

The Good Women of China by Xinran

'.......the inertia of tradition made it hard for any one of us to fix on an independent course in life.'

What an expressive phrase! - the inertia of tradition - and so full of meaning...

Sienna Craig...

has chosen her words so colorfully and yet so powerfully to convey what she wants to say:

'Our popular culture lexicon had not yet graphed the term "partner" into the space once reserved for "girlfriend" or "husband."'

(http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/18/living/same-sex-parents-sochi/index.html?hpt=hp_t5)

Found these words picturesque...

Peter Baker's report in The Telegraph, Calcutta, with regard to President Obama's invitation to President Hollande for a state dinner had this sentence I found irresistible:

'Should there be dancing if the romantically complicated guest of honour has no one to dance with?'

A word that stopped me short today...

Gaslighting.

It is manipulation of someone by psychological means......deliberate manipulative distortions with the intent to confuse the thinking...

I also thought this was a brilliant phrase...

'emotional economy' from Lessing.

Lessing says, 'As i grew older and became cleverer at managing my emotional economy....'

From Doris Lessings...

Walking in the Shade

Time is different at different times in one's life.

Thought this was a brilliant way of referring to time in one's time line...

On solitude and aloneness...

Maya Angelou says, 'Solitude can be a much-to-be-desired condition. Not only is it acceptable to be alone, at times it is positively to be wished for.'

One savors solitude...

One also battles to preserve beloved solitudes...

Aloneness on the other hand has an element of alienation. It means to be isolated and lonely...

While solitude has a positive connotation, aloneness does not.