Q (February)

Q is for Quaint, where “lies always now the notion of a certain curiosity and oddness, however these may be subordinated to ends of beauty and grace.” As, for example, the bustle, a pre-modern teapot, or the ‘ancient’ ramparts supporting the railway bridge over Burgundy Street, Heidelberg. Q itself is quaint, in its own way, whereas the word “had once simply the meaning of elegant, graceful, skilful, subtle.” Like the shift, a post-modern teapot, the upgraded Heidelberg bridge, Burgundy Street. R is for Richard Chenevix Trench (February reading) the quaint-not-quaint archiepiscopal philologist who noted this distinction in his ‘Select Glossary’(1859).