Augustus

 August 31 Word of the Day: Augustus

 

Augustus Disgustus

Wrote florid horrids

Monster wantsers

Greedier medias

Persian aspersions

All-mights all night

Augustus Combustus 

 

Augustus Combustus

Sold employment destroyment

Disappointment appointments

You’re hired you’re fired

Executive executions

Booked bimbo bombs

Augustus Golddustus

 

Augustus Golddustus

Made blue suit reboots

Phoney funny money

Lying without trying

Impeach speeches

Creaturely featurettes

Augustus Nonplussedus

 

Augustus Nonplussedus

Built artless arches

Stark staring statuary

Best crestfallen walls

Colosseum museums

Poison pools

Augustus Bloodlustus

 

Augustus Bloodlustus

Wrestled bantam phantoms

Lightweight lieutenants

Heavyweight headaches

Midnight monotonologues

Stormy swarms

Augustus Antitrustus

 

Augustus Antitrustus

Owed millions his millions

Doodly squat despot

Frauds rumours casualties

Lend him your last loan

Casino crumbs

Augustus Uppercrustus

 

Augustus Uppercrustus

Ate Big Mac super snacks

Diet hard Coke

Oreo afternoons

Famished for fame

Glutton for glory

Augustus Wanderlustus

 

Augustus Wanderlustus

Wrote geography autobiography

Made Greenland meanland

Israel misrule France frown

Muddle East Wild West

Gulf of Emergency

Augustus Sawdustus

 

Augustus Sawdustus

Left perks circuses

A pitiful pit full

A slumpful dump full

Golden shower caps

Olden power naps

Augustus Disgustus

Blueberry

 August 30 Word of the Day: Blueberry

 

Blueberry her tag, her registry statement at the home (temporary) from bewildering lanes of city cruelty. There to learn the hard way. To learn the scavenge of empty places, the threat of eventide that is darkness. Cat outside the bounds of domestic expectation, arrived unbidden, unknown. To be found in the crucial moment. Saoirse Blueberry O’Connor. Her chosen name after discovery. A basket on the passage to a corridor. Smell of unusual dry biscuits and lapping water bowl. Todays one upon another where a door opens on grass and green stalks. And settled sleep in dusk’s inside, dawn’s safe re-emergence.

Stimming

 August 29 Word of the Day: Stimming

 

Iso-mandala No. 206, detail (November 2020)

 Tapping fingertips upon the sill. Repeating lines of a song out loud. Saying something over again until it’s meaning is clear. Doesn’t everyone engage in at least low level, minor stimming? At a loss for words and need for words I express syllabic streams someone might call glossolalia; the gloss fills the loss. Shifting objects into a line, or special order, or equidistant from one another until it feels right. Could this minor stimming be the fractal of major stimming we do daily? Walking the same route somewhere familiar, for comforts’ sake. Doing the bins or washing-up. Furrowing the alphabet.

Vellichor

 August 28 Word of the Day: Vellichor 

Today’s word will be unfamiliar to you, very likely, arriving via a library e-list in England and Marion Smith: vellichor. Marion is responding to posts about the Tyndale Bible, but specifically about the olfactory atmosphere of rare books rooms in general. Marion herself must be a librarian but, in the nature of e-lists, due to their olfactory remoteness and social obliqueness, all we learn is about her enthusiasm for the newly discovered word vellichor, which she had heard for the first time on a radio program. She provides a link to a website called The Perfume Society, devoted to every kind of smell, with emphasis on the nice smells, and an article by the well-informed Suzy Nightingale. Clicks to Suzy Nightingale deliver a 404 Oops page so we hope Suzy is real; she is certainly the full bottle on perfumes. Suzy’s article directs her nosy readers via link towards her article entitled ‘A Shiver of Vellichor : On the Satisfaction of Finding New Words’, once more an Oops moment, making one wonder if The Perfume Society is in the business of leading readers astray. Never mind, because Suzy, if she exists, also tells us that vellichor is a coinage of John Koenig in his ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’. The link to which takes us to an Amazon page for this work, so it probably exists. Searches for this work deliver snazzy promotions for Koenig’s book, but not a definition of vellichor. Fortunately, Suzy helps us by writing expansively, outside the dictates of dictionary definitions: “Specifically, the word ‘vellichor’ sketches the overwhelming wistfulness that can engulf us when we enter an antiquarian bookshop or library, and are plunged into an olfactory sensation far beyond smelling the paper, leather and dust. Just as the olfactory word it was inspired by – petrichor – is larger than the sum of its parts; so vellichor conjures a fragrant universe far beyond the smell of a room lined with leather-bound tomes, ‘which are somehow infused with the passage of time.’ We feel nostalgia for our own past, for the memories instantaneously triggered when we pick up a particular book, for that comfort the very act of reading and escaping to another world can bring.” In other words, the coinage vellichor is precisely about the smell of old books. Vellichor, a celebration of decayed wood pulp, appears to be an invention using vellum + ichor, which is to say calf-skin + the liquid flowing in the veins of the gods. While Koenig’s coinage expresses an experience pleasurable to many millions of people, it exists imaginatively in that period in early printing when paper succeeded vellum as the main stationery for book production. The autumnal new word’s presence is as fleeting as an e-list entry, a 404-page, an Amazon sale, a website bio-line, or the smell of a room full of antique books. Further searches explain that Suzy does in fact live and breathe, in fact writes exclusively and in depth for The Perfume Society and gets flowery and grand on such ephemeral outings as Instagram, her breathing being the entire time in and out through the mouth and, significantly, through the nose.     

 

 

Light

 August 27 Word of the Day: Light

 

Rooftops arrayed at daybreak. Windows squared with new. Streets sometime were wetter. Light through garden railings. Faces washed and dry. Cloud very much whiter. Car sills winding up. City immersed in colour. Twinkle of backlane urine. Dogtag shines in fur. Brooch draws a line. Tireless reflections of watchface. Sunlight full against bookspines. Mouse twitches screen glow. Pages open for attention. Afternoon light slow bend. Faces watching the crossings. Flow shimmering under bridges. Light behind each blossom. Hair soft in sun. Home of finding switches. Wineglass curve at rim. Same fine cutlery look. Shafts inside flower vase. Tiny moon standing-lamp off.

 

 

Sentience

 August 26 Word of the Day: Sentience

 

In today’s class we learn about sentience structure. Sentience structure is how all the parts of sentience fit together. If you want more advanced and interesting sentience, you first have to understand how sentience structure works. Sentience structure is the order of all the parts of sentience: subject, predicate, objects, phrases, punctuation. They combine, they modify. Emotion comes into play, subjective states are applicable: dejects, predilections, abjects, phases, punctuality. Sentience requires at least a verb and a subject, though some musicologists dispute this. Cosmologists are tight-lipped. The same applies if you stand on your head or go for a long trip somewhere you have never been before. There is present continuous, auxiliaries, exceptions and imperatives. Imperative sentience is sometimes all you need at stressful moments or when in doubt. Stop! a single word completes sentience, at least theoretically. The verb is stop, and no subject is necessary because it’s a command. Life goes on, with or without this imperative to stop. (Some say stop is anathema in sentience.) Sometimes sentience adds objects, which are nouns that also participate in the action. Examples abound, when they can be put into words. Sentience may be direct or indirect. Verbs govern subjects, or vice versa, ditto direct objects and indirect objects, though some of those are completely ungovernable. Indirects may receive directs. Indirect objects come between the verb and direct object, leading to some awkward silences. This is harder to tell in early manuscripts with period punctuation, wingdings, daggers, and romantic outbursts. Aside from knowing the parts of sentience, you also have to follow the rules. In case you forget, here’s a quick list. Capitalize the first letter of the first word in any sentience. End sentience with a full-stop, question or exclamation mark, exclamation point, quote marks, or curlicues for all anyone cares. It’s crucial to understand how clauses work. Sometimes a clause is a complete sentience on its own. It is not always asking about your own well-being. Subordinating conjunctions need to be memorised, while you must be on guard for insubordinate clauses. To recap, there are basically four different types of sentience structure: simple, compound, complex, compound-complex. Your homework is to write a 500-word essay on common insubordinate clauses in everyday life. Tomorrow’s class will look at the relationship between independence and subordination, with special attention to auxiliaries. If you are not feeling top-of-the-morning ask your doctor for the day off.

Mania

 August 25 Word of the Day: Mania

 

Comment on Eureka Street this week, in response to the article ‘To build Claude, Anthropic needed to destroy millions of books’: “Scanning books for digital purposes has been a mania of publishers and even librarians for some decades now. This latest manifestation of the mania is directly related to the unquestioned attitude that readers have a right to read the text (any text) in every available format. Claiming though that this wholesale, indiscriminate ripping off of prime text is somehow creating a Borgesian library of all books is a pretense, a front for making money and controlling who gets access to this library of all libraries, while feeding a mindless amanuensis. Be assured, it will not be a free public library. In fact, there is no real interest in libraries at all to judge by the practices now underway: wilful indifference to authorship, physical destruction of the original books, placing silos for manipulative purposes, &c. This becomes even more serious for books pre-ISBN (i.e. 1968), where the only way we can be sure the original is the original is by reading it in a genuine library. Some of the main reasons for rare books libraries are precisely to salvage books from permanent loss, to confirm that an author really said what they said, to authenticate literature and publications against fradulence, to provide the researcher with the genuine article. Scanning itself is a dodgy business, as anyone knows who orders print-on-demand post-Gutenberg rarities. Scans flatten the text, magnify the blots and alter lettering by their very nature. To scan a book and throw away the print original is complete stupidity, a sin against the makers of the words and of collective memory.”

 

Link to the original article: https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/to-build-claude-anthropic-needed-to-destroy-millions-of-books

 

Odyssey

August 24 Word of the Day: Odyssey

 

Will he ever get to the Ithaca Theatre, its promises of fulfilment and money well-spent? He could kill for a good night out, but the enticing translator Calypso says the story’s all told wrong. This, and old wounds, do his head in so he drops a couple of lotuses. The one-eyed screen keeps him enrapt until poked off with his finger. Reviews are a Scylla and Charybdis of whirlpool opinions, cliched toppling towers here, comely cameos there. A week spellbound by the new Sirens release, he almost forgets the Ithaca, its friendly doggy smell, unsuitable clientele, and bygone matinee repeats. 

Century

 August 23 Word of the Day: Century 

Letrilla: The days of his century were numbered

 

[15^th]

She composed visions botanical

Their print fate pressed mechanical

Their colour butterflies’ capers

Their fade into cloth-head paper

The days of her century were numbered

[16^th]

He took words from everyone’s larder

Scarcely noticed the Armada

Saw how we want and let sin in

We are double inside a twin

Made light of dark with feathered wands

Joked he was more lasting than bronze

Dropped manuscripts upon the floor

Left friends to complete the restore

The days of his century were numbered

[17^th]

He ate the fruit and changed his suit

Kept changing sides and staying mute

All things to all men women too

Thought a pioneer of the zoo

The days of their century were numbered

[18^th]

He spelt out an all-mind God

Rhymings even but he stayed odd

His arguments made perfect sense

Based on assembled evidence

Versions went through ten editions

Deity through mass revisions

Back home his wig got a brush-up

Revolution the gig was up

The days of his century were numbered

[19^th]

She went to Paris, went to Rome

Somehow neither of them was home

Married once but it all went wrong

Married again and got along

Landscapes floated by like subplots

Loose ends then were tied up in knots

Her garden of azaleas

Her brother in Australia

The days of her century were numbered

[20^th]

She enumerated rewards

For all the objects she adored

The Moon that once was walked upon

Telephones that were talked upon

She marvelled at brisk energies

The sights of electricity

And for the persons she revered

Or at least that’s how it appeared

Portraits made of wishful thinking

And the levels she was drinking

The days of her century were numbered

[21^st]

He made sentences it-and-a-bit

Bitten off and chewed by an It

A cud of suddenly phrases

Without readers or their praises

Still he composed against the tide

Going along for the next ride

The days of his century were numbered

 

 

Source of the letrilla line: Osip Mandelstam, quoted from a critical essay about Aleksandr Blok, ‘Blok is described as a man of the nineteenth century who knew that “the days of his century were numbered.”’ In, ‘A history of modern criticism 1750-1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism, 1900-1950’ by René Wellek, Yale University Press, 1991, page 296.  

 

 

Careless

 August 22 Word of the Day: Careless

 

Times arrive, moments and days, when careless is accepted, the lack of notice people have given to care. Careless occurs and how an individual will find out is their test of awareness. To pay attention to the daily news is to experience high levels of carelessness, that being an implicit element of any news item. One notices a complete lack of opinion pieces addressing the matter of sins of omission, papers being in the business of telling us things that must be noticed, not that could have been avoided. Except, do they? Articles go on for pages itemising sins, the prime cause of their existence, but can also direct attention to sins of omission; if only someone had done what they ought, this would not have happened. The author has asked about the root cause of their news items, unstated but their reason for being, that cause being not just the given of sin, but also the sin of omission. We tut and scapegoat, we judge and complain, we turn the page. Sin is very popular as a subject, it seems, of interest to an average reader, especially while there is someone to blame, someone who should have done better. Such overload of news about people in the world leads to the disagreeable condition called indifference. Can indifference be quantified? Its presence could be accounted as anywhere between plethora and almost zero. Editorials never headline with Sins of Omission. But the existence of carelessness is such, it may as well anyway be the subtitle of most editorials. There is a requirement amongst editors to keep the terms simple and name the sin. The exhausting experience of witnessing carelessness daily may, by chance, even prompt one to greater awareness of our own. This can lead to guilt, doubt, neurosis, everything and sundry, regardless of immediate need and even one’s own well-being. People in well-paid positions are available to help deal with your carelessness, your sins of omission, their job being aid at a price. Relentlessly many people refuse to visit such well-paid people, choosing instead to join the rank-and-file of the indifferent. This carelessness may be indulged, becoming widespread, with the cure being remorse, or simply learning how to stop. But how? Love your neighbour as yourself, as they say, starting by learning who is your neighbour. The commandment is quite explicit, five words, while the words needed in each case may expand into books and lifetimes. The need to be paying attention is the first step. To address carelessness requires one to notice that the person is there, with needs, a task that itself is an act of care. Added to which one must have the preparedness to see the needs and act upon them. In most cases this does not involve payment of any kind, and may result in reactions and rejections that may discourage and even cause loss. Sin is so tiresome, it’s stupid. Yet times arrive when the demand to overcome carelessness cannot be put off another moment. We must do what we must with that which is at our disposal.

Image: St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne.

Care

 August 21 Word of the Day: Care

 

Times arrive, moments and days, when care is put at a distance, due to too much demand on care. Caring occurs at the level of individual capacity for caring. To pay attention to the daily news is to experience high demand on the ability of caring, equally or at all, on each news item. One laughs at an opinion piece addressing the small matter of sin, its author theorising sin into handy compartments, his article surrounded by pages of news items for which the prime cause of their existence is sin. Has our author ever asked about the root cause of most news items, unstated but their reason for being, that cause being some kind of sin? We turn the page. Sin is so unpopular as a subject unlike, it seems, its outcomes to an average reader. Such overload of news about people in the world leads to the disagreeable condition, recently coined, called empathy fatigue. That empathy can be quantified at all, with corresponding levels of plethora, balance, fatigue, and one thinks downward logically zero, would mean caring is okay for some but not for me and certainly not today with the case in hand. Fatigue in this use actually seems to mean the exhausting experience of being expected to care about everything and sundry, regardless of immediate need or even one’s own well-being. People in well-paid positions are available to help deal with your empathy fatigue, their job being caring at a price. Relentlessly many people refuse to visit such well-paid people, choosing instead to join the rank-and-file of the recently coined doomscrollers, and the like. This numbing addiction to uncaring hours spent indulging in discovering the results of sin is widespread, with the cure being weaning, or simply learning how to stop. But how? Love your neighbour as yourself, people that probably include amoral journalists and eye-rolling doomscrollers, is a lead, though how we treat each individual case of neighbour depends on who we are and how we wish to be cared for. The commandment is quite explicit, five words, while the words needed in each case may expand into books and lifetimes. And then there is the need to be paying attention in the first place. To care for another requires one to notice that the person is there, with needs, a task that itself is an act of care. Added to which one must have the preparedness to see the needs and act upon them. In most cases this does not involve payment of any kind, and may result in reactions and rejections that will discourage and even fatigue. Sin is so tiresome, it’s stupid. Yet times arrive when the demand for care cannot be put off another moment. We must do what we must with the little at our disposal. Zero won’t do. We must at least try for average.

Image: Parliament House, Melbourne

Uproarious

 August 20 Word of the Day: Uproarious

 

 Letrilla: Uproarious Waterfalls

 

Fabric only air and water

Turns sooner rather than later

Hundreds of miles down to touching

First leaf stone scale circles rushing

Uproarious waterfalls

 

Inside white haze unfreezing down

Showers shining darkening shown

Light mingling grey mass loosened speed

Edgeless almost everywhere need

Uproarious waterfalls

 

Sheoak Hopetoun Triplet Erskine

Kalimna Carisbrook Sabine

Beauchamp and other up signposts

Awash in storm above the coasts

Names out of mind aged out by stream

Head filled with sound stilled by extreme

Uproarious waterfalls

 

Why the physics takes up the slack

Where the clarity turns to black

What the answer is at the time

Whence goes water hundreds of lines

How the levels break into space

When the thunder below makes peace

Uproarious waterfalls

 

Airily when stonily as

Colourful like solidly is

Riverine down glossily to

Spaciously in urgently go

Tempesting this tempering thus

Fulfilling all fast filing must

Uproarious waterfalls

 

Spit spot sputter froth bubble smooth

Edge moss feather twig rainbow soothe

And more big rain gumleaf fern-tree

And more rain last decades burnt trees

And small rains from treetops bird dreams

And more rains on ridges upstream

More of the same or overdue

Pushing bank heights and coming through

Uproarious waterfalls

 

Reconcile

 August 19 Word of the Day: Reconcile

 

Letrilla: Reconcile the month of August

 

The queen asked the maid and the maid

Asked the prime minister who greyed

Okayed asked the treasurer just

Tell me are we about to bust

Reconcile the month of August

 

The taxman told the accountant

Told businesses and endowments

The Auditor-General cussed

Underlings tooth comb discussed

Reconcile the month of August

 

The last of the long weekenders

Told the last of the big spenders

Creditors with high-sounding trust

Nudged debtors grafted on by rust

Reconcile the month of August

 

Courtrooms overflowed with dismay

Querulous cases come what May

Judge and jury persist nonplussed

We’ll be here till we turn to dust

Reconcile the month of August

 

The cold front encountered unplanned

The warmest month since records began

Where cherubic zephyrs and gusts

Spoke sudden Aeolian lusts

Reconcile the month of August

 

Sitting

 August 18 Word of the Day: Sitting

 

Eating breakfast waking up

Keeping balanced coffee cup

 

Leaning forward as you speak

Meaning’s awkward hide and seek

 

Staring upward at the ceiling

Deciphering the carpet’s feelings

 

Pissing peaceful at stool your own

Cogitating systems upon the throne

 

Waiting arrival of the urbane commute

Watching landscapes from a window so beaut

 

Kneebone footbone to the floor mate

Sternum straight back as for a portrait

 

Sedentary ergonomic might

Typing keyboard left and right

 

Sitting pretty telling a phone what’s what

Photographically on the spot

 

Alone along a laneway alcove shaded

Squeezed in by crowds lost paraded

 

Crosslegged calm outside the rush

Knitting patterns their own weaved hush

 

Quietly quite upright somewhere somehow

Wishing waiting would end now now

 

Tickling smiling the cat’s chin

Homeward is where they let you in

 

Yoga poses or at least close supposes

Checking news is no spray of roses

 

Reading pages prolix up in bed

Slumping slumberwards in your head

 

Recollect

 August 17 Word of the Day: Recollect

 

Recollect the day, its pleasantness, resting into my pillow. The heavy fog, augury of sunny day. Kindness of breakfast barista to pay tomorrow when credit card defaulted. Jasmine, whiter than pinker over side fences. Email with good news. Progress with next week’s speech, two more sentences. Cataloguing a book by the Limbourg Brothers. Light at the end of the tunnel with an arduous task. Girl curled with lapdog curled in tram seat. Crunch of baby corn, wiggle of shiitake, and scent of rice over dinner. Paying a long overdue donation online, at last. Reading Primo Levi and listening to Mozart.

Median

 August 16 Word of the Day: Median

 

Clarinda is one of Melbourne’s top three “most tightly held suburbs”, according to a newspaper article entitled ‘The suburbs people never leave.’ Actually, the article reports residents saying approvingly it’s only a short drive to Oakleigh, so they do leave now and then, just not permanently. Oakleigh helped me grasp the location of Clarinda, a suburb I didn’t know and have never visited but seems to be on the other side of Warrigal Road, where we went to the drive-in in the old days. I am probably not alone in my ignorance of Clarinda, which is why people like living there, in another of those “best kept secrets of Melbourne.” The other two in the top three are Kilsyth South and Belgrave South, places where “home owners hold on to their properties for a median 26.9 years before they sell.“ Constant mobility is hardly a virtue of living. Wanting to escape denotes psychological anxiety. I wonder why the headline isn’t ‘The suburbs where people prefer to stay’, but such a statistic may be beyond the scientific interest of real estate. Anyway, as a watcher on a cast-iron balcony I enjoy browsing down this list, even if the same list in another paper may contain several different names. It comes as no surprise that two suburbs adjacent to my own obscure valley are in the top 20: Yallambie and Viewbank. Viewbank is Heidelberg by another name, one reason for its secure anonymity being that the main feature going through Viewbank is not a road but the Yarra River. Only two others feature in the inner east, Mont Albert and Murrumbeena, making me ask if a more meaningful list would be ‘The suburbs people most wish to leave’, though real estate is doubtless keeping tabs on them too. That Williamstown North is one of only two listed in the west is another story. Inner Melbourne is represented by old money Parkville, but also Carlton, the very mention of Carlton indicating that this early suburb has moved past its postwar déclassé legend into an entrenched gentrified respectability. I nod sagely at the naming of some of the islands of calm: St. Helena, Tecoma, Warranwood, Seaholme. Others require the Clarinda search test, Attwood and Wandong belonging I can report, like Ferny Creek and Croydon Hills, in the bracket Outskirts. Shoreham catches the eye as a questionable outlier, but the figures are thrown into complete chaos by Cape Schanck, which is not a suburb or a town or even much of a cape; Wikipedia plays safe by calling it a locality. Perhaps the whole article is a subliminal advertisement for Cape Schanck, with the intention of turning it into a suburb, but I must accept the word of the newspaper that it is somewhere people never leave.        

Lauf

 August 15 Word of the Day: Lauf

 

Is Scrabble a word game, a vocabulary memory test, or more a form of mathematical improvisation involving letters and numbers? You have to lauf. Formidable 13-year-old Dineth Fernando used this word on his way to winning the World Youth Scrabble Championship in Nairobi. Lauf he did, four letters meaning a run in bobsleighing, itself a fact known to a small percent of the English-speaking world. German, probably Swiss-German, its use here obscure even then. Dineth is unlikely to have competed in bobsleighs but he does practise 200 words per day from the official Scrabble dictionary. This reading habit is intensive training of a special order, eliminating the common assumption that players live on an intake of encyclopedias and novelese, another word Dineth put in place on his winning way. Authors of novelese, defined as writing characteristic of poor novels, bland and formulaic, might envy his word power while questioning how many of these words would ever make it into their own, or any, fiction. Latter day Joyces could well concur. Sri Lankan now living in Melbourne since February, Dineth has competed against many Australians. One player, Carol Johnsen, says Dineth is “an astounding player. The tiles just flowed for him. He got the X and the Z and the Q and they all went in the right places.” Which goes someway to answering our question. He uses his double and triple vocabulary to match double and triple word scores in a highly scientific manner, lending new meaning to the word computerate. Minceur, a French word for thinness that has entered English as low-calorie cuisine, was another of his winners. But the skill goes past knowledge of the word to where the power letters can capitalise, or grow fat if you will, by strategic placement on power squares. Only particular kinds of histrio (an archaic word meaning actor) will have that blend of aptitudes and talents, memory and attention, added to which they must keep in training. It is not enough to rely on postering, that is all the main words that send the message. Postering is another word the Scrabble histrio Dineth used in his win in Nairobi But he won by possessing words, any word but in fact the right word, to suit the occasion in play provided by the unique crossword puzzle combination confronting him in real time. It is as though all available words are equal on a level-playing field, their use being not communication or feeling or the necessities of words in the moment, but purely their perfect suitability during a game played on an enormous rebus. Dineth, his friends and colleagues, engage in a high-level language game that, long ago, broke the boundaries of an enjoyable pastime where family and friends test their English vocabulary. They are racing down their own chosen lauf.

 

Weakly

 August 14 Word of the Day: Weakly

 

Test cassettes for viruses get more sophisticated. Ailing this week, I returned to memories of lockdown tests: the swirl of the swab, sting in the nostril, goo in the extraction funnel, dropper on the test plate. “The RSV, Adv, Flu A/B & Covid-19 Rapid Antigen Combo Test is a lateral flow immunoassay based on the principle of the double antibody sandwich technique,” read the tissue-thin instructions, convincingly, extracted from the self-testing box purchased at the pharmacy. Expecting, even as I expectorated into a man’s large handkerchief, that Flu-A would register in the control panel bright red, instead a feint pink line appeared against Sars-Cov-2. This meant Positive, according to the tissue-thin pamphlet (See ‘Pamphlet’ this month, August 8 opening “Beloved of all…” for reverent description of such vital ephemera), but only what is termed Weakly Positive. I would see Red with completely Positive. This ‘Weakly’ position was signified by the pale pink band, scarcely visible, in the panel. I employed a magnifying glass to confirm this interpretation. The unusual flu symptoms of the past few days -sniffles, aches, pains universal, pulsing neck veins – suddenly made sense. They were covid symptoms, ‘Weakly’ because this year I had already had a covid shot, leaving me to think how badly I’d be suffering if I had not. ‘Weakly’, not weekly, as ‘weekly positive covid’ is, by definition as we and the world knows, impossible, the contracting of the virus making one immune for some months from further infection. So here I sit in my ‘weakly’ state which, according to current iso instructions from government and health, lasts no more than seven days. One may walk the streets but a mask is advisable near people. Stay at home and rest up. Having passed seventy, seven days is a reasonable quantity of measure, a foreseeable effort with a completion. I can practise being weakly positive. Not negative, which is not helpful, can hinder and distract, even be harmful and self-consuming. Nor completely positive, which is exhausting and a little unreal and possibly leads to quixotic or over-enthusiastic misjudgements. The panel is in, and it says be weakly positive. Potter around the place. Choose the best arrangement or the best view or best angle. Sleep at every hour when sleep suggests itself as an option. Reading matter may be negative, positive, anywhere on the spectrum, pamphlets, as long as it is read in a weakly positive manner. Pillows puffed up in bed in a warm room facilitates this style of reading. As day follows night, the longer I stay weakly positive the sooner I will recover from the reading listed Weakly Positive. No more aches and pains.

Auriferous

 August 13 Word of the Day: Auriferous

 

A Glossary of Everyday Colours

 

umbrageous

shady; yielding shade

“purple paths umbrageous in white heat”

 

testudineous

resembling the shell of a tortoise

“a deliberately slow reader, his text reflected in testudineous frames”

 

quiddany

marmalade; confection of quinces made with sugar

“their hi-vis breakfast made a queue of quiddany”

 

plunket

a kind of blue colour

“the sea was as plunket as they had ever seen it”

 

melliferous

productive of honey

“melliferous the clouds at sunrise”

 

lutarious

living in mud; of the colour of mud

“the wash-up is a fashion for lutarious home exteriors”

 

holland

fine linen made in Holland

“japan the master’s gold landscape, his clouds holland”

 

herbescent

growing into herbs

“in watercolour she had perfected herbescent abstraction”

 

erubescent

reddish; somewhat red; inclining to redness

“angry traffic halted at erubescent lights”

 

darkling

a participle, as it seems, from darkle, which yet I have never found; being in the dark; being without a light; a word merely poetical

“a blackness darkling where naught may be found”  

 

cerulifick

having the power to produce a blue colour

“musicians famed for their cerulifick techniques”

 

auriferous

that which produces gold

“acacias again auriferous in August”

 

[Selections from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755]