Secret, secretary

One more from Ammon Shea:

I’m constantly finding that the former meaning of a word differs significantly from how I know it today. When I learned that secretary meant “one privy to a secret” during the fourteenth century I was utterly delighted. And then almost immediately I began scolding myself for not having realized such an obvious precedent, and thought that I should feel no excitement at discovering something that in hindsight seems so obvious. But it is exciting to make these little discoveries about the language, and it shouldn’t matter at all if they are obvious to someone else.

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (New York: Penguin, 2008).

The earliest Oxford English Dictionary definition of secretary: “one who is entrusted with private or secret matters; a confidant; one privy to a secret.” Secretary comes into English from medieval Latin: “sēcrētārius a secretary, notary, scribe, etc., a title applied to various confidential officers (properly an adj.).”

Is the secret of secretary already obvious to you? It wasn’t to me. I told my mom, who worked as an executive secretary in the 1950s, about it: she didn’t know either.


[Peanuts, October 29, 1971. Peanuts past is Peanuts present.]

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A home entertainment system

[“One privy to a secret”: why the OED italicizes to must remain a secret.]

A home entertainment system

Ammon Shea:

I’ve never been prone to buying fancy clothes, or meals in nice restaurants. But I’ve always allowed myself to buy books, no matter how meager a budget I was living on at the time. Anytime I come across a book that holds the slightest potential that someday I may want to read part of it I pick it up and bring it home. It isn’t a mania for collecting — it’s a defense against boredom. The fact that my shelves are filled with things I haven’t yet read and want to, and things that I’ve read before and want to revisit, means I will never be at a loss for entertainment at home.

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (New York: Penguin, 2008).

I like the sentiment, though at this point in life I will often write down a title and get the book from the library. (Question to self: “Are you really ever going to read this?”)

Shea’s book has some good moments (see above), but I think it’s best borrowed from the library. The book is made of short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet, each chapter with a few pages of narrative (finding a good place to read, drinking coffee, getting a prescription for glasses, dreaming of words) and a few pages of odd words with short commentaries. Shea leaves unexplained the circumstances that allowed him to spend ten hours a day reading the OED. He gives a single definition for each word (not an OED definition), with virtually no attention to etymology. Which prompts me to ask: you read the OED for a year and this is all you came back with? Sigh.

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[A home entertainment system? A home-entertainment system? A home entertainment-system? A home entertainment system.]

Literary dust

W.G. Sebald’s comments about dust and my own efforts to rid some books and shelves of dust just prompted me to think about dust in literature.

Can you think of a work of literature in English in which dust plays a significant part? I can think of three; there may be many more. Leave your answer(s) in a comment, and we’ll see how things add up.

Sebald: “dust everywhere”

W.G. Sebald recounts a visit to the house of a London publisher, and the comfort of being in “a house where the dust has been allowed to settle”:

He had still some business to attend to when I arrived, and his wife took me up to a sort of library room at the very top of this very tall, very large, terraced house. And the room was all full of books, and there was one chair. And there was dust everywhere; it had settled over many years on all those books, on the carpet, on the windowsill, and only from the door to the chair where you would sit down to read, there was a path, like a path through snow, as it were, you know, worn, where you could see that there wasn’t any dust because occasionally somebody would walk up to that chair and sit down and read a book. And I have never spent a more peaceful quarter of an hour than sitting in that particular chair. It was that experience that brought home to me that dust has something very, very peaceful about it.

From “Ghost Hunter,” a 1997 interview with Eleanor Wachtel. In The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007).

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Sebald: “out in the sticks”

W.G. Sebald, on living “in hiding”:

Well, where I am now is very much out in the sticks. It’s in a small village near Norwich in the east of England. And I do feel that I’m better there than I am elsewhere in the center of things. I do like to be on the margins if possible.

From “Ghost Hunter,” a 1997 interview with Eleanor Wachtel. In The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007).

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Unity Day

[Click for a larger view.]

Today is Unity Day, an anti-bullying initiative. Its color is orange. Its focus is on kindness, acceptance, and inclusion.

[Insert dark memories of middle school and high school here.]

I read the papers (as people used to say) and watch the news. But I learned of Unity Day, only this morning, from Zippy and Zits.


[Zippy, October 24, 2018.]

Recently updated

Earl Greyer, correcter The story has a good ending.

John Gruber reviews the iPhone XR

John Gruber, in a lengthy review: “The iPhone XR is everything Apple says it is, and it’s the new iPhone most people should buy.” And: “The sweet spot for most people in 2018, in my opinion, is one tier above 64 GB [that is, 128 GB].” And: “Dollar for dollar, the XR is almost certainly the best iPhone Apple has ever made.”

Holy cow — I chose well. (I hope.)

Hot-dog stands and poetry

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).

Elaine and I just finished re-reading Lolita. As we discovered, we each marked this passage while reading. Elaine has already posted her transcription on her blog.

Humbert Humbert’s observations (and the first-person plural pronoun) remind me of what Proust’s narrator says about the “contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory.” More than coincidence, I think.

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MSNBC, sheesh

On MSNBC this afternoon, someone, I wish I knew who, suggested to Nicole Wallace that television talkers stop calling Mohammed bin Salman “MBS.” I have had the same thought. As the commentator pointed out, Prince Mohammed is not a Marvel Comics villain. Nor, I would add, is he a rapper or Supreme Court justice. Prince Mohammed is, as the commentator put it, “an autocratic thug.” The last thing our public discourse needs is another trivializing nickname.

And soon enough, Katy Tur was on the air, speaking of “MBS.”

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