Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Monday 19 January 2015

I Am Staring at a Word

As one does.
It is odd, exotic... is it a name?
Someone seems to be calling herself by it.
I stare at it some more.
So, the name of someone foreign, whose native language requires transliteration for westerners?
Or perhaps one of those entirely fabricated words models give themselves and celebrities give their babies?
My mind sounds it out... jah-DEAD? or JAH-deed?

I realise I have had no caffeine, and that the writer is simply telling us that she is world-weary.

"Jaded" isn't the only word to flummox me. When I was a child and read voraciously, obsessively,  mostly historical fiction set in one era or another, I was forever encountering heroines and villainesses whose finery was elaborately embellished in a manner I heard in my head as "berry-boned."

I dunno, that could be pretty....

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