Today, you can get an idea of how my “creative” process works. On Saturday morning I was going for a run around the university here, NUI Galway. In order to ensure I met my modest distance target, I went down a little-used path, behind the old quadrangle.
If you don’t know what to write, they say, just write. Don’t worry about what to write, just keep going. Of course, this isn’t really necessary when you’re writing for a blog. I could just not post anything. I’ve no problem taking a day off now and then. Only, at the moment, I’ve got a bit of an itch to write something. So I’m just going to write for a little bit and see where it takes me.
Good question, I’m very glad you asked. There are about ten words in English that end in –mb, but have a silent B. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
As you can see, it’s a fairly common phenomenon, but what’s the story behind it?
When writing about James Joyce last month, I got to thinking about the word hero. Two things made me think about it: the fact that an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was known as Stephen Hero, and how often I referred to Leopold Bloom as the hero of the novel Ulysses.
On the surface, it seems like a fairly straightforward word. You can think of its meaning pretty easily, I’m sure: someone brave, with exceptional abilities. Someone we can look up to. And this has always been the meaning of the word. It comes from the Greek ἥρως (hērōs), meaning protector or defender, and was often specifically used in Ancient Greek myths to refer to heroes of divine ancestry such as Heracles. So, not so different from how we use it today. Except, as I alluded to in the first paragraph, when we use it as a literary term.
Earlier this evening, while WhatsApping with my friend about staying in or going out, I tapped out the following phrase: best to stay in out of the rain (we’re staying in). I didn’t think anything about it, until I happened to glance at it as I was putting my phone down. My eye zoomed in on the middle, specifically on these two words: …in out…. Hang on a second, I said, that can’t be!
Thank you to Flip Flops Every day for the idea of the Manic Monday Challenge, in which one must use a chosen song title in one’s post. And yes, I know that this is being posted at 8am on Tuesday, but I’m writing it on Monday evening, so it still counts. Here we go… Continue reading
Look at Daisy up there, simply enjoying the warmth of the sun, as only a dog really can. What a life of simple joys a dog lives, one we can all be envious of. Seeing her like that yesterday made me think of the phrase the dog days of summer. A lot of people assume that it refers to the hottest period of the summer, in which dogs are too tired to do anything else but lie in the afternoon heat. I can see the logic in that, but as I’d never looked into the origin of the phrase, I thought now was as good a time as any to do so.
English-Language Thoughts 