Baubles #1

This is the first in a series of posts I’m calling “Baubles”, shiny things I’ve found in my research or internet-dwelling that I write here for my benefit as much as yours.

The Historical Thesaurus of English

I just learned about this today from a boundary-pushing History Today article about the evolution of swearing in the 1600s. The Historical Thesaurus of English looks a lot more complicated than a typical thesaurus. It’s going to take a little work to figure out how to use it.

But look! Knowing that in 1528 we had a monk writing “d fuckin Abbot”, and that he was literally talking about the Abbot’s sexual promiscuity, is pure gold.

I recently noticed a habit in my writing. Rather than inventing things purely out of nothing, I tend to get more excited about taking old things and making them new again. The mythology of A Season of Shades comes from ancient Mesopotamia and Babylon (up through the period the Talmud was created). A short story I just submitted to a local anthology retells the story of the Guernsey Martyrs. And when I’m trying to come up with the name of a character, I like to find inspiration in my own family tree. I’ve found Family Search to be the most accessible way to dig back through my ancestors.

(You might notice that Family Search is owned by the LDS church. My relationship to that church is complicated. I was raised in it. I have ancestors in it going back about 150 years. The church does a lot of good, like with Family Search, and it also causes a lot of harm, as it did in my case. I am no longer a member. If you don’t come from an LDS background, you might have less luck finding your ancestors on Family Search, because it’s less likely that you’d have Mormon relatives populating your family’s database.)

Phrases

Sometimes I read something so beautiful I think “I wish I had written that.” That came up twice over the last couple days.

The first was in a column by George Will in Voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history. I don’t particularly agree with the title; Trump may be among our worst presidential candidates, but I think Harris is, at worst, your garden variety ambitious politician, not much better or worse than the average presidential candidate. That being said, I liked this phrase:

Vance’s scary fairy tales (he calls them “stories”) about kitten-cooking Haitians, etc., are, he says, intended to be didactic. They might be if he, a bristling porcupine of certitudes, candidly demarcated his fictions from reality

Bristling porcupine of certitudes! His beliefs are sharp. He has lots of them. And they’re prickly!

My mind jumps to adjectives before metaphors. But I’m thinking there may be a formula to get from one to the other.

  1. Think of the adjective.
  2. Think of other things that evoke that same idea. Nouns. Find one that punches. Ideally, there are more attributes of that other thing that are in common with the thing you’re trying to describe.
  3. Add another adjective to that noun that intensifies it.
  4. Put it all together into your “bristling porcupine of certitudes.”

The second shiny phrase is one I ran across (again) this morning. It wasn’t entirely new. It’s in the epigraph of Chapter 6 of A Season of Shades. It’s by George Eliot:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Oof. “That roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

I often frame ideas in terms of a continuum from one extreme to another. The “other side of” construction turns those gradients into circles, like the color wheel. I’m squirreling that away for later.