Tuesday, August 5, 2014

the tail wagging the dog

I woke up the other day and I was thinking about the word yearn.  And while I was thinking about it, I tried to think of its opposite.  And still being still asleep or something I thought of nraey, which I thought odd.  A sort Chaucerian word it seems to me, out of The Pardoner or maybe The Miller.


And not waking properly I thought oh my god, I promised myself I would read the original in Chaucer's native tounge with all its quaint misspellings and such, and I had to laugh at that idiocy, and that helped a tiny bit, nudging me toward wakefulness.  At least I could see light at the end of the tunnel somewhere off in the distance.


And I remembered that I did read Chaucer in the original, except that I couldn't remember how it felt while I was reading it.  And speaking of that the opposite of a word is not the word spelled backward.
Why did I do that and what is yearn as a word?  Certainly it is too thin to be able to pick it up, it'd just fall apart in your hands, and why don't I use that word every day?


These thoughts as I like to call them were firing away in my head in a real uptempo, and there were zillions of them coming toward me fast, and I was amazed I could remember any of this at all, carefully laying words out on a cloth to dry, looking at them to find its antonym.


Nowhere so busy a man as he than he, and yet he seemed busier than he was.  Geoffrey Chaucer

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