Life must be filled up

LJ sent me a notification that someone had mentioned me in their journal. As I don’t know the language, I’ve no idea why they did so. Something to do with a comparison between Love for Lydia and Brideshead Revisited?

Here’s the text.
"Сложно искать, где Brideshead Revisited упоминается вместе с Love
for Lydia безотноситально Jeremy Irons (учитывая крайне редкое вообще
упоминание книги как таковой). В дополнение к помянутому в соседнем
комментарии обзору callmemadam нашлись ещё два обзора именно книги, также
упоминающие схожесть её с Брайдсхедом. Frisbee: A Book Journal — H. E.
Bates’s Love for Lydia: "And, of course, H. E. Bates’s Love for Lydia,
which is a kind of inter-class Brideshead Revisited." Miranda's Notebook —
Book Talk: Lofe for Lydia by H.E. Bates: "If you adored Love for Lydia as
much as I did, here are some suggestions for what to read next: <...>
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The young Charles Ryder, starstruck
by the aristocratic Sebastian and Julia Flyte, has similarities to Bates’s
narrator." //"

nappishness (n.) sleepiness; a tendency to nap

My stop on the blog tour! Hop off the bus and read on.
Ever heard of nappishness? It first appeared in print in Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick in 1851.
‘Moby-Dick is also credited with introducing a fairly niche set of words into the English language, including cetology, the study of whales, and plum-puddinger, naval slang for a voyage short enough to carry fresh fruit and other spoilable provisions. Among the more useful terms Moby-Dick introduced to the language, however, is nappishness - another word for sleepiness, or an inclination to nap.’
I like it! I also like naps and the book this quote is taken from.



‘THE CABINET OF LINGUISTIC CURIOSITIES
A Yearbook of Forgotten Words
PAUL ANTHONY JONES
Publication date: 19 October 2017
£14.99 hardback/ebook Elliott & Thompson’

There’s an uncommon word for every day of the year. Did you know, for instance, that muggle, J K Rowling’s name for people without magical powers, is actually an old word for a fish’s tail (26 June)? Or that if you are equally clumsy with both hands (the opposite of ambidextrous), you are ambilaevus (3 September)? I’ve a mind to refer to this book constantly and bring out a mystifying word (on the given day), just to fox people.

From the publishers:
‘Paul Anthony Jones runs @HaggardHawks twitter feed, blog and YouTube channel, revealing daily word facts to 39,000 addicted followers, such as Jack Monroe, Rufus Sewell, Simon Blackwell, Robert Macfarlane, Sara Pascoe, Allegra Stratton and David Baddiel.’

Call me a boring old pedant, but. I've been constantly irritated in a book I'm reading by references to 'cannons'. Now I've just seen the same usage on the BBC news website in connection with the Waterloo commemorations. Isn't the plural of cannon, cannon? As in
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them, etc.?

If I'm wrong, I take it back.

Roses Over a Cottage Door posted about favourite words and coincidentally I’d been having similar thoughts. My word is ‘mysterious’. A favourite silly song of mine at the moment is Jessie J’s Price Tag, especially these lines:

"Why is everybody so serious?
Acting so damn mysterious"

I love this! It conjures up an image of a crowd of people wearing trench coats with collars pulled up and hats pulled down over their eyes, a sort of Inspector Gadget flashmob. It reminds me of H G Wells playing charades, drifting around in a sheet and then saying he was ‘God moving in a mysterious way’. If you emphasise the 'm' and stretch the second syllable, there’s something inherently amusing about the word, but why?