Life must be filled up

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.’

The Week Before Christmas by Freda C Bond is the second of four books about the Carol family, which I mentioned briefly here. The cover and black & white drawings are by Mays, who illustrated Noel Streatfeild’s Curtain Up and many of the Jennings books.

The four Carol children live with their parents in a smart London flat, with ‘Posset’ as they call her, coming in every day to do the work. How agreeable. At the start of the Christmas holidays the younger children, Squibs and Tony, fear that things will be dull until Christmas. Instead, in the week of the title they find themselves hunting for their mother’s stolen ring, tracking a missing child, getting on the trail of turkey rustlers and befriending a nice refugee family. Tony’s life is busy as he has a good singing voice and is very involved with the local church choir. He takes religion seriously as does older sister Susan, who goes to a boarding school run by Anglican nuns. You can tell what sort of girl she is when she takes a liking to a girl they meet, thinking, ‘I bet she’d make a wizard prefect.’ Lawrence is also at boarding school and turning into a languid, arrogant public schoolboy. At home with his family he becomes quite human and as keen on adventures and planning a Christmas charade as the rest of them.

From the jacket blurb: What we especially like about Freda Bond’s books is that they are happy stories about real-life people, who manage to have adventures in their everyday comings and goings. Her children and grown-ups alike are lovable and natural – the sort of folk who might live next door to you. If your neighbour happened to be a famous actress, that is. As far as I’m concerned, the Carols need never have any adventures at all; I like just to read about their daily lives in post-war London.
( Angela Thirkell and more )