Three things from DAH.

DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. I pen, promote, and make change (not the coin kind). 

First up this week, Faux …  
Words are value-laden beyond their dictionary definition. Merriam-Webster defines "faux" as "not real or genuine." The definition for "fake" is nearly identical. Yet few of us would say fake instead of faux unless we aim to criticize. Something fake is deceptive and bad. Something faux is more an homage, a salute to the real thing. Makers of the Impossible Burger would certainly bridle were their flagship product described as fake meat. So much easier to accept it described as faux meat. "The Meaning of Your Communication Is the Response You Get." That's the title of the first chapter in Mindworks by Anne Linden. I mind that precept when thinking what to say and how to say it.
The loanword "faux"

Second up this week, Flibbertigibetty …  
"I'm a flibbertigibet," says one of the three characters played by Meg Ryan, speaking behind a gloved hand, voce not-at-all sotto. No particular attempt was made to disguise Meg Ryan's identify in any of the three women playing opposite Tom Hanks in Joe Versus the Volcano, a 1990 film written and directed by John Patrick Shanley. Flibbertigibbet comes to us from the Middle English word flepergebet. A flibbertigibbet is a silly or flighty person. Flibbertigibetty is my coinage to describe that sort of all-over-the-place quality. Faux-flibbertigibetty would be only seeming to be silly and all-over-the-place. John Patrick Shanley was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for his play Doubt. He won a screenwriting Academy Award for Moonstruck. Shanley's works often seem like fables that mix the feasible with the fantastic. That can yield a flibbertigibetty-seeming result but I find it faux-flibbertigibetty. "My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement" (another line from Joe Versus the Volcano). 
How We Choose Our Favorite Film, and Why Mine is Joe Versus the Volcano

Third up this week, Faraway …  
Faraway may be far away, at a physical distance, but that's not the point of faraway. Faraway is an adjective modifying a noun. "He had a faraway look in his eyes." Far away is an adverb phrase. "The Scilly Isles are far away." Faraway suggests to me a wistful longing for something beyond reach: A past we can't recover, a future we can't obtain. Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite authors, wrote in her lovely The Faraway Nearby (2013): "Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it." If you've wondered, "Why The There There?" it's because some most precious things are faraway. Gertrude Stein, noting that her childhood home in Oakland, California, no longer existed: "There is no there there." That's a faraway place. 
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit – review

And a bit more: 

The Dream 
by Lola Ridge

I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day….
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium…
domes
fired in sulphurous mist…
sea
quiescent as a gray seal…
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay….)
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water –
where shall I pour my dream? 

And that's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver’s poem "Sometimes" …  

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. 

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