A brief poem today by William Michaelian that both settled into and enveloped me when I considered the wide variety of meanings of the word “drawn.”

WORK

“These Old Gods”

These old gods
are like fence-posts
with the wire
gone;

they remain,
you move
on,

a heart-drawn constellation.

—William Michaelian
—from Recently Banned Literature

WORD(S)

buckie. noun. A whelk or, more generally, the whorled shell of a mollusc such as a whelk. Nautical slang: buckie-ingram (hermit crab), buckie-prins (periwinkle) and roaring buckie (great whelk). More rarely, a stubborn or rebellious person.

“Triton, his trumpet of a buckie, / Propin’d to him, was large and luckie.” (Henry Adamson)

“If envious buckies view wi’ sorrow
Thy lengthen’d days on this blest morrow,
May Desolation’s lang-teeth’d harrow,
Nine miles an hour,
Rake them like Sodom and Gomorrah,
In brunstane stoure.” (Robert Burns)

“Here was a medley, not of fisher-folk alone, and all their bodily belongings, but also of the thousand things that have no soul, and get kicked about and sworn at much because they can not answer. Rollers, buoys, nets, kegs, swabs, fenders, blocks, buckets, kedges, corks, buckie-pots, oars, poppies, tillers, sprits, gaffs, and every kind of gear (more than Theocritus himself could tell) lay about, and rolled about, and upset their own masters, here and there and everywhere…” (R. D. Blackmore)

“But my choler only made him worse, for there is not a greater deil’s-buckie in all the Five Dales.” (James Hogg)

WEB

1. The Booker Prize is open to authors outside the British Commonwealth for the first time, and it shows in the composition of this year’s longlist.

2. “Be Lucky. It’s an Easy Skill to Learn”. Thoughts (and the results of some experiments) on the lucky and unlucky. Accompaniment: “Born Under a Bad Sign” performed by Nina Simone.

3. Mitch Dobrowner’s storm photography.

4. I missed Louis Armstrong’s birthday yesterday. Many think of Armstrong as a novelty, a genial entertainer making what is now background music. But he was not only a pioneering trumpet player, he was one of the best jazz trumpet players ever. Start with a listening guide to the famous song “West End Blues”. Then listen to an album that should blow your mind: Louis Armstrong Plays W. C. Handy. While you’re listening, see some fantastic photos from the Gottlieb Archive. In his spare time, Armstrong also created collages.

5. Today in 1864, Rear Admiral David G. Farragut, famously proclaims (maybe): “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”, charging through a minefield and ultimately winning an important naval battle at Mobile Bay.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Sometimes words that stand out aren’t phantonyms or antagonyms or anything else…they just don’t mean what the user thinks they mean (and I’m not talking about going back to archaic and/or eclipsed original meanings). Some examples: factoid, dilemma, inflammable (again), travesty, peruse, bemused, nauseous and penultimate. How many of these do you use improperly?

• Related: the Digg article “Irony, Illustrated” is a nice tidbit for use of that particular word, the tired (and wrong) complaint about the old Alanis Morisette song notwithstanding.

• Reader T. shares that he recently came across yesterday’s word, susurrus, in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods:

“There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the halls of the gods whose very existence had been forgotten-octopus-faced gods and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires…”

• You might remember “thrawn” was a WORD(S) entry some time back. And it come back in a use of today’s word:

“A perverse or refractory person is denominated a thrawn buckie, and sometimes, in still harsher language, a Deil’s buckie” (S. Ramsay)

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.

And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: http://katexic.com/clippings/.