|k| clippings: 2014-11-26 — Just one more small, lost thing.

WORK

Nat watched them, and he watched the seabirds too. Down in the bay they waited for the tide. They had more patience. Oyster-catchers, redshank, sanderling, and curlew watched by the water’s edge; as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the seabirds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and be gone: yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.

—Daphne Du Maurier
—from The Birds and Other Stories

WORD(S)

widdiful (widdefow, widdiefow). noun and adjective. One who deserves to be hanged. Fit to be hanged. A rascal. A gallows-bird.

“The Laird was a widdiefu’, bleerit knurl.” (Robert Burns)

“I never saw sic widdiefows!” (gallows-birds), chimed in a farmer’s wife who was standing in the shop." (George MacDonald)

“Will scoured his brain for the right word. He needed something accurate, but also something that was sensitive to his mother’s feelings. Words meant a lot to his mother, so they meant a lot to Will. He spent a lot of time trekking through the dictionary. He filled notebooks with long and unusual nouns that might impress her (rastaquouére: a social climber; widdiful: describes someone who deserves to be hanged).”

WEB

1. A beautiful “old world language family tree” illustration

2. Some “simply terrible flavored Thanksgiving foods”. Most of these have to be fake, right?

3. I enjoy writing about musical history that includes examples, an area the Long+Short specializes in…such as this piece about the sampling history of the “amen break” (trust me, you’ve heard it) and a piece about the history of the synthesizer.

4. The rag-picking history site aims to “unearth hidden places & pasts.” And it does so with gusto.

5. Today in 2004, the (presumably) last Poʻouli (Black-faced honeycreeper) dies of avian malaria in the Maui Bird Conservation Center before a mate can be found. The species was only discovered in 1973 on the wet side of the Haleakala volcano and the only two other known specimens were last sighted in 1998.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader B. writes: “Tristram Shandy is one of the great books in my brain. Permanently warped my thinking in all kinds of ways, from re-seeing the 18th-century to expanding my capacity for digressions.”

• A different Reader B. wonders: “After reading Rick Gekoski’s piece, I am so very, very tempted to contact Andrew Franklin of Profile Books and tell him I’m willing to write it. But then what are my credentials, what authority do I represent? And being that Mr Gekoski does not know of almost any creative writer or passionate reader who has the slightest interest in the history of the book, what am I to think of myself? Of course he does write ‘almost’.” — I suspect you would find many allies who care about the history of the book amongst the Katexic Clamor…

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