Booking Through Thursday: Carpe Diem...
Nov. 23rd, 2007 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fajrdrako
From Nov. 23 - and this is sort of complicated:Joanna and Brad are asking about “connecting words,” and they don’t mean conjunctions like “and” or “but.” No, what they’re looking for are unique, or treasured words that we’ve found out and about in our daily travels, words that might not be common usage, or often heard, but which struck a chord for some reason.Now, the blog cited is this one and it looks quite fascinating. The way Joanna and Brad pose the question is this:
All you need to do is share with us (and the rest of the blogosphere)
1. A word or words that you’ve learned, read, noticed, been gifted
2. What it means to you
3. Who you got it from
4. Any conversations or connections that followed
Carpe diem. Okay, it's two words, and they aren't even English, but it's my LJ so I can cheat all I want to.
Carpe diem. Sieze the day. I love the concept. Take what opportunities come. Do what you want to, or need to, or can, and do it now. Step into the TARDIS. Write. Lounge. Follow your bliss, wherever it leads.
I've no idea when I first heard the phrase. I was long familiar with it when I re-encountered it in Latin for Canadian Schools as a teen. Perhaps when I was four, tiptoeing to look at the wonderful sundial at the frog pond at the Experimental Farm - for some reason, unremembered now, I associate the phrase with that garden and that age. Perhaps my mother said it to me.
I love it too when people use and abuse the phrase - carpe horam (sieze the hour), carpe canem (grab the dog), carpe pecuniam - go for the money. Or just carpe your chances, buddy!
Now, if I can add an addendum to this... and I can... this brings to mind another whole class of words that I think of as Dunnett words, meaning they are words I first encountered in the Dunnett novels. "Otiose" is a good example of this. It means "useless". I love the word. I found it in The Disorderly Knights, where a hard-drinking pirate calls Lymond "dead cold sober to the point of otiosity". I love it when a pirate talks like that.
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Date: 2007-11-23 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-23 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-23 06:32 pm (UTC)(Or maybe you've met Captain Jack Harkness - ?)
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Date: 2007-11-23 07:39 pm (UTC)(I wish. I do, really. But, no. Unfortuntately, I haven't.)
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Date: 2007-11-23 05:04 pm (UTC)I like the phrase "joi e deport" – joy and delight/pleasure. I want more of both in life.
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Date: 2007-11-23 06:26 pm (UTC)"joi de deport" is wonderful.
I also like the Italian 'ben trovato'.
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Date: 2007-11-23 05:15 pm (UTC)On my screen, it ends: Lymond "dead cold sober to the point of o
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Date: 2007-11-23 06:27 pm (UTC)No, it was not supposed to break off in the middle. When I write it, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like all good sentences should have. Then half of it went and wandered away into another dimension or something.
Now fixed.
Thanks for pointing it out. (Last time I looked, it was there, I swear!)
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Date: 2007-11-23 06:34 pm (UTC)I was halfway through my first comment when it occurred to me that you just might have done it deliberately-- a sentence that breaks off mid-word illustrating the concept of "useless".
That's the sort of subtle joke that usually flies right by me. :-)
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Date: 2007-11-23 06:41 pm (UTC)Yes, there's something about an eloquant pirate.
I might have done that to be stylistically clever... but really, I'm not so subtle. Except maybe once a millennium on a blue moon in February.
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Date: 2007-11-23 07:06 pm (UTC)Carpe diem
Date: 2007-11-23 05:28 pm (UTC)Thanks for joining in, and making the connection
Joanna
Re: Carpe diem
Date: 2007-11-23 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-23 07:01 pm (UTC)But seeing otiose reminds me that it used to be used often, I think in the 60s, and one hardly ever sees it nowadays. Same as sedulous, which used to be a fave and I haven't even thought of that word for years until it turned up recently in one of the early Donald Strachey mysteries. As Stevenson is roughly the same age as me, it looks like he was using it when I was using it, and it's not in his recent novels.
My Chambers provides a phrase every few years, and I imagine it is reproaching me when it falls open to the page with grex venalium. But I'm doing the best I can! I tell it, though I think it doesn't believe me and that page keeps coming up when least expected. Told off by my own dictionary - how wimpy is that?
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Date: 2007-11-23 07:08 pm (UTC)Dorothy Dunnett would have used the word 'otiose' about 1965, I think.
Funny how words have cycles and fashions. And yes, I noticed sedulous in Stevenson too - don't know when I've last seen it, and it's a great word that I'd pretty much forgotten about.
Off topic but following your lead
Date: 2007-11-24 04:00 am (UTC)The second, from Heinlein, Dum vivimus, vivamus!
Since we must live, let us live!
Third, the motto of Clan Ross: Spem successus alit, success nourishes hope.
Re: Off topic but following your lead
Date: 2007-11-28 05:03 pm (UTC)"Dum vivimus, vivamus" is from the classical world - believed to be the motto of the Epicureans. It's a nice one.
Now I want to make a whole list of good mottos!
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Date: 2007-11-24 05:06 pm (UTC)My dictionary says nevertheless, nonetheless but I like the Dutch better. It has a slightly archaic and formal ring to it. I see it popping up after objections are raised to a plan, nevertheless I am sticking to my intentions!
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Date: 2007-11-24 06:13 pm (UTC)Personally I like using both 'nevertheless' and 'nonetheless' in English, in conversation, and stop myself, scolding myself because it sounds pedantic - but it also sounds so cool.
So I use it anyway - nonetheless.
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Date: 2007-11-26 03:14 pm (UTC)I've also made up words at times. A recent example (which I added to Wiktionary's list of really new words (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:List_of_protologisms) [near the end]) is 'villianfoil', the act of wrapping a villian or criminal in sheets of aluminum, forcing him to exclaim "Curses, foiled again". :-)
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Date: 2007-11-26 03:20 pm (UTC)The objection is usually that it's a redundant word - that it means the same as "regardless". Why do you like it?
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Date: 2007-11-26 03:21 pm (UTC)I don't get it. How does this make 'villainfoil' a word?
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Date: 2007-11-27 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-27 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-27 07:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-27 07:42 pm (UTC)(Biiig sigh.) I'm clueless with puns at the best of times and I never played with a D.M.!
(P.S. I think actually that's a lie. I have a dim memory of trying out a D&D game at my apartment about 28 years ago. Very dim. Not so heavy on the 'memory' bit. There were elves, and monsters, and dice.)
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Date: 2007-11-28 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-28 02:21 am (UTC)I suppose there are some gamers who do both!