#dead words

[kawibee]

Reminder that in 1930s britain (and maybe after) the word duffer meant an incompetent or idiotic person

[schofielded]

Hello everyone I have a book full of dead/unused English words and have just discovered a new word that means “Twilight; the time poultry are shut up for the night”

This word is

Cockshut

Naturally, my mind raced to an alternate universe where the famous vampire YA series by Stephanie Meyer, Twilight, had a different title. Imagine, if you will:

Cockshut

Cockshut: New Moon

Cockshut: Eclipse

Cockshut: Breaking Dawn

Do with this information what you will. And if anyone with any modicum of photoshop skills sees this and is inspired… 👀

[poem-today]

A poem by Sheenagh Pugh

I think someone might write an elegy

I think someone might write an elegy

for the dead words: the shapely words

that have no shape to fit round now,

whose ladies have stepped out of them,

as it were, and left them in a huddle,

the words we don't have things for. I think

someone might write an elegy for words

like timothy, socksfoot, feverfew,

fennel and saffron, ginger and galingale.

For mowdewart and marmot; for furze-pig

and parmaceti; for feline

and anserine; for Lawrence the tod.

For cirrus, nimbus and stratocumulus.

For Persepolis, Hamadan, Shushan,

for Tolleshunt d'Arcy and Cirencester;

for Elizabeth Sarah Davidson,

which once seemed to me the fairest words

that ever anyone laid tongue to.

For the words that mean nothing now

and whose loveliness, made as it was

by what they meant, has left them; the husks

of dragonflies, drying out… Things that are dead

we keep with words, but when the words die

themselves; oh then they're dead, and dead indeed.

Sheenagh Pugh

[irwonder]

Poetry, [Giovanni] Pascoli says, speaks in a dead language; but dead language is what gives life to thought. Thought lives off the death of words. From this perspective, to think and to poeticize is to experience the death of speech, to utter (and to resuscitate) dead words.

Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics

[i-am-the-meme-fightme]

PSA

Don’t say “I love you” when to someone when you’re ready to move on from them a week later. Don’t say it in a chance to get them to stay with you. I’m so sick of people saying “I love you” when they’re angry that you’re not dealing with their bullshit or when they can’t cope with your mental illness or with your busy schedule. I’m so tired of people thinking that it’s acceptable to say “I love you” when they’re manipulating you to keep dealing with their problems and not with your own. The words “I love you” barely have any meaning to me anymore because of you. 

[echoesofutterance]

Roses die....

[hexbish]

the zodiacs as dead words

aries: flosculation (an embellishment or ornament in speech), igniparous (bringing forth fire). phlyarologist (one who talks nonsense), 

taurus: gardeviance (chest for valuables; a travelling trunk), morsicant (producing the sensation of repeated biting or pricking), rogalian (of or pertaining to a great fire).

gemini: exipotic (purgative; cleansing the body of illness), nepheliad (cloud-nymph), theomeny (the wrath of God).

cancer: isangelous (equal to angels), montivagant (wandering over hills and mountains), tortiloquy (crooked speech). 

leo: adnascentia (root-like branches that sprout into the earth from a plant’s stem), cosmogyral (whirling round the universe), xenization (fact of travelling as a stranger). 

virgo: caprizant (of the pulse, uneven or irregular), inocciduous (of a star, never setting), uviferous (bearing grapes or vines).

libra: medioxumate (of gods of intermediate rank between those of heaven and of hell), perantique (very antique or ancient), woundikins (diminutive form of “wounds”; mild oath).

scorpio: gaudiloquent (speaking joyfully or on joyful matters), murklins (in the dark), scathefire (great destructive fire; conflagration).

sagittarius: alabandical (barbarous; stupefied from drink), parepochism (error in dating or assigning time period), teliferous (bearing darts or missiles).

capricorn: ossifragant (bone-breaking), quercivorous (feeding on oak trees), venustation (act of causing to become beautiful or handsome).

aquarius: ephydriad (water-nymph), gelicide (a frost), tropaean (blowing from sea to land).

pisces: antipelargy (reciprocal or mutual kindness; love and care of children for their parents), magastromancy (magical astrology), nubivagant (moving throughout or among clouds).

[flyersofiowacity]

Artist: Anthony Manning