You should see this chicken scratch. In fact, I’ll show you. I obviously have no idea what I’m doing. Maybe Jax was right? Should Gwen be a vampire? A soulless stowaway. Could work, right? (Have I mentioned that I decided to name her Gwen? I think it's almost poetic. Gwendolyn. Gwen for short.)
Look at the picture thingy that has taken me hours to upload for your viewing pleasure. Yes. Thingy. I’ve been spending too much time with the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED for future reference) to use big words with you. Please deal with it or stop reading. Or go back to the doctor for better PMS medications. Either way, I think you understand my point.
The OED is probably the most difficult thing I’ve navigated since I was a Freshman in college and decided I was going to join a frat. The OED process goes something like this: look up word, wait for 10 minutes for page to load, check definition of word, pick another word that might have the correct definition, spend 5 minutes finding a date that is halfway relevant, realize that there’s a better definition farther down the page, search another 5 minutes for a proper date, curse under breath, scratch out word on page for third time, curse out loud, & listen to old lady pound her cane on her floor in response to my colorful language.
If I were a girl, I’d cry.
I am definitely having a difficult time getting the tone down, let alone the diction. Any researchers that want to help a poor, smelly man?
ReplyDeleteWell, I think I'm starting to navigate the OED and it's various reference sections a little better. Check out this stuff on "ill"...as you can probably tell by my notes, I spent over an hour researching that one word:
ReplyDeleteill, sick. Ill and sick share responsibilities in peculiar ways, and are not always interchangeable. To begin with, ill is more usually predicative (placed after a verb, as in She was ill), whereas sick occurs naturally in attributive position (before a noun, as in She was a sick woman) as well as predicatively (as in She was sick), and in compounds such as sick leave and sick room). Ill is used attributively only in the broader sense ‘out of health’ (He was an ill man when I last saw him), in the extended meanings ‘faulty, unskilful’ (ill judgement / ill management), in idioms and proverbs (do an ill turn to / It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good). It also occurs adverbially in compounds (ill-behaved / ill-considered). In BrE, to be sick and to feel sick have the special meanings ‘to vomit’ and ‘to be inclined to vomit’, and to underline the anomalies of the two words a person can look ill and then report (or go) sick. In varieties of English other than BrE, the overlaps in meaning and usage vary considerably, and in some varieties there is little difference other than the more formal nature of the word ill. In AmE, the meaning ‘vomiting’ is normally supplied by the phrase sick to (or at) one's stomach.
**
Then there's this Middle English note:
ill [ME] Ill is from Old Norse illr ‘evil’, and the commonest modern sense, ‘suffering from an illness or feeling unwell’, developed in the later medieval period. Before then a person would be sick, as they still are in the USA. The idea of harm and evil is prominent in many English proverbs, such as it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. This refers to the days of sailing ships. The wind might be blowing in the wrong direction for you, but it was sure to be blowing the right way for someone, somewhere—it would be a very bad or ‘ill’ wind that was of no help to anyone.
So, the conclusion is that I can keep "ill" in and not use "sick." I feel as though all that work was done for nothing. I think I'm counting my blessings that Modern English is extraordinarily similar Early Modern English. :)
PS. for the Suzes of the world, I believe both of these quotes originate from the Oxford Reference Online.
Ha! I just noticed that Oxford thinks of those of us unable to work our way through an MLA manual...Suze, you may appreciate this even more:
ReplyDeleteHow to cite this entry:
"ill" Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. by Julia Cresswell. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Creighton University. 16 April 2010
B - I do appreciate this. Nicely done.
ReplyDelete...I can't believe I read this often enough to notice your post. My life is almost as sad as yours.
I also have some experience with the OED and its reference section. Did you know:
Gwenllian [Venus symbol] (Welsh) Traditional: from gwen, the feminine form of gwyn ‘white, fair; blessed, holy’ (see Gwen) + lliant ‘flood, flow’ (probably in the transferred sense ‘foamy’ or ‘white’, referring to a pale complexion).
How to cite this entry:
"Gwenllian" A Dictionary of First Names. Patrick Hanks, Kate Hardcastle, and Flavia Hodges. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Creighton University. 16 April 2010
I added the citation in honor of your English professor.