|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 57
LEGACY, n. A gift from one who is legging it out of this vale of
tears.
LEONINE, adj. Unlike a menagerie lion. Leonine verses are those in
which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end, as
in this famous passage from Bella Peeler Silcox:
The electric light invades the dunnest deep of Hades.
Cries Pluto, 'twixt his snores: "O tempora! O mores!"
It should be explained that Mrs. Silcox does not undertake to
teach pronunciation of the Greek and Latin tongues. Leonine verses
are so called in honor of a poet named Leo, whom prosodists appear to
find a pleasure in believing to have been the first to discover that a
rhyming couplet could be run into a single line.
LETTUCE, n. An herb of the genus _Lactuca_, "Wherewith," says that
pious gastronome, Hengist Pelly, "God has been pleased to reward the
good and punish the wicked. For by his inner light the righteous man
has discerned a manner of compounding for it a dressing to the
appetency whereof a multitude of gustible condiments conspire, being
reconciled and ameliorated with profusion of oil, the entire
comestible making glad the heart of the godly and causing his face to
shine. But the person of spiritual unworth is successfully tempted to
the Adversary to eat of lettuce with destitution of oil, mustard, egg,
salt and garlic, and with a rascal bath of vinegar polluted with
sugar. Wherefore the person of spiritual unworth suffers an
intestinal pang of strange complexity and raises the song."
LEVIATHAN, n. An enormous aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some
suppose it to have been the whale, but that distinguished
ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan, of Stanford University, maintains with
considerable heat that it was a species of gigantic Tadpole (_Thaddeus
Polandensis_) or Polliwig -- _Maria pseudo-hirsuta_. For an
exhaustive description and history of the Tadpole consult the famous
monograph of Jane Potter, _Thaddeus of Warsaw_.
LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of
recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does
what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and
mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his
dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas
his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural
servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial
power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a
chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example)
mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men
thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however
desirable its restoration to favor -- whereby the process of
impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary,
recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow
at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has
no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary"
-- although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven
forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that _was_ in the
dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when
from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own
meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a
Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end
and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy
preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion -- the
lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which
his Creator had not created him to create.
God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form,"
And lexicographers arose, a swarm!
Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,
And catalogued each garment in a book.
Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:
"Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise
And scan the list, and say without compassion:
"Excuse us -- they are mostly out of fashion."
Sigismund Smith
LIAR, n. A lawyer with a roving commission.
LIBERTY, n. One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|