I was goofing off (bad writer, but I wrote until well after midnight last night, so stale to start this morning) and ran across the latest show-offy & disgusting post by Trump about his upcoming visit to the Fulton County Jail to get “arrested for having the audacity to challenge a rigged and stollen (his spelling) election ….”<\/p>\n
My backbrain sat up straight and waved its hand for my attention.\u00a0 “Teacher, teacher he misspelled stolen and stollen is a real word and it means–”<\/p>\n
“Yes, I know,” I said mentally.\u00a0 ‘A kind of holiday bread in Germany.”<\/p>\n
“Yes, teacher but he also used audacity like he thought it meant only ‘bold’ from the Latin ‘audax’ and there are other usages–”<\/p>\n
I sortakinda remembered that, outside of my backbrain, but not all the specifics.\u00a0 “See you at the OED,” I said, with great cheeriness and backbrain sank back into his assigned seat and put his head on his desk.<\/p>\n
Audacity is, of course in Volume 1, A-B.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m getting smoother at removing a volume and flipping it open to the approximate location, but the Au bunch is large and it took several exploratory page flips to find it.\u00a0 And there was the jewel I sought.\u00a0 3. Open disregard of the restraints of decorum or morality: effrontery, impudence, shamelessness.\u00a0 <\/em>The first use in print citation is from 1545.\u00a0\u00a0 Perfect.\u00a0 Trump hoisting himself on his own petard, BOOM!\u00a0 Self-description accurate beyond, no doubt his intention.\u00a0 Not bold, not brave, not admirable.\u00a0 Open disregard of the restraints of decorum or morality.\u00a0 Check. Effrontery, impudence, shamelessness.\u00a0 Check.<\/p>\n Backbrain has received a + for today and a ticket to join in the day’s half hour of rabbit-holing in the OED in the evening.\u00a0 Backbrain is happy.\u00a0 I am happy.\u00a0 I am SO happy that I overcame my “But you don’t deserve that because somebody else needs something more than you” impulse to not buy this OED.\u00a0\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I needed it.\u00a0 I’m using it.\u00a0 I’m waking up the word-finding part of my brain just by rabbit-hole exploration.\u00a0 Just having it over there, leaking words into the atmosphere, is helpful.<\/p>\n And\u00a0 finding out that usage 3. turned Trump’s brag about himself into a self-revelation of the nekkid kingpin…?\u00a0 THAT was landing the complicated many-flip floor exercise perfectly, jumping the cross-country course clear and inside the time,\u00a0 singing that string of 16th notes at the start of Bach’s Magnificat and the whole choir snapping the final T exactly together.\u00a0 Like that.\u00a0 Now back to fiction.\u00a0\u00a0 In another post, later.\u00a0 I’m doing something I’ve never done before.<\/p>\n Words, words, words, words….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was goofing off (bad writer, but I wrote until well after midnight last night, so stale to start this morning) and ran across the latest show-offy & disgusting post by Trump about his upcoming visit to the Fulton County Jail to get “arrested for having the audacity to challenge a rigged and stollen (his Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1548,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547\/revisions\/1548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}