The Impetuous Duchess
Aug. 31st, 2012 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyThe free magazine given out at the supermarket has some handy spring cleaning tips in it this month. One of them started off being a good idea: if your washing line is dirty it will mark your nice, clean clothes, so why not wipe it with a damp cloth or wet wipe? And I, reading this while eating my lunch, nodded sagely. That *does* sound potentially useful. Thanks, free magazine! Then I read the rest of the sentence, which was 'every week'. Every week! I've got better things to do than wash my washing line every week.
Things like writing about a random word, for example:
18. Fulgour
Fulgour (or fulgor) is a brilliant or dazzling light or splendour, from the Latin fulgor, meaning lightning, or a flash, glitter, gleam, brightness or splendour). It was first used in popular English literature around 1532 and not often since then, but you could use it yourself next time someone turns the light on when you're not ready. 'Turn the lights off. They are blinding me with their fulgour!' Give it a try. The related verb is fulgurate, which means to emit flashes. See if you can work that into conversation somewhere too. Maybe next time you see a disco ball?
An example from Sir Thomas Browne's fine work from 1646, Pseudodoxia Epidemica:
Thus Glow-worms alive, project a lustre in the dark, which fulgour notwithstanding ceaseth after death; and thus the Torpedo which being alive stupifies at a distance, applied after death, produceth no such effect; which had they retained in places where they abound, they might have supplied Opium, and served as frontals in Phrensies.
(If that seems like a lot of gibberish, it was part of an essay about how plants retain their properties after being picked so you can benefit from their medicinal properties fresh or dried, but animals don't. So, Sir Thomas says, just because a kingfisher seems to know which way the wind is blowing when it's alive, don't go hanging a dead one inside to act as a weather vane, because it just won't work. He knew what was what did Sir Thomas.)
Another example, which the internet is not terribly helpful at identifying, but would seem to be by Henry More in the 1660s:
But when he came up closer to me, the vivid fulgour of his eyes, that shone so piercingly bright from under the shadow of his black Montero, and the whole air of his face, though joined with a wonderful deal of mildness and sweetness, did so of a sudden astonish me, that I fell into an excessive trembling, and had not been able to stand, if he had not laid his hand upon my head, and spoken comfortably to me.
That's some fulgour, all right.
Next week: bad
Things like writing about a random word, for example:
18. Fulgour
Fulgour (or fulgor) is a brilliant or dazzling light or splendour, from the Latin fulgor, meaning lightning, or a flash, glitter, gleam, brightness or splendour). It was first used in popular English literature around 1532 and not often since then, but you could use it yourself next time someone turns the light on when you're not ready. 'Turn the lights off. They are blinding me with their fulgour!' Give it a try. The related verb is fulgurate, which means to emit flashes. See if you can work that into conversation somewhere too. Maybe next time you see a disco ball?
An example from Sir Thomas Browne's fine work from 1646, Pseudodoxia Epidemica:
Thus Glow-worms alive, project a lustre in the dark, which fulgour notwithstanding ceaseth after death; and thus the Torpedo which being alive stupifies at a distance, applied after death, produceth no such effect; which had they retained in places where they abound, they might have supplied Opium, and served as frontals in Phrensies.
(If that seems like a lot of gibberish, it was part of an essay about how plants retain their properties after being picked so you can benefit from their medicinal properties fresh or dried, but animals don't. So, Sir Thomas says, just because a kingfisher seems to know which way the wind is blowing when it's alive, don't go hanging a dead one inside to act as a weather vane, because it just won't work. He knew what was what did Sir Thomas.)
Another example, which the internet is not terribly helpful at identifying, but would seem to be by Henry More in the 1660s:
But when he came up closer to me, the vivid fulgour of his eyes, that shone so piercingly bright from under the shadow of his black Montero, and the whole air of his face, though joined with a wonderful deal of mildness and sweetness, did so of a sudden astonish me, that I fell into an excessive trembling, and had not been able to stand, if he had not laid his hand upon my head, and spoken comfortably to me.
That's some fulgour, all right.
Next week: bad