Under the weather

Why do we say we're "under the weather" when we're sick?  I have no idea why, but it got me thinking about weather ... and googling for photographs of storms and lightning.  That's when I found this absolutely awesome photo of a tornado AND a bolt of lightning.  I had no idea something like this was possible.   Looking at it makes me shiver!  I don't want to be anywhere near this "weather," much less "under" it.

With bated breath

I left a comment on my friend Beth's Blue Ridge Blue Collar Girl blog that said I was waiting with bated breath for her next post.

When I thought about it later (I really should learn to trust myself), I wondered if I had spelled the word correctly and went in search of "bated" at Dictionary.com.  That's where I learned that "with bated breath" is idiomatic.

—Idiom
4. with bated breath, with breath drawn in or held because of anticipation or suspense: We watched with bated breath as the runners approached the finish line.

The Free Dictionary added:

If you wait for something with bated breath, you feel very excited or anxious while you are waiting.

I cross-posted this on my book blog, the one that's mostly about words in books.

Fulgurating

"Its fulgurating pain comes out in shrieks of unlikely laughter."

I ran across this sentence (and the word "fulgurating") while reading a New York Times article.  It's unusual for me to run across a word that is totally new to me, so I looked it up.

fulgurating = (of pains) sharp and piercing; lightninglike, especially of sudden shooting pain (medical dictionary)

The question now, of course, is whether I'll remember this word when I need it.  Probably not, since I am not prone to sudden, sharp, piercing pain that hits me like lightning.

Exhausted

Not even being tired can slow down my interest in playing with words.  (I'm thinking about yesterday, when I was so exhausted I fell asleep.)  I love that somebody came up with a whole sentence in the word EXHAUSTED:  "Haste has exhausted us."

It's an allusion!

Resolve the paradox of this poem by identifying the allusion.

IN THE GARDEN
by Anonymous

In the garden there strayed
A beautiful maid
As fair as the flowers of the morn;
The first hour of her life
She was made a man's wife,
And was buried before she was born.

Do you recognize the allusion?

Oh, you want me to define allusion?  Okay, an allusion is a reference to a literary work, person, place, or event.  Allusion is a means of suggesting far more than it actually says.  This picture is a visual allusion to another part of the same story.

I ran across my old copy of Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, Second Edition, by Laurence Perrine, 1963.  My notes in the book show that we discussed this poem in my college English class on March 28, 1966.
__________
I posted this on my Bonnie's Books blog a couple of months ago and intended to cross-post it here.  I guess I forgot.

How do you pronounce "often"?

This quote is from Throw Grammar from the Train:

"Sounding the t in often." I've been interested in this one since my daughter, brought up as an OFF-en speaker, went to college at the University of Michigan and came back saying OFF-ten. I don't think it's a regional thing -- I grew up two hours south of Ann Arbor, and I don't remember OFF-ten even as a variant. It must have been something she picked up from friends. ... And it's true that OFF-ten deviates from the usual pattern of soften, listen, fasten, christen, etc. 

Read that last sentence again and notice that the "T" sound is silent in lots of the words we use ... (ah-hem) ... OFTEN.

Hoi polloi

Hoi polloi is a Greek expression (οἱ πολλοί) meaning "the many" or "the majority."  It's used in English to denote the common people, usually in a derogatory sense.  As uncommon as the phrase is, it has come up twice this week:  in Sunday school when the teacher read it but didn't know what it meant (I did, fortunately) and in a book I'm re-reading.  This is from page xxxi of The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (1979):

"[Gnostics] ... typically characterized themselves as 'the few' in relation to 'the many' (hoi polloi)."

I want a tee-shirt like the one pictured here!