Wordy Rappinghood

 

When I was growing up, dad used to spend occasional time perusing his rather old - even then - Chamber's Etymological Dictionary, originally his sister Margaret's; and which I inherited after he died in 2012. I've since passed the book to my son, as seems appropriate, given that he, like his grandfather and me, is himself a wordsmith fascinated by the eccentricities of language, given to twisting words and sentences at will. I remember fondly my father's love of wordplay for comic effect; a characteristic affectation of his, like so many other, that I have absorbed, along with a growing physical resemblance to the old man, into my being. As a teenager, I started to take on board the desire for and acquisition of books: marshalling words, concepts and ideas into serried rows of paperbacks and the occasional hardback on shelf after shelf, in house after house. None are fancy tomes worthy of bibliophile attention, but all are collected for their content: the true purpose of a book is to convey information, after all. Pictured is volume one [A-O] of my compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary - four pages of the original to one, micro-graphically reproduced, on Bible-thin paper. I really can't afford the full, multi-volume edition of the dictionary, and this really rather difficult to read tome is the closest I'll ever get to it, short of winning the lottery. By the the way, I opened the thing at this page whilst I was searching for something, and noticed the word at the top left, which I recognised, odd and  archaic though it seemed: Middenerd. A scan of the dictionary entry revealed it to be Old Norse for the world: a place midway between Heaven and Hell, which seems entirely appropriate, dontcha think?