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verbicideIt's not every day that I see a word that completely flummoxes me. But today, reading the back of my newly delivered Who Do You Love, I read:
"In this acclaimed collection, Jean Thompson limns the lives of ordinary people..."
At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks, then I looked it up. It apparently means:
1. Trace the shape of
2. Make a portrait of
I had no idea. As there are many on my friend's list far more erudite than myself, this is probably not news. But I thought it was a rather cool word.
"In this acclaimed collection, Jean Thompson limns the lives of ordinary people..."
At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks, then I looked it up. It apparently means:
1. Trace the shape of
2. Make a portrait of
I had no idea. As there are many on my friend's list far more erudite than myself, this is probably not news. But I thought it was a rather cool word.
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Date: 2006-05-01 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 10:32 pm (UTC)How cool that it's related to 'illuminate' and 'luminous' too!
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Date: 2006-05-01 11:17 pm (UTC)all the words come from "luminare," which means, surprise, "to illuminate."
I'd love to learn Latin too!
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Date: 2006-05-03 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-03 11:14 am (UTC)limn \LIM\ verb
1 : to draw or paint on a surface
*2 : to outline in clear sharp detail : delineate
3 : describe
Example sentence:
In her novel, Deborah limns a vivid picture of life in the rural America of the 1950s.
Did you know?
Allow us to shed some light on the history of "limn," a word with lustrous origins. "Limn" traces to the Middle French verb "enluminer" and ultimately to the Latin "illuminare," which means "to illuminate." Its use as an English verb dates from the days of Middle English; at first, "limn" referred to the action of illuminating (that is, decorating) medieval manuscripts with gold, silver, or brilliant colors. William Shakespeare extended the term to painting in his poem Venus and Adonis: "Look when a painter would surpass the life / In limning out a well-proportioned steed . . . ."
[no, I didn't have to retype it, I just had to figure out where on the server we'd moved the master file THIS time....]
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Date: 2006-05-03 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 10:47 pm (UTC)By the way, do you remember that lovely French expression for the clever rejoinder you only think of after the conversation is over? I want to say l'esprit d'escalier, but I'm not sure ...
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Date: 2006-05-03 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 10:53 pm (UTC)It also has a not umcommon use in law - there is something called a motion in limine which is a preliminary motion made to...uh, sketch out the boundaries of a particular field of evidence into which, or beyond which an adversary cannot go.
I love stuff like this though. I recently had been reading on the train, in lieu of a novel, this book: Word Histories and Mysteries, from which I learned many fun little wordly factoids, such as the words 'women' and 'men' are utterly unrelated to one another, the word 'vixen' is the only surviving English word in which a word is made feminine by the suffix '-en,' the words 'bodega' and 'boutique' both mean the same thing in Spanish and French, respectively (both derived from, obviously in retrospect, 'apothecary'), and my favorite one - the word 'wizard' was originally an insult - words ending in '-ard' are derogatory, i.e, drunkard, dullard, bastard...
I am such a GEEK!
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Date: 2006-05-03 08:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-03 08:17 am (UTC)