Tag: words
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The Familiarity of an Unfamiliar Language
I keep catching myself. I’ll be sitting at a table, idly watching the conversation move back and forth, or sitting quietly on a train, zoned out but hearing the words drift by. Suddenly, it occurs to me that the words I’m listening to, the conversation I’m following, isn’t in English. Perhaps I am used to…
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“Yes, our African sky gives on the same sense of perfect freedom and wild exhilaration; sometimes on fees as though, for no reason that could be given, one were almost in an ecstacy of happiness when one goes out alone… Here one is never alone.” Olive Schreiner writing from London, 1879
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Words across time
In 1874, Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessey published a collection of poems called Music and Moonlight. Among them was a poem, Ode, that will be familiar to many, although most people know only the first couple of stanzas: We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, wandering by lone sea breakers and…