{"id":1460,"date":"2008-08-23T19:46:48","date_gmt":"2008-08-24T00:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=1460"},"modified":"2008-08-23T20:15:17","modified_gmt":"2008-08-24T01:15:17","slug":"summer-reading-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=1460","title":{"rendered":"Summer reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading Paul Theroux&#8217;s <em>The Pillars of Hercules<\/em>, his book in which he spends a year travelling around the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n<p>He is in France now, derogating the French for banning all foreign words. You can almost hear him thinking: silly French people, banning all those foreign words, when they could be like those of us who speak English and who have a huge number of words available to us, most of which we stole from other languages. And then a few paragraphs later, he slips in a beautifully obscure word, as if to show those French how delightful it is to use words appropriated from other languages:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The dream of the Mediterranean is not the Albanian coast or the docks of Haifa or the drilling rigs at the edge of Libya. It is the dream of this part of France, the sweep of the Riviera as a brilliant sunlit lotophagous land&#8230;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>lotophagous<\/strong>, <em>a., rare<\/em> Lotus-eating, resembling the Lotophagi. Hence <strong>lotophagously<\/strong> <em>adv.<\/em><br \/>\n&nbsp; <small><strong>1855<\/strong> EMERSON in <em>Corr. w. Carlyle<\/em> II. 244. I have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of Anthony Wood; which and the like of which I take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. <strong>1882<\/strong> PIDGEON <em>Engineer&#8217;s Holiday<\/em> I. 83. Thus lotophagously sailing, we landed one morning on a beautifully wooded point. [from the OED]<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading Paul Theroux&#8217;s The Pillars of Hercules, his book in which he spends a year travelling around the Mediterranean. He is in France now, derogating the French for banning all foreign words. You can almost hear him thinking: silly French people, banning all those foreign words, when they could be like those of us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1460\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}