Friday 21 January 2011

Words

Following our trip to the O2 Exhibition, we are spending some time reading and writing about the Titanic. The wreck was discovered by sonar equipment and I was trying to explain the difference between sonar and echolocation - is there one? Out came out our trusty Oxford Dictionary, leading me on a pleasant rabbit trail:

"Sonar: a system of detecting objects underwater by reflected or emitted sounds."
(Aha! no swimming bats!)

"Echolocation: the location of objects by means of the echo reflected from them by a sound-signal."

In the next column was,
"Edam: a spherical Dutch cheese, usually pale yellow in colour with a red rind."
I don't know why, but this struck me as a soothing and strangely poetic collection of words. I repeated it a few times for effect.

Back across the page to "Eclair: a finger-shaped cake of choux pastry filled with cream and iced." Succinct and elegant, everything I love about dictionary entries.

My son suggested I look it up in the red (Chambers) dictionary, so "Eclair: a cake, long in shape but short in duration, with cream filling and chocolate icing." A joke! In a dictionary! What a lovely, hidden surprise.

And underneath, "Eclaircissement: the act of clearing up a midunderstanding; explanation."

Eclair, eclairissement: cake and understanding - essential to life.

1 comment:

Lucinda said...

Now this is the blogging inspiration I was looking for! Life-affirming stuff. Thank you Gaynor! xx