Summer Stock Take

Right then. Probably time we took stock.

It’s been rather lovely watching so many new people drift between the shelves this week, taking down words and having a look around. The little bell above the door has barely stopped tinkling, the conversation has been flowing, and I think someone has left something pulchritudinous near the tomatoes.

So, whether you’ve just wandered in or you’ve been browsing the shelves for a while, this is the Word Emporium Summer Stock Take.

It is Saturday morning, after all, so let’s make this a jentacular affair. Hopefully nobody is feeling too crapulent after Friday night. There are croissants, orange juice and a Mediterranean spread on the trestle table over there to serve as restoratives if so.

Help yourself.

Now, let’s see what we’ve got.

Recently, we discovered how a really boring speech in Congress gave us bunk, looked up at noctilucent clouds, watched our shadows disappear at Lāhainā Noon, and encountered ten words that sound as though someone made them up after several drinks.

That last one appears to have completely escaped the premises.

It has been shared hundreds of times, travelled considerably further than expected and, rather wonderfully, brought a lot of new people through the door.

If that includes you: welcome.

If you’ve only recently stepped through the door, here are a few bits you might like to explore.

Japanese Concepts That Don’t Quite Exist in English
Ideas, emotions and experiences that resist easy translation.

Querencia
A word for the place where you feel most yourself.

10 Everyday Sayings That Sound Completely Unhinged in Translation
Featuring monkeys emerging from sleeves, shrimp hiding behind rocks and cows watching trains.

Consider
How sitting with the stars became another way of thinking carefully.

The Spotlight Effect
Why everyone probably isn’t looking at you nearly as much as you think they are.

Pick a shelf. Have a rummage. There’s no particular order in which any of this needs to be read.

It’s these that I open the shop for every morning. Sometimes there are a few in a day. But even if it’s just one, and there always is, it’s a joy to wander home after locking up the Emporium for the evening with something new to think about.

Sometimes that something is simply knowing that a word has found its way out into the world. Paul Chiddicks, for example, recently told us that he’d introduced the delightful crapulence to his colleagues at his local family history research centre.

“It brought a smile to everyone’s face.”

Mission accomplished.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, something from the other end of the emotional spectrum came our way.

We’d explored the Italian phrase dolce far niente: the sweetness of doing nothing, and the strange truth that sometimes doing nothing is really about paying closer attention to everything.

A reader who writes as Waving From A Distance then shared something remarkable.

Our article had prompted her to share a poem written by her grandmother, Lilian Stockton Edmonds, around 1935. Its title?

Dolce Far Niente.

I give my body to the sun
And play with idle hand,
And time slips through my fingers
Like hot and heavy sand.

Almost a century between them, and there they were: two pieces of writing circling the same idea.

But the conversation continued. We wrote about the strange connection between the two pieces.

She wrote back.

Our interpretation, she said, had helped her understand something in her grandmother’s poem, and in her own years of dolce far niente, that she hadn’t quite understood before.

That one had us brushing away a tear behind the counter.

Elsewhere in the Emporium, an extremely important sporting competition took place recently.

The Word Cup pitted some of our favourite words against one another, with readers deciding who survived each round. Susan Bates became our Fair Play Officer. Steve Croft became our unofficial pundit. Things escalated.

There was cheering, hugging and partying. There were upsets. There were questionable refereeing decisions. But most of all, there were newfound, often die-hard allegiances to words we’d never heard of before.

And then there was Nunchi, quietly reading the room while everyone else fought it out around it.

Nunchi is the Korean art of sensing what others are thinking and feeling, and adjusting accordingly.

And, well, we should’ve known, shouldn’t we? It read the room and went all the way.

The Mezzanine has had a bit of a glow-up

It’s where we take a little longer over things: essays about language, books, culture, memory, place and the strange ways words become entwined with our lives.

To name just three:

Marginalia - on the lives left between the lines.

Solastalgia - the homesickness we can feel without ever leaving home.

The Secret Languages We Invent Together - on the little languages we create with the people we love.

If you’d like to support the Word Emporium, and have a key to the whole place while you’re at it, you’re welcome to come up and spend a little time here.

I love the stockroom. Every time I go in there, I can feel a thrum: all those words waiting for their time to be brought out and placed on the counter.

There are so many of them! But alas, we can only do a few a week. Each word needs its time to shine, right?

So, the ones I can tell you about that will be making their way onto the shop floor soon are…

A handful of Hindi words you probably already use.

A honeymoon with a rather more complicated past than you might expect.

An entire philosophy devoted to the surprisingly serious business of going for a walk.

And something called a haboob.

There are others with their hands up back there too, waiting to be picked.

They’ll all get their moment.

Some of you have been here since the shelves were rather bare. Some of you arrived this week.

The good thing about the Emporium being where it is is that there’s always enough space. Enough shelves. Enough words. Enough stories for everyone.

It grows and expands as required.

I am delighted to see you all here.

- the word collector, behind the counter

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