~ Monday, February 09, 2004 ~

*whew*

On Friday afternoon, JTS called me to schedule an interview. In spite of all the plain speaking (read: writing) I did in my essays, I seem to have passed Stage One of the filtering process. :)

The interview isn't scheduled yet, because when the person from JTS called to schedule it on Friday afternoon, my phone didn't ring, which is highly typical for my phone. The guy who left the message on behalf of JTS's admissions office was named Chris.

Oh, and (I can never manage to keep my posts to just one topic) after wondering about the word "silly" after making my last post, I went and looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, Concise Edition, which I now own (ranks up there among the best birthday presents I've ever received), using the nifty magnifying hemisphere and breathing in the wonderful new-book-just-opened fragrance, which is almost as good as the old-book-just-opened fragrance. I remember reading an article on the office door of some history professor in Building 200 about how that delicious thrill of opening up an old book that historians and other scholars get to know so well might actually be caused by getting high from breathing air rich with mold and mildew. I wish I could find that article. You know, professors' office doors are good sources of reading material. And not just all the Far Side comics you find in the music buildings, either. It was on the office door of a Philosophy (Ethics?) Prof. I'd never met that I first saw the delicious Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz, a copy of which then lived on my dorm door for a long time. All harpists stand up and wait...silliness, indeed.

Which brings me back to my topic. There I was looking up 'silly' in the OED, CE*, and I found out that it used to have a sense more like innocent, vulnerable, and weak, rather than stupid and inane. (By the way, the correct adverbial form is indeed 'sillily'. Likewise, 'lovelily'. I've wondered about that.) Apparently, it comes from Middle English, in which it was spelled seely, which bears a striking resemblance to the term seelie, as in the court of fairies that conducts itself according to nice rules, as opposed to the unseelie court, that will take your baby and switch it with an imp while you're in the other room drawing the bath water. In this incarnation, seelie seems to have connotations of blessedness rather than simply harmlessness, which is fine with me. Silliness is next to Godliness? Why not?

*The other version is so hopelessly out of date.

Current Music: Jeux d'Enfants, Alegria

~ prattled by Miriam at 12:12 a.m. [+]

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