Sunset, Monday, 22 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Many ages ago (in blog terms – December 9th) I wrote about a word I’d encountered in the Edgar Allan Poe story “Mystification.” The word was uniquity – Poe used it to refer to the quality of being unique, and I had to go back to a 1955 version of The Oxford Universal Dictionary to find it.

In that post, thinking I was pretty cute, I referred to my ‘obliquity’ – believing I was cleverly making up a word.

Last night I began reading the Poe story “The Man That Was Used Up” – when what to my wondering eyes should appear:

They [his eyes] were of a deep hazel, exceedingly large and lustrous; and there was about them, ever and anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression.

Well, shoot. Turns out obliquity’s “even more of a word” than uniquity – it’s in current dictionaries, and seems to be used to describe the degree of an oblique angle, in addition (perhaps) to the way I used it. Obliquity – I should have noticed even my spell-check didn’t mind it.

I think in France they call this tragiquité. Well, O.K., maybe not.

Meanwhile, sunset tonight is fog and a lingering cold rain. The dense granular snow and the air seem to be meeting as some sort of middle substance between slowly melting snow and solidifying atmosphere.

Sunset, Wednesday, 9 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Painted at Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

The word of the day is something I encountered in “Mystification,” a crazy little story by Edgar Allan Poe. 

That he was unique appeared so undeniable, that it was deemed impertinent to inquire wherein the uniquity consisted.

(The story can be found online in a few places, all of which seem to share the defect of not showing italics.) 

Uniquity ... somehow sounds bad, as in “a den of uniquity.”

My spell check, no surprise, objects to the word. Webster’s doesn’t have it. However, it’s in a 1955 revision of The Oxford Universal Dictionary.

The story’s plot turns on characters intimidating, or seeking to intimidate, each other – to “mystify” – through the use of very arcane and particular mumbo-jumbo. It’s an appropriate device, since the story satirizes the very arcane and particular codes of dueling.

What this has to do with sunset ... not sure. Write it off, perhaps, as obliquity.