Neanderpundit

“I know of governors of places, and seneschals of castles, and sheriffs of counties, and many like small offices and titles of honor, but him you call the Science of Optics I have not heard of before; peradventure it is a new dignity.”

“Yes, in this country.”
(Hank Morgan to unnamed nobleman,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)

In this country, ‘Optics” has come to mean “Appearances”. While there are some English usages that annoy me no end, like using ‘Decimate’ to mean something other than “To tithe”.

but I kind of like “optics”. It isn’t a misapplied word like “Decimate”, used by people ignorant of it’s real meaning, or a misunderstood phrase like “Out of pocket” which means living on ones own resources instead of “out of touch’ which is the way it is now most commonly used. No, “Optics” is a sort of a twist of the original word, the concept easily recognizeable by anyone who speaks the language well, just like the bard did in do many of his plays. To take a word or part of a word and give it a twist in the way you’re using it so it means something very similar but in a whole new way… that seems very akin to the way Shakespeare used the language to his own purposes, and I think it’s OK.

reminds us all that Jesus loves you regardless.

if he’s towing that train with that little bike he must have leg muscles like cannonballs. Looks like he has sleeping quarters in there, and it sounded like there was a dog- I don’t know if the dog was his or belonged to one of his visitors, he had attracted a crowd of bikers. This was in Lockport, sort of a (Maybe) less nutty Scott Huber.

I started yesterday dealing with weeds- the flower beds the Ogwife was so desperate to have do not imply that she was desperate to weed them- I piled the pulled weeds out in the lawn and moved on to mow, with hands now full of thistle spines. Got the front mowed and weeds mulched, moved to the back, and once the back was half done moved a bunch of logs so I could mow the patches under them. Got stung by five yellow jackets.Rolled a bunch of logs up into position to stage them for the drag up the hill, and managed to cut my thumb AND jam a bigass splinter up in the joint on my right ring finger. Parked the tractor and moved onto the Oglets truck, made trips to three different auto parts stores, finally got the right part, whereupon I dropped the part coming out unto the valley between the intake manifold and valve cover, reached for it, burned my hand and smacked the hood prop with my elbow, dropping the hood on my head. Right next to one of the five bee stings. Ended the day by waiting for partner at a restaurant we have been frequenting for five or six years whose name I don’t remember except that they were once called “Crab Shack”, and since the sandblasted B looks more like P on the inside of the glass we always call it the Crap shack, and Partner thought we were talking about the Crab shack some fifteen miles away. Having arrived there and not finding us he called, and we managed to sit down to dinner about seven thirty with no further incident. I am consistently amazed that I managed to survive.