One of my favorite books from childhood
Aug. 13th, 2017 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyis A Tale of Time City. Great book - a rare one of DWJ's that doesn't end with a sudden epidemic of love at first sight.
And what I remember from the book more clearly than any other detail is Vivian's lesson on the universal characters everybody uses. She's having trouble with her translation, can't figure out if one character means "old" or "funny", and is told to try antic - it means both.
This is the one and only time I've read that antic means both, though once the connection is made, the fact that it's cognate with "antique" is obvious.
Today I finally got around to looking up the etymology:
1520s, antick, antyke, later antique (with accent on the first syllable), "grotesque or comical gesture," from Italian antico "antique," from Latin antiquus "old, ancient; old-fashioned" (see antique (adj.)). In art, "fantastical figures, incongruously combined" (1540s).
Originally (like grotesque) a 16c. Italian word referring to the strange and fantastic representations on ancient murals unearthed around Rome (especially the Baths of Titus, rediscovered 16c.); later extended to "any bizarre thing or behavior," in which sense it first arrived in English. As an adjective in English from 1580s, "grotesque, bizarre." In 17c. the spelling antique was restricted to the original sense of that word.
Now everything makes sense again!
And what I remember from the book more clearly than any other detail is Vivian's lesson on the universal characters everybody uses. She's having trouble with her translation, can't figure out if one character means "old" or "funny", and is told to try antic - it means both.
This is the one and only time I've read that antic means both, though once the connection is made, the fact that it's cognate with "antique" is obvious.
Today I finally got around to looking up the etymology:
1520s, antick, antyke, later antique (with accent on the first syllable), "grotesque or comical gesture," from Italian antico "antique," from Latin antiquus "old, ancient; old-fashioned" (see antique (adj.)). In art, "fantastical figures, incongruously combined" (1540s).
Originally (like grotesque) a 16c. Italian word referring to the strange and fantastic representations on ancient murals unearthed around Rome (especially the Baths of Titus, rediscovered 16c.); later extended to "any bizarre thing or behavior," in which sense it first arrived in English. As an adjective in English from 1580s, "grotesque, bizarre." In 17c. the spelling antique was restricted to the original sense of that word.
Now everything makes sense again!
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Date: 2017-08-13 06:31 am (UTC)". . . a long man with an antic (is that right?) weather and boring shirts . . ."
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Date: 2017-08-13 06:48 am (UTC)A Tale of Time City is one of my favorite and formative books by Diana Wynne Jones, too.
I don't know why it doesn't seem to make anybody's top ten lists.
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Date: 2017-08-13 02:51 pm (UTC)For me, because I really don't have any memory of it at all. Nothing I can't point at and say 'this is what I liked' or even 'here's something the book is about'. My favourites, I have a strong sense of what it was that the book gave to me.
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Date: 2017-08-14 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
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