Fiat Lux

This morning about 6:45 as I stepped out onto the front porch to head to the coffee shop (my wonted and wanted walk), I noticed something odd: I didn't need the porch light to help me descend the front steps (a process that's a little bit more ... dicey ... in my dotage--especially in the winter).

It's no glimmering insight to note that much of the dreariness of winter is its oppressive darkness. December, January--it's dark when I get up, dark when supper's over. It's as if the land itself can't abide looking at all the ice and (apparently) dead vegetation.

But today--as I said--the sun was edging up, and not long after I arrived at the Open Door Coffee Co., I had to lower the sunscreen on the window in front of me, for Old Sol was pouring a river of light through that window, a river that splashed me, full in the face. I was simultaneously grateful--and annoyed. (Hard to concentrate on my reading when Apollo's chariot is flaring in my face.)

In the kinder months when the sun lingers in the sky in the evening, Joyce and I like to run an errand after supper--"errand," usually, meaning a stop at Mickey D's for a Diet Coke. Or whatever. ("Fries with that?")

And until very recently, we even went out in the winter evenings (unless Frosty the Snowman and his ilk prohibited it), though our brumal evenings usually involved merely a stop at a Starbucks drive-thru in Aurora or Stow-Kent.

But this year ... I've wussed out. We eat supper, clean up--then I head upstairs to read for an hour or so until it's time to stream "our" shows. (I usually watch a Rockford Files episode before Joyce joins me; some of you know I've watched those episodes, in sequence, countless times; I quote lines coming up as Joyce enters the room--hard to tell if she's charmed, annoyed, impressed, depressed, regretful about a certain event that occurred on December 20, 1969).

So our evenings, I'm saying, have become even less exciting than they used to be. I mean, when a quick jaunt to Marc's or the grocery store or Kohl's or Mustard Seed Market qualifies as a Dyer Adventure, you have a pretty good understanding of the dimensions of our lives.

And--as I've said--it's even more constricted and restricted in the winter.

Nothing used to daunt me in my younger (dumber?) days. We'd head off to see family in Massachusetts for Christmas in a blizzard. We'd decide at the last minute some summer week to drive out to Oregon. When I was in my mid-forties, I thought it would be cool to hike over the Chilkoot Pass from Alaska to the Yukon because I was teaching The Call of the Wild to my eighth graders, and that pass figures a bit in the story. And so I did.

In the summers Joyce and I would drive all over the country looking at sites with literary significance--writers' homes, hangouts, graves. No problem.

And now? An evening trip to Bed, Bath seems a bit ... much for me. And Joyce--bless her--never hassles me about it. She'll just head to her study, work on her next book--or read, read, read until it's time to walk in our bedroom and hear the man she married quote lines from a 1976 episode of The Rockford Files.

Ah, romance!

But, as the Beatles once reminded us, "Here comes the sun"--and I am ready (more than ready) to embrace that nuclear ball of fire.

Loser Teachers?

First off: Let's be fair. Donald Trump, Jr., was not calling all teachers losers--just those who disagree with him politically, a characterization which is dingbatty enough because there are myriads of wonderful teachers who disagree with him politically. But name-calling is the new substitute for subtlety and analysis, isn't it? Our political world has become a school playground where bullies reign, where they employ their most egregious (and still effective) weapons.

(Video of his comment is easy to find on Google.)

I'll start with a confession: Early in my teaching career (which began in the fall of 1966), I realize now that I was too overtly political. It was the 60s, man--and I was deeply sympathetic with the Leftist causes of the day--civil rights, women's rights, and on and on. My students had no doubts whatsoever where I stood on such issues. And that, I realized later on, was ... inappropriate. The State of Ohio required those students to be in my room, and it was no more fitting for me to serve them snacks of my political opinions than it would have been to insist they all listen to my ideas about religious beliefs.

The years went on; I changed. I'm sure that my students could easily infer where I stood on political and social issues, but I really did try to refrain from discussing them overtly. My job, I realized, was to engage all students--not just those who shared (or pretended to share) my values. And it's hard to reach someone intellectually/emotionally when you have made it patent that you revile their politics.

In a related way, I still employ this principle on Facebook. Probably 95% of my FB friends are former students, and I have fond memories of all of them. And so I do not engage with any of them politically or religiously on FB because I prefer to maintain our relationships--and some of those go back more than fifty years. And that matters to me as I sail into the sunset.

Still, the "loser" label annoyed me when I heard it. In some particular ways, at the beginning, I was a "loser" in the economic sense. My first year's salary was $5100--that's fifty-one hundred, not thousand. The school offered no health insurance. Few other benefits. By the time I paid my bills each month, I had virtually no "discretionary funds." I was most definitely an economic "loser."

But ... I loved my job. I had colleagues I deeply admired (and tried to emulate); I had wonderful students (seventh graders the first couple of decades) who tried so hard, who helped me survive those early years by treating me as someone worthy--when, in too many ways, I wasn't.

I ended up teaching about forty-five years--and even to the very last days of my career I was trying to learn from my mistakes (and to rue them); I tried hard to engage my students, to listen to them, to learn as much as I possibly could about whatever I was teaching. I realized this: I was a learner among learners. And I loved it.

Now retired, I read about teachers all over the country who are trying to improve their profession--their working conditions. And I feel ... related to them. I know what they're doing--what it's costing them.

I also recognize that in this country we like to talk about the "value" of education--but our communities and our states do not often enough commit to that value. We need to pour financial support into our schools--to attract the best and the brightest into the profession--to lower class sizes--to diminish the number of classes our teachers teach (many years I had six a day)--to provide the best supplies and technology for all kids--to make sure every kid goes to school in a safe, comfortable building--to ...

I could go on and on.

But I fear we won't do all that much. It's far easier to vote NO and call your victims "losers."

Sunday Sundries, 218

1. AOTW: The dude who, yesterday, approaching our car, turned left right in my face, forcing me to brake--HARD--to avoid broadsiding him. Joyce heard from me some words she rarely hears ...

2. I finished a couple of books this week ...

     - The first was Kudos (2018), the final novel in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy--a series I did not know existed until a former student of mine, Alexxa Gotthardt, told me about it in the coffee shop a month or so ago. (So I need to go back and change some of her grades ... not: She was a superior student). The three novels, narrated by a writer who's moving here and there for various reasons (writers' conferences, etc.), all deal principally with the stories of the people she encounters during the day--on an airplane (this one begins with such a scene--as does the first in the series), at restaurants, in hotels, at the conferences. And everyone is so intent on telling his or her own story that we don't often get much about the narrator's story.

There's a funny scene in this one when the narrator is being interviewed by a journalist, but the interviewer is so interested in his own story that he never really gets around to the interview! The narrator comments at one point about "the mutual narcissism of human relationships" (56).

Cusk is a learned writer--but never really obtrusively so. There are allusions to Hesse, Tennyson, and some others here.

There are no chapters or numbered divisions--just occasional space breaks to indicate a time/venue change.

And now I'm resolved: When I finish my journey through the works on Kate Atkinson, Cusk is next!

     - I also finished the latest collection of pieces of John McPhee, whose wonderful nonfiction I've been reading since the days of A Sense of Where You Are (1965), The Headmaster (1966), Coming into the Country (1977), and those other dazzling works. I think I've read pretty much all of them.

McPhee will turn 86 next month, and in this new book--The Patch (2018)--he alludes now and then to his declining physical capacities. (He used to climb mountains, canoe all over the place--do pretty much whatever-the-hell he wanted; no more.) And this is sad to read--especially since, I, though more than a decade younger than he, am "enjoying" some of the same ... transformations.

His writing does not have those same snaps of electricity that it once did--but it's still McPhee! And I especially enjoyed the last, very long piece "An Album Quilt" (99-242), which is a collection of sections from earlier writing he's done throughout his career--sometimes snippets, sometimes a few pages long.

What a talent! And what a pleasure to have been able to read and learn from him all these years--these decades.

3. Yesterday afternoon, Joyce and I drove over to the Cinemark in Cuyahoga Falls for a 3:55 showing (the only one of the day) of the WW I documentary by Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) called They Shall Not Grow Old.

What a stunning piece of work. (By the way, if you see it, stick around after the final credits: Jackson talks for about a half hour on film about how they did what they did--why they made the choices they did, etc.)

As you probably know, technical experts standardized the film speed (the WW I movie cameras were hand-cranked, and the speed varied from camera to camera--thus, the "jerky" movements you see)--and now the movements of the soldiers (and others) seem perfectly "normal"--i.e., like yours and mine. Jackson's team also colorized the film, and the overall effects--the movement, the color--humanizes that old film in ways that just stunned Joyce and me.

Jackson begins--and ends--with some old b&w jerky footage so that when the restored footage begins, it seems truly miraculous.

He focuses tightly on some things: the enlistments, the training, the voyage from England to France, life in the trenches, an attack across "no-man's land" to the German lines--an attack that saw vast casualties on both sides. (He reminds us that about a million British soldiers died in the war.)

We see these men as human beings--human beings, by the way, who are mesmerized by the camera. He tells us afterward that most of them had probably never even seen a movie camera before.

A remarkable afternoon at the cinema. (Link to film trailer.)

By the way--one of the best high school teachers I had at Hiram High School (1958-62) was Mr. Augustus Horatio Brunelle (1894-1978), and he had served in France with the U. S. Army during WW I--but not in a trench-warfare capacity. Since he was a Ph.D. candidate (U of Wisc, where he was working on his dissertation in classics at the time he enlisted), they assigned him to an office: He could type--a valuable skill then. When he came back from the war, his dissertation advisor was gone, and his new one didn't like his topic and told him he would have to start over. Mr. Brunelle instead took some teaching--and preaching--jobs before ending up at Hiram High and, eventually, changing my life.

4. Had a weird experience streaming the most recent season of Vera via BritBox (or is it Acorn?): The subtitles were out of sync, about five minutes off. That was disconcerting. And, yes, we use subtitles for some of the British shows: We can't always understand our own language!

5. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from Oxford English Dictionary

† magirist, n. An expert in cookery.

Origin: A borrowing from Greek, combined with an English element. Etymons: Greek μάγειρος, -ist suffix.

Etymology: <  ancient Greek μάγειρος cook (further etymology unknown) + -ist suffix.

N.E.D.  (1904) gives the pronunciation as (mădʒəiə·rist) /məˈdʒaɪərɪst/.

 Obsolete. rare.

  1716  M. Davies Diss. Physick  12 in Athenæ Britannicæ  III Magists, Magirists..Geoponists, Hygiests, Prophylactists, Remedists.

1814 School Good Living  53 To their Magirists was given an appointment of culinary artists.

Derivatives

 magiristic adj.(in form mageiristic) relating to cookery.

1892 Punch  21 May 249/1 Immortal contributions to mageiristic lore.

Why Would You Ever Go Off-Script?

In earlier centuries, politicians could say one thing in one gathering, something quite different in another gathering. The formula: Say what your audience wants to hear--even if it contradicts what you said to a different audience the day before. And no one would really know. They could stumble and misspeak and goof--and no one but the folks in that particular crowd would ever know.

But today? It's Twitter-Time! It's Blog-Time! It's 24/7-News Time! It's Facebook-Time! It's iPhone-Camera Time! It's Whatever-Time!

And every word a politician utters is like a top, waiting to be spun.

As a result, candor has become error. Any slip of the tongue (or mind) becomes grist for the mill, corn for the cattle, forbs for the sheep, pizza for the population ...

And a result of this? Well, we are encouraging politicians (and other public figures) to deliver lines from a script rather than speak--as Petruchio says in The Taming of the Shrew--"extempore, from my mother-wit" (2.1).

Unfortunately, so many of us come up a bit short in the "mother-wit" department--as Katherine counters in Shrew--"A witty mother! Witless else her son."

(And daughter, of course.)

So ... when public figures drop their scripts and speak "extempore," so often (so very, very often) they demonstrate their witlessness--and the blade of the social-media Cuisinart commences to whirl.

If I were a politician (not likely: Even I would not vote for me!), I don't think I would ever deviate from a carefully crafted script. Doing so is a slow form of suicide (unless, of course, you're You-Know-Who).

And so--in our swiftness to indict, judge, convict, condemn, and execute, we are encouraging our public figures to become mere deliverers of lines--the sort of person Macbeth alluded to in his speech about "life": "a poor player  / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more ..." (5.5).

We're a bit hypocritical, wouldn't you say? We allow ourselves countless mistakes, slips of the tongue, inadvertent cruelties, goofs, misjudgments, misadventures, but our public figures? They must be flawless! Not a single mispronounced word must pass their lips, not a single error of grammar or usage, not a single thoughtless thought. (Think of the careers of politicians that have ended with a single error.)

And so--in a way--we deserve to drink the salt water they serve us at our banquet of tears.

Changing Roles for Teachers?

In the Washington Post today is an op-ed by David Von Drehle--"It's Time to Think What Teachers Are For" (link to the piece).

In the essay, he notes the accelerating number of advances in technology that now make it possible, he says, for this: Students from inner cities to rural hamlets can now (or soon) experience the world’s most skilled instructors delivering optimal lessons — at the student’s pace, in the student’s language, at whatever time of day the student learns best.

Okay--this is the argument--often advanced by people who have never taught (or have not taught much)--that what will improve education is putting kids in front of computers (or smart phones or whatever), where they will sit and watch "master teachers" instruct them about, oh, indirect objects or Hamlet or whatever.

To be fair to Von Drehle, he does make the argument, too, that "on-site teachers" will still be needed as life coaches, role models, facilitators, therapists, motivators, demolishers of obstacles and openers of eyes. And he talks about one of his teachers who had a significant influence on him years ago.

But all of us who have spent time teaching in actual classrooms--as I did for about forty-five years--know the folly of this replace-teachers-with-online-experiences stuff. It just ain't the same. Not even close.

I had some wonderful teachers in my student career--and all of them "knew stuff" and were profoundly human, as well: Mrs. Stella Rockwell (4th grade), Mrs. Ruth Browning (high school English), Mr. Augustus H. Brunelle (high school English, Latin, German), Prof. Abe C. Ravitz (college English), Prof. Charles F. McKinley (ditto).

And as I think about those remarkable people, I try to picture them coming to me only via a screen, a monitor. And it just doesn't ... compute.

Mrs. Rockwell's hand on my shoulder, her smile when I'd done something well (okay, I didn't see it all that often!), her determination to urge us to love books (she read to us every day after recess); Mrs. Browning's insistence that we work hard, that we take our studies seriously; Mr. Brunelle's mastery of language, his vast reading, his sense of humor (he loved puns), his temper (oh, yeah!); Prof. Ravitz's cerebral engagement with American literature, his vocabulary (I often went back to my dorm and looked up words he'd used--like lycanthropy and noetic), his belief that you ought to read a writer's complete works and visit significant literary sites; Prof. McKinley's wry sense of humor, his wide knowledge of world literature, his ability to keep things personal, even in a survey course--these are the qualities that had a significant effect on me, that greatly influenced me (though, I confess, some of it arrived a bit later on--after it had ... stewed ... a little), that helped shape me into the teacher that I became.

I'm trying to picture what Von Drehle is picturing: "master teachers" on the screen, "on-site teachers" walking around the room, smiling, touching shoulders (well, not too much of that these days!), encouraging--like eager trainers at the health club?

Well, if so, that's not a profession that would interest me. No, I want to dive into the sea of literature and writing, dragging the kids behind me; I want to go see where Shakespeare lived, where Hemingway died, where Willa Cather wrote, where Sinclair Lewis lived, where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are buried; I want to drive the road that Faulkner wrote about in As I Lay Dying; I want to walk the beaches of Grand Isle, LA, where much of Kate Chopin's The Awakening is set; I want to tour the Missouri cave where Injun Joe died in Tom Sawyer; (a book Mrs. Rockewell read to us);  I want kids to write from their memories, from their hearts, from their minds; I want ...

... I want to return to my classroom and show the pictures I've taken, help kids see what I saw, share with them how all of this affected my thinking; I want to have them read--and have their own thinking changed, elevated.

One of the great building principals I was fortunate enough to work for in my teaching career was the late Mike Lenzo. He embodied what Von Drehle mentions near the end of his piece--those things that make us human to begin with: our capacity for connection, compassion, empathy and love. He was wonderful.

Anyway, one day Mike said in a faculty meeting--a meeting at which we were talking about technology issues and what tech can do for us--"Just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should do it."

That rang so true my eardrums are vibrating to this day.

And, of course, Mike (as always) had identified the key questions: What should we be doing? And why? And what will best benefit kids?

I'd love to hear those questions today, bellowed from the mountaintops--and so loudly that maybe even politicians would hear them.

PS: I'll write more on this issue tomorrow--or soon.

PowerPoint?

Several of my Facebook friends have recently shared a piece from Business Insider, a piece that features this headline: Universities Should Ban PowerPoint: It Makes Students Stupid and Professors Boring (August 25, 2017).

I'm not sure why the piece is circulating now? But FB, of course, is known (notorious?) for such things--the resurrection of ideas and memes and lies and interesting stories and inconvenient truths ... it's quite a mix, as you Facebookies well know. (Would Chewbacca be a Facebookie Wookie?)

Anyway, here's a link to the entire piece.

Written by a professor, Dr. Paul Ralph (Aukland Univ.), the piece summarizes some research, some interviews, and makes such declarations as this: "Slides discourage complex thinking."

Okay. I have attended some PowerPoint lectures which were, indeed, dull--the speaker merely reproducing on the slides what he/she was saying aloud. Lots of words--few graphics, etc.

I'll also confess this: During the later years of my teaching career (I retired in the spring of 2011), I used PowerPoint quite a bit in my high school classes--American literature. But I like to think (self-delusion?) that I was animating the class, not narcotizing it.

I didn't use it every day; I didn't simply make slides of the words I'd planned to say--hell, I was lucky to know what I was going to say milliseconds before the sentences tumbled from my mouth!

Instead, I used it principally during my introductions to the classes, introductions to the writers we were going to be reading. So--say--when we were about to read some Hemingway, I would show pictures and talk about Hemingway-related places where my wife and I had gone--from his boyhood home in Oak Park, IL, to his final home and grave in Ketchum, ID.

For Willa Cather, we drove all over the countryside near Red Cloud, NE (the cornfields were awesome!), saw the place where she was born (near Gore, VA), visited her later-life summer place on Grand Manan Island (New Brunswick), saw her simple gravesite in Jaffrey, NH.

We toured Arrowhead (the home in Pittsfield, MA, where Melville wrote Moby-Dick), climbed Monument Mountain (where he met Hawthorne, in company with Oliver Wendell Holmes), took a boat to Nantucket, visited whaling museums, saw his grave in the Bronx.

Jack London took me twice to the Klondike (including a hike over the Chilkoot Pass, prominent in The Call of the Wild) and many times to his former ranch near Glen Ellen, CA.

And on and on and on and on. All these places we photographed, then made PP slides to show my classes.

My purpose is all this was to humanize the writers--to show my students where and how they lived--to show them how history has honored them (or not)--to let the kids see the settings they were going to be reading about in a story or poem or play or novel.

Did I succeed? You'd have to ask my former students. I'm sure that what I was doing did not interest some of them (so it goes--no matter what you do), but I like to think (deluding myself?) that the PowerPoints did, indeed, enrich their experiences with American literature. It certainly enriched mine!

Sunday Sundries, 217

1. HBOTW: The squirrel outside my study window, his nest in a nearby tree, a nest I can see, who works hard every day to keep him and his going. No complaints. No calling in sick (when he isn't). No knowledge of Hump Day. A hard worker (who can be profoundly annoying--to me, to the dogs that can't catch him). Virtues and vices abound in him--just as they do in the rest of us.

2. I finished two books this week ...

     - The first--one of my read-a-little-in-bed-most-nights books--was The Law and the Lady (1875), a later novel by Wilkie Collins (1824-89), a friend of and collaborator with Charles Dickens (1812-70). As some of you know, I've been slowly reading my way through all of Collins' novels, in the order he wrote them ... well, after, that is, I got hooked by The Moonstone, 1868, and The Woman in White, 1860.

I realized, about halfway through Law, that I was reading it out of order: I should have first read The New Magdalen, 1873; it's now on my bedside table. Oh well.

Law is narrated by its principal character a young woman named Valeria Woodville, who discovers not long after her marriage, that her new husband had been on trial for the murder of his first wife; a Scottish court found him neither guilty nor innocent--a final possible ruling at the time. "Not proven."

Valeria is convinced he is innocent, and he, ashamed, flees while she decides she will devote herself to discovering who the actual murderer was.

She does. (Ain't tellin' you who it was.)

Along the way, she gets involved with a witness at the trial--a truly bizarre character named Misserimus Dexter, a brilliant but wildly eccentric man who has legs that don't function; attending him is a violently devoted woman ...

Anyway, an early example of a "woman-detective" novel, and, somewhere, perhaps, Kinsey Millhone is expressing her gratitude.

Collins is a brilliant writer--every bit Dickens' equal. Maybe his superior ...

     - The second was a collection of forewords, prefaces, and afterwords by Michael Chabon (one of my favorites), pieces that that he has written over recent years to be included in the books of other writers--and, in some cases, of his own. It's called Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros (2018).

I had never read Chabon until I saw the film Wonder Boys (2000) with Michael Douglas as a writing professor who is stuck in his second novel, a novel that has swollen to thousands of pages with no end in sight. One of his most talented/interesting students is Tobey Maguire (who's not yet realized he's Spider-Man); another is Katie Holmes. With minor--but great parts--are Frances McDormand, Robert Downey, Jr., and Rip Torn. (Link to film trailer.) I loved the film--have seen it numerous times since its initial release--and it got me reading Chabon. 

I've now read everything by him. A confession: I wasn't' really looking forward to this one, but I really enjoyed it. Lots of cool things he says about writing, about specific writers. He's had a lifelong fondness for fantasy, so there are pieces about that. (I've liked some of it, too, but I'm nothing like the fan that Chabon is.)

Some cool things he says ...

• "realism is ... hopeless" (26)
• "the past is another planet" (37)
• "Writers are mutants" (45)
• "All short stories, in other words, are ghost stories" (57)
• "I did believe in fairies. I did. I did" (105)
• good writers "plant flags at the end of time" (138)

And on and on and on and on. Really loved his piece about his own 2002 novel Summerland (which I loved--a baseball fantasy novel!).

3. Last night, we drove down to the Cinemark in North Canton to join our son and his sons (13, and 9--both very close to their next birthdays) to see a film I'd kind of wanted to see before--but it had quickly disappeared from most local theaters: The Kid Who Would Be King (link to film trailer.)

It's a re-telling of the King Arthur story--set in contemporary England at a school where our "Arthur" is a bullied 12-yr-old kid (one of the bullies is Lancelot--"Lance" here). Fleeing the bullies, he stumbles into a construction site, where he finds ... the sword in the stone (yes, that one), and then the story changes and charges ahead.

About midway through my teaching career I became an Arthur fanatic (can't remember why): read scores of books, saw the films, even took a busload of kids to see Disney's The Sword in the Stone at the old downtown Kent Cinema. (Original release 1963--so it must have been a re-release ...)

I actually liked the Kid film a lot more than I thought I was going to. The writers knew the stories, had some sly references (and obvious ones) to various Arthur tales--from The Once and Future King to Camelot to ...

One actor that really stood out, I thought, was the young man who played Merlin: Angus Imrie. That guy just radiated intelligence and humor. I see on IMDB that he's been in a few things--but he has a future. (As King? We'll see!)

We end up with two titanic clashes between "Arthur" and his "knights" (classmates who are convinced of his "chosen" status)--both with Morgana (aka Morgan le Fay) who's come roaring back from her confinement to the underworld, supported by scary bony dudes with flaming swords on flaming horses. The big confrontation: They attack the school, but, thanks to Arthur, et al., the kids are ready.

I especially enjoyed sitting next to my younger grandson, who loves books and fantasy and legend, and who was brimming with questions, most of which I could actually answer!

4. Enjoying the Netflix comedy special--just available last week--with Ray Romano in a couple of NYC clubs where he began his career. He's funny ... (Link to some video.)

5. Last word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from wordsmith.org

nidifugous (ny-DIF-yuh-guhs)

adjective: Well-developed and able to leave the nest soon after hatching.

ETYMOLOGY: From Latin nidi- (nest) + -fugous (fleeing). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sed- (to sit), which is also the source of nest, sit, chair, saddle, assess, sediment, soot, cathedral, and tetrahedron. Earliest documented use: 1902.

NOTES: The opposite of nidifugous is nidicolous (remaining with parents for a long time after birth). Etymologically speaking, these words apply to birds, but there’s no reason you can’t use them elsewhere. For example, if your adult child suggests living in your basement, you could simply say, “Don’t be nidicolous!”

USAGE: “The young of all species are -- as you well know -- nidifugous, and ours will be no exception. And as they go, they will take some of their spirit with them, leaving us, the founders as mere husks.”

Malcolm Macdonald; Strange Music; Severn House; 2012.