I would just like to say, for the record...
I've had three people at work today tell me that I'm not ALLOWED to go on vacation, they need me too much. Which... okay, it's touching, it's nice to be needed. And part of me secretly hopes that they *do* find things a little harder with me gone (since that's what they pay me the big bucks for, after all). BUT. In a smoother-running business, they wouldn't be relying on ONE person for so much, and I'd already have a back-up. (As it is, I started as someone's back-up, upgraded to someone else's minion (I hate paperwork), and now BOTH of them are gone and I'm holding all the loose ends and bits.) I'm so desperate to just get AWAY for a little while, and "getting away" is going to involve enough jet-setting that I've built in a day of post-vacation vacation at home. And there's been so much last-minute "oh, I need to do this before I leave" stuff, and lists, and remembering what to pack and who to notify and what chores to finish that... argh. I just want to be able to SKIP the whole prepping for vacation part and just GO on vacation. The prep's been more stressful than the work and travel put together. >_<
Alright. Done whining now.
Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
It's the oddest thing. This letter has been showing up CONSTANTLY today. I had two patrons with a Q in their names... and the reviewers I'm reading at the moment seem enamoured of q-words. So we have, in a nice neat, er, queue, no less than FIVE words I hadn't come across before:
qui vive*
quidnunc*
quiff
quincunx*
quotidian (actually, I'd never looked it up before-- and discovered when I did that I'd believed it to mean the opposite of what it DOES mean. heh.)
Lest this not seem much of an impressive trend, the low-carb column in the paper was featuring recipes on quinoa. And I also ran into quiver, quid pro quo, quarter, quinine, quidam, Quiddich, quibble, Q.E.D., and-- okay, they don't start with Q, but-- Proquest (vendor for some of our databases), jacquard and mosquito. All in one day. Queer, no? ; )
* Proof that being able to puzzle out the Latin won't always clue you in to how a word's used today-- tho' I got very close with quincunx.
I come across some of the oddest words in my line of work. Actually, the first one isn't terribly odd at all, it's just an occupation-specific term I hadn't known. I'd always called a maker of violins or guitars a "violin-maker" or a "guitar-maker." Apparently, the correct term for both of these, and for any crafter of stringed instruments, is luthier, derived from the Old French word for lute, which is a precursor to many modern wooden stringed instruments.
My other word is a little, um, odder, and a good example of how I get what I deserve when I browse the dictionary instead of just looking up my work and going away. (Come to think, this is one of the drawbacks of an otherwise great site like OneLook-- it doesn't let me browse and learn new words incidentally.) Anyway, the word in question is jumart. Fine, you say. Bull and mare. Right, impossible cross, yadda yadda. Well, thanks to the miracles of modern science, probably not so impossible anymore, but... why would anyone try in the first place? (Of course, why would people breed labradoodles, one might ask?) But.... I dunno. What would it look like? Unfair. Now I have jumarts on the brain.