{"id":78,"date":"2015-12-13T08:26:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-13T16:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ralockhart.com\/WP\/?p=78"},"modified":"2015-12-13T08:26:26","modified_gmt":"2015-12-13T16:26:26","slug":"words-as-eggs-moiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/words-as-eggs-moiling\/","title":{"rendered":"WORDS AS EGGS: “Moiling”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those of you who know my book Words As Eggs, <\/em>know that I can\u2019t leave words alone, or, more accurately, words won\u2019t leave me alone. I\u2019ll be reading along and, without warning, a word will leap at me, tethering me to it until I give in and take up what I call  \u201cword work\u201d with it.<\/p>\n

     The most recent experience occurred while reading James Howard Kunstler\u2019s  acerbic critique of artist Damian Hurst, in the course of which he used the phrase, \u201cZombies moiling outside the building.\u201d Moiling<\/em> leapt at me. I had not seen the word used in years, and even longer since I used it. I recalled its meaning as \u201ctoiling,\u201d and this sent my mind into an associative spree, with \u201cboiling, coiling, poiling, roiling, soiling.\u201d Hey, at my age, the mind being spontaneously associative is a good sign, neurogenesis and all that. As I began my word work, I saw that the word derived most immediately from the Middle English moillen, <\/em>meaning \u201cto soften by wetting.\u201d As you can see, it\u2019s not immediately clear how we get from \u201csoften by wetting\u201d to \u201ctoil.\u201d Such word puzzles I find very useful in keeping an active mind. In looking through the historical usage of the word (as is possible in the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>), one begins to see it and often a phrase will make the picture easier to see: to toil in muck and mire.<\/em> To dig deeper into the pre-history of the word, we find its Indo-European root to be mel-1<\/strong>, which refers to \u201cmelt, soften, slime\u201d The root is intertwined with mel-5<\/strong>, <\/em>meaning \u201cgrind, mill.\u201d Sloppy work, one might say, as befits the toil of Zombies. <\/p>\n

     These words that grip me, often lead to dreams as well. Such was the case with moil.<\/em> In the dream, I am writing on a blackboard and though I am not aware of any students, I am teaching. I am listing words related to moil: goiling, hoiling, joiling, koiling, loiling, voiling, woiling, xoiling, zoiling. <\/em>As you can probably tell, none of these words I am listing are \u201creal\u201d words. I am about to ask the class to take one of these words and to develop a meaning for it. At this point I wake up. <\/p>\n

     We live in a time where we are quite aware of words newly made up\u2014most especially words related to the advancements in technology. Now here is a dream<\/em> that introduces nine new words. (How does the dream know these words I\u2019ve never experienced before?) So to linger with the dream itself, rather than ask what the dream means, I focus on what the words mean. In a subsequent post, I\u2019ll let you know what I did with this \u201ctask.\u201d<\/p>\n

     But now, let me ask you<\/em> to focus on this task as if you were a student in this class of mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those of you who know my book Words As Eggs, know that I can\u2019t leave words alone, or, more accurately, words won\u2019t leave me alone. I\u2019ll be reading along and, without warning, a word will leap at me, tethering me to it until I give in and take up what I call  \u201cword work\u201d with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-soon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralockhart.com\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}