It is coming up to midnight and the deadline for the online job application, the time at which my truthful and dissembling prose will be indifferently disappeared. An autoresponder will offer its thanks for my interest in working there, mistaking my motives. But I am more interested in my Christmas present from Kim, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and this fine Welsh Seidr Dai I obtained in Liverpool the other day.
In Orwell's novel, the protagonist observes his fellow commuters on the tube with the haughty but also self-directed disdain which is a trope of the book. "He would be a law-abiding little cit like any other law-abiding little cit--a soldier in the strap-hanging army." Later, talking about a printing process, he mentions a small poetry journal printed on a "jellypress".
Neither "cit" nor "jellypress" appear in the Concise OED (nor in the larger online version). I haven't looked in my Shorter OED as I'm not at home at the moment.
In a recent issue of the LRB, Jeremy Harding, discussing the changing life in Britain of the concept of "multiculturalism" ("swaying like a blanched orchid at a Peter Tosh concert was not enough"), deployed the words, new to me, "refoulement", "laudatio", and "tractation". You can guess the middle one I suppose, but I've gone wrong by guessing before.
They are: a legal term meaning to render a person to a country where it is likely he or she will be maltreated in the legal system, usually as 'non-refoulement'; a formal or academic word for 'laudation'; and the treatment of a subject or topic, the manner of proceeding with it.
On the other hand, the words I didn't know from The Sorrows of Young Werther--which I bought recently as a purgative to a piss-poor chick-lit book that someone chose for our book group--were all present in the COED: "clabber", "cruse", "raree show", "manikin", and "chromo" (short for "chromolithograph").
After such an enjoyable night's squirrelling about in the dictionary, I'd left myself very little time to craft an answer to Question 3 on an application form for a bit of short-term work at my alma mater. Ability to cope under pressure. "You don't know you're fucking born," I drunkenly muttered.
A previous job I had was Signalman, during which I would control 900
train movements a shift. The pressure there was such that if done
wrong, you could kill people. Working in a more academic environment
afterwards was a stroll in the park. I also have triplet daughters, and
I think anyone who can hold down a job, do a postgraduate degree, and
look after three occasionally awkward teenage girls, can deal with the
sorts of "pressure" that any paid job offers.
Arrogant, too informal, insufficiently subordinate? I'll let you know how I get on.
