As previously mentioned, I have been on something of a journal-tear of late, digging into a variety of diaries, mostly mid-twentieth century, and all quite, in very different ways, fascinating. The latest are early ones of one James Lees-Milne, an utterly English creation, great expert on country houses, a dabbler in louche adventures, and a friend of any number of fascinating creatures, many if not most titled, talented, or terrifying.

Among the last, if not all three, would have to be the late Queen Mary, who was more in the nature of an acquaintance. Having met the regal personage in the course of showing her around a charity exhibition, he describes her as "contradictory, splendid, and awful" even as he acknowledges her tremendous expertise in antiques and royal bibelots.

This first installment of his journals (which precede by several decades the more famous ones he wrote with publication very much in mind from the 1970s) start with a bang in the midst of the War and end up in the mid-fifties, after his highly advantageous and apparently quite happy marriage to a lady of means, the Viscountess Chaplin (herself hardly a dull creature and sometime intime of Vita Sackville-West, among others). As a result, we begin with air-raids, accounts of food shortages and wartime privations and end with our hero diving into bed with his wife in their villa on the Côte d'Azur. In between there are long stretches describing his travels around England as part of his work for the National Trust and any number of interesting encounters with everyone from the last surviving Edwardian hostesses and dandies to Prince Rainier ("I believe the Prince does not live in the Palace [where the Lees-Milnes have been lunching] but with a film star in a villa in Beaulieu...").

Toward the end of the volume, he reflects on his own character and writes that, with the passing years, he becomes "more and more fascinated by persons, places and things. I am a late developer more than most men of my generation and in some respects still quite adolescent, an opsimath indeed."

I love learning new words. In 1953, when Lees-Milne wrote that, he was just about my age, and now I have a new ambition: to remain, as I think I am now, an opsimath, one who continues to learn and to love and be astonished with new things late in life. Aren't you?

I have to say that, crazy as I am for alternate foreign-language titles for famous films (and the often fabulous posters that accompany them), when I think Perversidad, Edward G. Robinson is pretty much the last thing I want to pop into my mind.

As I continue to free associate about words that, once common, may be vanishing or already gone, two were sufficiently obscure that I realized that I didn't know all that much about them. I was that much more surprised to discover, when I did my little bit of research, to discover that they are in fact practically the same thing.

Yes, it's true: sarsaparilla is smilax. Or vice versa. Whatever. In one form, it's a half-forgotten soft-drink and excellent word for Sylvester the Cat to use; in the other, it's a modest plant often used to decorate Old Tyme weddings.

Go figure.

Compare and contrast.

Lately, when drifting off (as one is wont to do) in boring meetings, I've been thinking about words that you just never hear anymore - or perhaps never did all that often - that may in fact almost be in danger of vanishing altogether.

Today's word: Cretonne.

Grandmother Muscato may have been the last woman in America who dutifully every spring changed her curtains and put slipcovers on all the furniture in her every-day-of-the-week sitting room (as opposed to the parlor, which remained magisterially clothed, as always, in dark purple cut velvet and coordinating striped brocades).

"Cretonne," she would say, once she and her lady-of-all-work, the redoubtable Fanny (I kid you not), had gotten things more or less back in order, "is so cooling in the summertime."

Never mind that, even though it was nearly Decoration Day (the phrase "Memorial Day" being an unacceptable innovation in that household) on the calendar, in our northern town the warmth of summer was actually still about a month away (and would last no more than six weeks if we were lucky). It was almost summer, and soon enough time for white shoes and straw hats, along with cretonne curtains and slipcovers.

And until those few hot days of mid-July, I can still remember: cretonne may be cooling in summer, but on a brisk spring morning, it's downright cold.

Here's the Inaugural Address in world cloud form; a pleasing array of rhetoric, looking already to be backed up by substance. Even as they're dancing, the process of cleaning up the mess has started.

(Image snatched from wordle.net)

Doris took the idea of being a knockout to a whole new level. As Jeff discovered.

He also discovered that he rather liked it, taking his life in a whole new direction.

Over on his there website thingy, Joe.My.God. is pondering the age-old geographic divide between those who say "pop" and "soda" (and the unspeakables who simply say "coke").

This line of thought leads me to ask: am I the last person under seventy to refer to the item of furniture pictured above as "a davenport"?

Every once in a while a word will cross my mind, and I'll realize how very lovely it would sound - if only one didn't speak English. The most recent one is, of all things, "suppository." (no, no gory backstory, thank goodness).

Think about it. "Suppository." What a serene, classical sort of sound it has. It might be the name of a room of a cathedral, or the architectural term for some supporting part of a dome. Or perhaps a kind of garden pavilion, a pergola or gazebo...

"Have you seen Lady Blanche?" the Duke asked testily. "By Jove, Mrs. Gleaning, she becomes flightier by the hour!"

"I have, Your Grace," replied the housekeeper slyly. "I believe she is with Sir Edgar in the Suppository."

See?