21AprThe Weirds sisters

I’ve recently finished reading the edited Letters of the Mitford sisters. I’ve always been a bit fascinated by them, expecially Nancy; not only did she write excellent books, she also married my Great Uncle Peter (Peter Rodd, or Prod).  The letters go from well before the War to the death of Diana in 2002 or thereabouts, and they’re a fascinating read.  What an extraordinary bunch of women they were, so totally divergent both politically and emotionally.

One letter from Diana to Debo caught my eye because she used a very unusual word, “unweeting”, which she defined as meaning “meaningless”.  I knew about “unwitting” meaning “unknowing”, but this was a new one on me.  Neither The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words nor Google’s “define” feature had heard of it, nor had the QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, nor the Cassell Book of Slang (a fascinating tome!).  Finally my 1811 edition of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary came up trumps: “Unweeting: Ignorant; unknowing. Spenser.”

So it’s the same as unwitting after all!  Johnson doesn’t have “unwitting”, but under “unwittingly” he writes: “(properly unweetingly from unweeting.)  Without knowledge, without consciousness.  Sidney” – so that clears that up.

It’s amazing to me how many dictionaries it can take to find the meaning of a word.  If I’m really stuck I look English words up in my Garzanti Hazon Grande Dizionario Italiano-Inglese, which has more English words in it than any of my other dictionaries.  I’ve found several crossword answers that way, words that weren’t in any of the 9 standard English dictionaries and 2 thesauri I have on my shelves.

That’s how I came to start the “Weirds” page: it’s a listing of the unusual words that I’ve discovered in my reading, in conversation, in specialist dictionaries and so on.  Please feel free to send me any “weirds” you come across.  Who knows, they might even end up being quoted on Google’s “define” feature.  If you don’t know about that, it’s simple: type “define:[word you want defined]” without the “” or the [] and it trawls the ‘net to find listings that define the word.  It doesn’t always find them, but it’s amazing what it does come up with.  When I first looked up “umbles” Goggle couldn’t find anything for me; I put the word on the Weirds page and, when I checked today, it’s been put in both Wikipedia and Wiktionary.  Progress!

So send ‘em in and we’ll see how much more we can add to the sum of human knowledge.