Wherein I admit that the terms discussed below were heretofore unfamiliar to me. Be kind.
Homework, a recent memoir by Englishman Geoff Dyer, is endlessly amusing. He’s a witty writer (The Ongoing Moment, The Last Days of Roger Federer) with a great memory, two valuable assets for a memoirist. Because he was born in the fifties, I found we have a lot in common. But because he’s English and Oxford-educated, I was flummoxed by a fair number of words and references.
Etiolated is one of those words I’ve looked up in the dictionary at least a half dozen times. Maybe this time I’ve learned it. Or maybe not. At this moment, I’m aware that it means “feeble” or “bleached” or “deprived of vigor.” Botanically, it refers to plants growing in deficient light. It comes from the French etioler, meaning “to blanch.” Its stress is on the first syllable /ˈēdēəˌlādəd/.
Conkers is an odd game English boys play (or played) in which they attach strings to horse chestnuts, or conkers, and swing them around in an attempt to damage or destroy the other boy’s conkers. As an adult, Dyer reasonably observes that somehow it never occurred to him or other boys that you were just as likely to damage your own conker as your opponent’s. Boys are very weird.
Verrucas is a synonym for warts, which plagued Dyer as a child. It is, in fact, the Latin word for wart, which means that I should know it. In my experience, however, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Ovid, Vergil, Horace, Catullus, and Lucretius neglected to tell us about their warts. Unless I’ve forgotten.
I think I knew the meaning of “taking the mickey ” out of someone, a favorite expression of Dyer’s dad. It means “to ridicule or embarrass.” I wanted to check out its history, though, and found out it’s ambiguous. The best theory is that it’s Cockney slang, based on “taking the Mickey Bliss out” of someone, because bliss rhymes with “piss,” and “taking the piss out” of someone is the older phrase for teasing or embarrassing someone. Or, it might refer to micturition, another word for pissing. Either way, I guess it has to do with urinating.
Finally, I had to check out Boxing Day, celebrated in England and other countries on December 26. Traditionally, it was a day to box up gifts for servants and the poor. Ironically, it’s come to mean shopping at big box stores after Christmas and buying more stuff, kind of like Black Friday in the US. I had a vague notion it had something to do with fisticuffs.
Don’t draw the conclusion that Geoff Dyer’s prose is pretentious or intimidating. True, sometimes his narrative dragged a little as he reaches his teens, when he obsesses over British bands I never heard of, collects Brooks-Bonds tea cards (?), and wants so desperately to insinuate himself with girls. At the end of the book, though, as he leaves home and deals with his parents’ deaths, his experience becomes poignantly universal. It’s a unique and lovely book.