QUINTE

77. QUINTE:

Of course without a reality none of this is real so I’m sitting explaining to this girl the lifetime of a word saying that it takes like 100 years for a word to get acclimated to the people who speak it and sitting there at the Olde Town Tavern bar where we’re just talking back and forth I use the word ‘upstairs’ as an example because there’s an old very old sign in front of us which announces that the dining room is ‘up stairs’ as two separate words not up the stairs or up-stairs or upstairs as it would be today but instead just up stairs and I mention how words first seeking conjoining are at first put together with a space as up stairs was and some time later after initial use become hyphenated as in up-stairs and then only later much later when they break into the language deeply are they incorporated into it as word unto themselves such as upstairs and that then becomes the lifetime of a word (not life time or life-time) and that leads to varied other things we talk about until then at the very end of the conversation as we are leaving we see that there is a book on the counter nearby in fact a glossy book for children entitled Extinct and Endangered Birds of the World and such a title as that catches our eye and we decide to bring it back to the bar where we’d been sitting instead of leaving just then and we begin paging through it reading the various names and decriptions and habitats Dodo of course to Rycmajikur Maricanus a old genus of Peruvian Mountain Songbird to the Laorfus Bird of western Africa which could sing but not fly instead just broadly leaping from treetop to treetop with a harsh wail a sound which no longer after thousands of years saved it as genetic development of larger bird-eating species bred the familiarity of that noise into their systems and lessened it of all fear and as we were sitting there of a sudden a loud rolling boastful voice interrupted us : “hello! I am Horatio Quinte and glad to make your acquaintances!” he pronounced Quinte quite proudly with a sliding roll on the ‘e’ so as to pronounce an ‘ay’ sound to which I quickly responded (not missing a chance not missing a beat) with “well hello Mr. Quinte how are you today?” thus forming a rhyme of some note myself and then he said “couldn’t help overhearing some of what you said before much true and sharp of you I saw too the thing the thing about compound words was quite accurate actually and did you know that I authored a book once a book entitled “The Start of Mt. Nothing” one of the premises of which was that word ‘nothing’ you see which too started once as ‘no thing’ an obvious assertion wouldn’t you say and then had itself transmogrified into no-thing which is a phrase you can semetimes quite enough see if you peruse old volumes from the 1800’s being a bookstore fanatic myself of the old school back when all the old dusty tall stores along lower Fourth Ave. held many many old books still replete with the archaics of spelling and outlook and usage all gone now all gone pulped and dust you see but anyway the point I was making was that I was able to show quite decisively how in early language all mankind had to first learn to distinguish between appearance proving reality and at the same time the value to attach to a thing not seen which perhaps too became the difference between ‘no thing’ and ‘some thing’ both eventually compounded down to our nothing and something used frequently in apposition to ‘that thing’ which as an object has never been compounded strange wouldn’t you say and oddly enough even in old Latin you can see this as in ‘hoc diem’ which is their equivalent for ‘this day’ which of course English has adapted and mistranslated to ‘today’ a compound word once featured as ‘this-day’ and thisday somehow having turned to ‘today’ and even the very word ‘compound’ can be said to have been a Latinized assemblage of ‘cum poundus’ meaning ‘with pressure’ or ‘with squeezing’ in its day brought over to us in our lazy English variants once again as ‘compound’ apparently without the hyphen so you see there is at work always quite a magic and a distant touch with words as we know them and I would say we ‘complicate’ things sometimes but then that would lead me to ‘cum plicatus’ meaning ‘with many little places’ in Latin and brought to us as ‘cum-plicate’ later on ‘complicate’ meaning to ‘add levels to’.