Over the past few months I have become an avid reader of Other Men's Flowers, a Blogspot blog written by a fellow called Tony - the best kind of Englishman: erudite, self-effacing, acerbic, and magnificently literate. He's a gentleman of mature years (late 70s, if his online biography is to be believed; there may be a few little jests in it, but I think it is mostly in earnest), but he appears to be in fine fettle, and I hope he'll be entertaining us for a good long spell yet.
The blog is, as he says, a collection of -
Comments, short essays, anecdotes and quotations on language, literature, politics, food, the arts and almost anything else. Some are quite serious but most are not: caveat lector. (Updated every two days or so.)
The blog is, as he says, a collection of -
Comments, short essays, anecdotes and quotations on language, literature, politics, food, the arts and almost anything else. Some are quite serious but most are not: caveat lector. (Updated every two days or so.)
Or, in another summary -
...a medley, a mélange, an assortment, a collection, a compendium, a digest, an assemblage, a compilation, a gathering, a miscellany, a mustering, an anthology, a farrago, a ragbag, a hodgepodge or a gallimaufry...
OF:...trivialities, pastiches, parodies, anecdotes, bons mots, spoofs, trouvailles, plagiarisms, causeries, reviews, pensées, abstracts, recollections, aperçus, short essays and quotations.
How can you not love vocabulary like that? It is giddyingly diverse and beautifully written.
It is, more or less, what this blog aspires to be, but at least 10 or 20 times better. However, adulation displaces any twinge of jealousy I might feel. I just love it. Marvellous, marvellous stuff. Do go and check it out.
His blog title, by the way, is taken from that of an anthology of favourite poems compiled by the distinguished British WWII general Archibald Wavell, the unifying principle of which was that - rather dauntingly! - they were all poems he had committed to memory. (I knew this because Wavell and his unusual poetry collection were amongst the eclectic enthusiasms of one of my favourite teachers at school, the one who also introduced me to colourful anecdotes about Huey Long. I think I still have a copy of it somewhere.) Wavell in turn had derived the phrase from a translation of a line of Montaigne's: "I have made a garland of other men's flowers; only the thread that binds them is my own."
5 comments:
Aw, shucks. Was having a bad morning until I read that.
Well, I'm glad to have lightened someone's day.
You are a steady source of delight to many of us, Tony.
Surely 'Gallimaufry' is a small village in Scotland?
No, you're thinking of Galloway, a small village in Ireland.
Incidentally, you were wrong to credit me with a large vocabulary on the evidence of the many words I used to describe Other Men's Flowers. They were not mine, but Dr Roget's.
Ah, but most people are ignorant of Roget. And your blog content is often just as lexically abundant as your summary description of it.
In my mind, Gallimaufry is a tiny Lowland village, 20 miles or so from Gretna Green and thus enjoying some of its elopement overspill.
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