December 01, 2004
On Dilatoriness
filed under: Idle ChatterI have now heard from not one but two readers, complaining bitterly about the paucity of new posts.
Ironically, one of these complaints was from my late night correspondent, third-shift worker Agilda Peas. In response, I posted one of her entries, which I'd been sitting on. So as she tries to stay sane in the wee small hours of morning, she'll be stuck reading her own late night ramblings. Purgatory achieved.
From Friend-of-Procrastinet Wm F comes a Merriam-Webster word of the day:
dilatory \DIL-uh-tor-ee\ adjective1 : tending or intended to cause delay
*2 : characterized by procrastination : tardExample sentence:
Maura has been dilatory in paying her bills, and she now owes late fees in addition to the original amounts due.
Did you know?
Slow down. Set a leisurely pace. What's the hurry? If procrastination is your style, "dilatory" is the word for you. That term has been used in English to describe things that cause delay since at least the 15th century, and its ancestors were hanging around with similar meanings long before that. If you take the time to trace the roots of "dilatory," you will discover that it derives from "dilatus," the past participle of the Latin verb "differre," which meant either "to postpone" or "to differ." If you think "differre" looks like several other English words, you have a discerning eye. That verb is also an ancestor of the words "different" and "defer."
So: apologies for the recent dilatory nature of posts. These are the perils of a website based on procrastination.
While I'm maundering away privately rather than publicly, I'll send you to a site I recently found through Defective Yeti's blogroll, called Mimi Smartypants. Great reading, and the kind of kidblogging that I would do if I were better and smarter and funnier (and had an adopted Chinese daughter rather than the adorable, strange little monkey who keeps stomping from one end of our apartment to the other). Read her entry on Maisy Mouse, even though she will tell you repeatedly throughout the entry not to.
For the record: I think her take on Charlie the Alligator is slightly off, in that I think Charlie displays a pronounced and disturbing developmental disability, rather than the mere stoned slackerness that she identifies. If Charlie came to hug you (and he would), you'd want to check very carefully to make sure his hands hadn't been down the back of his pants recently. But she's dead on in her final analysis: that's one damned annoying alligator.
Posted by rjt at December 1, 2004 03:49 PM