Omni

This is a prefix that begins many fascinating words – omnibus, omnidirectional, omnifarious, omnificent, omnipresent, omnirange, and omniumgatherum.

Omni itself comes from the Latin omnis, meaning ‘all.’

Omni magazine (a popular science magazine) was published from 1978 to 1995 (online until 1998). I still have a number of copies (I wonder if they’re valuable?)

A homonym for omnigatherum is hodge podge, meaning a miscellaneous collection of a variety of things or persons. A good name, it seems to me for this blog.

I suspect that most humans are omnigatherers (not sure if that’s a word) because we collect all kinds of things both deliberately and by accident. Think of the last time you moved and the odds and ends you discovered in your house and apartment that made you say, “What on earth am I keeping this for?”

Much of my omnigatherum includes books – mystery, SF, non fiction, poetry, Canadian authors, classics, and so on. I do try to cull this collection periodically because I don’t have room for more bookcases in my house and I don’t like to hide books behind each other.

I have less trouble getting rid of clothes than I do books. I’m not one of those people who can pull out something she wore in 1967 that might actually be considered interesting in 2012.

When I was a teenager still living at home my mother’s collection of knickknacks (there’s another good word – meaning ornament; can also be spelled nicknacks) used to bug me. I vowed that I would not fill the top of a piano or TV or various shelves with what I considered useless odds and ends. Well, I have to confess that I do have a few knickknacks now.

I was never a collector in the sense of stamps or match books or license plates; though for a short time I did collect reproductions of old paper dolls. I still have a few paper dolls to this day.

There are several boxes of my son’s stuff in my basement – as long as there’s room I don’t mind.

And of course, now that I have a grandson, I have to have a few toys about.

I have files of stuff I think might be useful or interesting from some future writing project. My basement holds a few tools and odds and ends of paint, along with old year books from high school and university as well as a couple of bound Sheaf newspapers from the time when I wrote for it. Recently I actually had reason to go back and at the latter for an article for The Sheaf centennial.

I don’t consider myself a pack rat (my possessions don’t feel as if they are taking over my house or my life) though I do like to keep what interests me. Probably it’s time to do a cull, however.

Noctuās Athēnās ferre

I enjoy the different ways that various cultures and languages say similar things in regards to idioms.

One of my favourites is the German “Mann muss mit den Wölfen heulen,” which literally means, “one must howl with the wolves,” but the equivalent idiom in English is “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

The Latin quotation above, literally means “To carry owls to Athens.”  Because Athens had lots of owls and the owl is also a bird sacred to the goddess Athena (for whom Athens is named), carrying owls to Athens would be as silly as carrying coals to Newcastle (which is the port from where coal was shipped to other parts of England).

In French “J’ai un chat a la gorge” (I have a cat in the throat) is equivalent the English “to I have a frog in my throat.” Neither of these idioms makes much rational sense, though apparently the latter comes from how croaky we can sound when we have a cold or obstruction in the throat.

My Dictionary of Idioms says, through the centuries idioms have nearly always been looked down on. In the eighteenth century, Addison warned against their use in poetry and in the seventeenth Dr. Johnson had laboured  in his dictionary to ‘refine our language to grammatical purity and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms and irregular combinations.’ There is not much charity for the humble idiom there.

So who comes up with these things I wonder. Idioms can be as imaginative as poetry and yet become clichés when overused.  It seems that a lot of our English idioms originate in the Bible. For example, ‘salt of the earth’, and to ‘separate the sheep from the goats’. Others appear in Shakespeare, such as ‘in the mind`s eye’ and ‘the time is out of join’t; he may have made these up himself, and also used popular colloquial expressions of his day. Some idioms seem to spring up from daily life or work – ‘teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, having too many irons in the fire, trimming one`s sails’,  while others originate with people (‘keeping up with the Joneses’, from a comic strip of the same name) or events (‘to meet one`s Waterloo’, referring to Napoleon’s defeat there) . Although some idioms are quite different in other languages, others have come to us from other countries. For example, ‘to be in a pickle’ comes from a Dutch expression ‘to sit in the pickle’.

However idioms begin, in my opinion, they add to the colour and richness of the language.