Sunset, Monday, 22 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Many ages ago (in blog terms – December 9th) I wrote about a word I’d encountered in the Edgar Allan Poe story “Mystification.” The word was uniquity – Poe used it to refer to the quality of being unique, and I had to go back to a 1955 version of The Oxford Universal Dictionary to find it.

In that post, thinking I was pretty cute, I referred to my ‘obliquity’ – believing I was cleverly making up a word.

Last night I began reading the Poe story “The Man That Was Used Up” – when what to my wondering eyes should appear:

They [his eyes] were of a deep hazel, exceedingly large and lustrous; and there was about them, ever and anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression.

Well, shoot. Turns out obliquity’s “even more of a word” than uniquity – it’s in current dictionaries, and seems to be used to describe the degree of an oblique angle, in addition (perhaps) to the way I used it. Obliquity – I should have noticed even my spell-check didn’t mind it.

I think in France they call this tragiquité. Well, O.K., maybe not.

Meanwhile, sunset tonight is fog and a lingering cold rain. The dense granular snow and the air seem to be meeting as some sort of middle substance between slowly melting snow and solidifying atmosphere.