There are lines that can reliably make middle school boys giggle, given the chance. But soft is one of them. They will often make the quick leap to “Butt Soft” and there will be laughs for days. They’ll be sure they invented this hilarity and I will be sure to allow them this fiction – because, they did, in a way. It’s just that almost every other middle school boy also invented the exact same joke.

This sense of flaw seems like one that Shakespeare could have made up. The word feels like a combination of flood, froze and thaw. Like it’s a word that should exist instead of one that did. But it would appear that flaw once meant flake, as in snowflake. So when snow fell in the 13th century, folks might say “Look at all those flaws!”
“I caught a flaw on my tongue!”
Or when it’s a clear day and suddenly a snowflake seems to appear – “Was that a flaw?”
How did this word shift meaning so dramatically?
I know its sense of flake expanded outside of snow – that you could have a flaw of fire or flint at a certain point …but then from there – how did we get to a sense of blemish or mistake?

PARTICLES of CAESAR, MIXED with SAND and SILT and CLAY
HANGING OUT in a WALL:
No, no, my earthy friends, I am not ambitious for a crown of silt. I am here among my friends to stop up this hole, just as the rest of you are. Just because I once ruled an empire, because I was once an emperor, because I ruled over all I could see, does not mean I want to be treated any differently than the rest of you fellows.

I mean, if you insist, Sand. I wouldn’t want to insult you as we sit here keeping this house from becoming too drafty. For you, then, Sand, I will wear this crown. But of course – we must all hang together here to keep this hole filled.

The ‘they’ in this line is the most compelling bit for me. Who is they? Alexander and the other parts of the loam? The sand? The silt? The water?

It’s not Alexander alone who can stop a beer-barrel. He has to do it as an organic collective.

Loam is, itself, a bit of earth. When it is mixed with water, it is still earth, just earth in a clay form – and while clay is wet it seems one thing – once the air has had its way with it, it becomes another. Loam is kind of the earthy version of water, changing its texture and solidity depending on the environmental conditions.

I’m reading Philip Pullman’s prequel to The Golden Compass series and dust is rather important in that book (it is called The Book of Dust) and rather a lot more than earth. And probably actual dust is also a lot more than earth. Probably dust is just a way to say a very small amount of something that makes it hard to identify as anything else. Like, some dust is ash. Some is skin. Some is wood. Some is lint. And perhaps that is all earth is, too – just a large collection of disparate objects and substances.

I was curious to know if this was the case. Were Alexander’s remains, in fact, in the ground?
And it would seem that they were not. It would be quite difficult for Alexander’s body to make any contact with earth.

Apparently, his body was put into a gold honey-filled sarcophagus and that was put into a gold casket. A tomb was built for it – but on the body’s journey, it was waylaid several times before ending up in Alexandria in a tomb. That is a lot of layers from the earth. Honey, gold, gold, stone.

Turns out, he died in Babylon.
He was 32.
He fell ill and 11 to 14 days later, he was dead.
Many suspected poison
But it might have, just as easily,
Been bacteria, disease, contaminated water,
Hard living or infected mosquitos.
It doesn’t take anything particularly superhuman to end a human, even one seen as Great. He did manage to bend a lot of people to his will in three decades of life.
I’m not sure that makes him Great, though.

The modesty portion of this line intrigues me. Like, even though Alexander is dead, Hamlet is suggesting he’ll still respect his personal space, even as he follows the journey of his corpse. He’ll follow that corpse at a respectful distance.

I was working on my play that is a prequel to Comedy of Errors the other night. I was trying to find a balance between contemporary language and Elizabethan infused heightened language. As the first draft was written impossibly quickly, there were a lot of phrases and words that were, I knew, even as I wrote them, place-holders for better, richer words.
I found myself searching for the better ones in the numerous Shakespeare resources I have before consulted for acting, director or teaching purposes. And I also found myself searching for a sort of contemporary English to Shakespearean translator. I finally found one which was mostly a joke but I used it seriously. See, I knew there were a vast number of denigrating words for woman. I remember flinching through many of them while I sat onstage in Henry IV, waiting for my scenes. But when I typed “Woman” in translator, it gave me “Mistress” so I typed “lady” and it gave me “mistress” and then I tried “shrew” and it gave me “shrew” and then I tried “harridan” and it gave me “harridan.” And I realized that I had found the word I wanted from my own inner Shakespeare Thesaurus.

I searched for so many things I already knew and I discovered again how words like “jot” and “faith” even though they are still in use, can sound heightened just by how they’re used.