Christmas has passed and it's day six of The Evenings. Today's chapter begins not with Frits waking up, but right in the middle of the afternoon, with Frits being at the office, where the lights have to be turned on at a quarter past three, because it was already getting dark outside.
Early darkness on day six of The Evenings. Photograph by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash.
Yesterday, we looked at hapax legomena, or words that appear only once in a text. So, why not look at dis legomena today? Dis legomena are words that occur exactly twice in a text, and most often, they are a lot less frequent than hapaxes. For instance, today's chapter hosts 925 hapaxes, and 'only' 255 dis legomena. One that caught my eye, was oem, of which I thought it might be part of those weird little songs Frits sometimes hums or sings. We'll look into those later, as it may be interesting to see how those are translated, but we'll stick to oem for now. The word appears twice and it actually is the name of a lady in the following little story Frits finds in Viktor's book.
He leafed on. 'Janet: the gentlemen will surely remember,' he read, 'the case of the lady Oem, whose cat had died. I can, to my great satisfaction, report that her recovery is complete. Thanks to a remarkable course of treatment which I, in this case, applied. My treatment of Miss Oem consisted of giving her a new cat.'
Another word occuring exactly twice is lipreader, which draws the attention to quite a funny bit about sitting next to a lipreader in the movie theatre. There are, according to Frits, two types. First, there are 'the extroverts, who laugh and explain things to those sitting beside them. Those are truly terrible.' But there's a worse type of lipreader, 'the ones who read the subtitles out loud. Aye-aye, Jesus Christ, what an abomination.' I find these small observations very funny, because they both ring true, and are things you could think yourself, but would not readily say out loud.
Movie theatre. Photograph by Jake Hills on Unsplash.
Have fun reading again today!