LornaMcHardy

By LornaMcHardy

Stillicidal Bulbine

Huh? I hear you say...
Well, I found a photochallenge on here yesterday, all about words. There's a new one for every day.
Unfortunately, it was for March, and I only discovered it yesterday. So I'm going to have a go at it for April instead, in an "I'm a bit late but I'm trying it anyway" kind of way.
I love words; you can get drunk on words. I like photochallenges. And I've never even heard of most of the words of this fantastic challenge! (My thanks to DDW for compiling them).
So I really can't not! I have no idea whether they're supposed to be attempted in order or not, so I shall make the unilateral decision to do them in whatever order I can find subjects for them.

Today, the first day in ages I'm not out at work and could be in the garden all day... it's raining, raining, raining. I call that a particularly nasty April Fool's joke, myself.

However, it did give me the opportunity to take a photo for
Word no. 30, Stillicide.

I found the following, totally fascinating, definition online at worldwidewords.org - I didn't know any of this, and my only remaining question is, how on earth did the word "eavesdrop" change its meaning from the original legal one to the apparently totally unrelated modern one?

"The first part is from Latin stilla, a drop; the English word is a reformulation of Latin stillicidium, falling drops.

The Latin word could mean in particular the drip of rain from the eaves of a house, which is exactly equivalent to an ancient meaning of our eavesdrop. This meaning led to the main historical sense of the word, a legal term in Scots law. If a householder let rain fall from his eaves on to the land of a neighbour, he needed the neighbour’s permission. John Erskine explained this in 1754 in his Principles of the Law of Scotland: “No proprietor can build, so as to throw the rain water falling from his own house immediately upon his neighbour’s ground, without a special servitude, which is called of stillicide.” (Servitude is another term for easement, a special permission relating to access to land.)

It’s not a word much encountered these days. When it appears it has the sense of falling water, not the legal one. It is in a poem in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “Stilettos of a frozen stillicide”, one of a collection of unusual words in that section that also includes shagbark, torquated, vermiculated, preterist, iridule, and lemniscate. Its most famous use is perhaps that by Thomas Hardy, again in a poem:

They’ve a way of whispering to me —
fellow-wight who yet abide —
In the muted, measured note
Of a ripple under archways,
or a lone cave’s stillicide."

Good, isn't it? :0))
The plant is the first of my South Africans to bloom every year. It's a bulbine, but I don't know which one.

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