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Tuesday 24 October 2017

Thing To Be Today: raffish.

Raffish means careless or unconventional in dress, manners, or more or less anything else. 

Well, when I say that, it's not raffish to be careless about serious stuff like murder, because at the back of the use of the word raffish is a certain exasperated acknowledgment on behalf of the speaker of something close to envy.

Raffishness does come with a certain charm.

It's true that to be raffish involves embracing the vulgar and the tawdry, but a raffish man (it's usually a man) gives the annoying impression, as he strolls around in his scuffed shoes, that he's having far too much fun to bother with conventional details.

So there's the challenge: to have a day so filled with enjoyment that there's no time to attend to convention.

And, as a further, and much harder, challenge, to do it without losing any friends or making any enemies, too.

Thing To Be Today: raffish. This word comes from raff, which can mean either mean rubbish or rabble. The word might come from the Old French rafle, a snatching up.


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