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Tuesday 4 February 2020

Thing To Be Today: sublime.

Well, we all know that sub- means under, and that a lime is a fruit.

But what's so good about sitting under one of those?

File:Lime Tree - recovery from wind damage.jpg
This sort of lime tree, a Tilia species, doesn't actually bear limes, but, hey, it's still very beautiful. Photo by Rosser1954.

(If you're chuckling wisely and thinking about all the other meanings of the word lime then, yes, okay - but as it happens even those doesn't actually help very much. Or, indeed, at all.)

The trouble is that to be sublime is quite an ask. Sublime talent and sublime beauty may indeed elude us (elude us? As if I ever got within clutching distance!).

Still, we can all be sublimely unconcerned, I suppose, if only about our own deficiencies.

Personally, I'm going to have to go with that.

Thing To Be Today: sublime. This word is from the Latin sublīmus, which means lofty. That word might come from sub-, meaning up to, and līmen, threshold (or possibly lintel).

But what's sublime about a threshold (or a lintel) I have no idea at all.

Anyway, threshold to what, I wonder? 




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