To celebrate the publication of Josh Glenn and Mark Kingwell’s excellent small book, The Idler’s Glossary, I asked Mark to offer glosses on a few of his favourite entries. His response is below. I urge everyone to buy this book; there’ll be nothing more curious and delightful published this fall. (Nor many as beautiful—Seth’s design work is lovely.)
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Hi Jared,
Here is a small sampling of the richness packed into our little book, The Idler’s Glossary. As I say in my introduction, the glossary is the idlest of all textual forms: no narrative, no explicit argument, no structure save the alphabet. And always that insistent, kooky circular imperative to see another word, or compare an entry elsewhere. Thus, the perfect vehicle for insights about idling!
In fact there are mini-narratives and brilliant little arguments scattered liberally through the entries. Like McLuhan’s probes or Nietzsche’s aphorisms, these are little mind-bombs that go off almost randomly, as the reader dips here and there into the book.
There’s also the larger philosophical narrative, suggested in the intro, that the idle life is the best life. If your personal narrative means you just got fired because of global economic meltdown, this is the book for you.
It’s also a gem of language-appreciation. I was especially drawn to entries that expanded my vocabulary or revealed buried etymologies. A few of my favourites, with paraphrases of their definitions (for the actual entries, see the Glossary):
AESTIVATE: A word that means to spend the summer at a mountain or lakeside cottage, creating art away from the dirt and heat of the city. Like the verb to summer, except with aesthetic rather than aristocratic intent.
KAROSHI: The Japanese word for ‘death by overwork.’ Enough said.
LUFTMENSCH: A German/Yiddish term that translates literally as ‘air-person’ and so means someone with lofty but maybe impractical ideas. It was co-opted by Jewish intellectuals in the 1960s as a word to describe the revolutionary utopianism of student uprisings.
LIGGER: A word for people who crash parties, sneak drinks, and eat all the food—even while knowing nobody there. (See ‘cadger’ and ‘shit-heel.’)
OTIOSE: A word that now means redundant or useless, but whose origin contains a salient reminder of how backwards our values have become. The Latin word for business—negotium—is clearly also the root for ‘negotiate’ in English. But neg-otium means, literally, the obliteration of idleness. Work is negation of value; every capital transaction destroys leisure—especially those transactions dedicated to what we call ‘leisure time.’
SKIVER: An English slang term for someone accomplished at avoiding work or dodging duty in a large and, ideally, glorious way. (Related verb: ‘to skive.’) Often used pejoratively but overdue for a reappropriation. Nice etymology too: the accepted version is that British soldiers serving in France during the First World War anglicized the French word ‘esquiver’—to dodge or slink away—which they thought sounded more elegant than, well, dodge. But it turns out there is a common Old Norse root that’s even older, giving us other English words like ‘eschew’ and ‘shy.’
Don’t be shy. The idle life awaits. Our Glossary is your lazy guide, your deadbeat’s dictionary.
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