Josna Rege

Archive for the ‘Notes’ Category


Ten Years in the April A to Z Blogging Challenge

In blogs and blogging, Notes, Stories on April 8, 2026 at 4:45 pm

I have just realized that this my 10th (arguably my 11th) year participating in the annual April A to Z Blogging Challenge, in which bloggers sign up to for an abecedarian April, posting a blog a day, preferably on a self-chosen theme. Here is a list of my chosen themes for every year in which I took up the Challenge between 2013 and 2025, with each one linking to a hyperlinked list of all my April A-to-Z posts that year.

2013: Blogging from A to Z (no theme)

2014: Traveling Light

2015: A Printer’s Alphabet

2016: Bringing Me Joy

2019: Migrants, Refugees, and Exiles

2020: 50 Years in the United States

2021: My theme this year was Anachronidioms, but April is the cruelest month for people in academia, and that year must have been particularly so, because I only managed to get to the letter F before I had to throw in the towel. Here are those six posts: Animalidioms, Britishisms, Clothes and Clothing, Dancing in the Street, Euphemisms, and Fin.

2023: My India Trip

2024: The World is Always With Us

2025: Books I Have Loved

2026: War and Peace (underway)

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Reflections on A-to-Z 2025: Books I Have Loved

In Notes, Stories on May 5, 2025 at 2:55 pm

My theme for this year’s A-to-Z April Challenge was Books, in particular, books I have loved over the years. I had intended to make each of the posts brief, and insisted that they were not going to be reviews. Instead, they would be idiosyncratic, anecdotal accounts of my personal experience with each chosen book.

Well, I failed spectacularly when it came to keeping my posts brief. And although I tried to keep my teacherly persona from taking over, I failed in that regard as well! I think I have to own who I am, as a writer and as a person–long-winded, meandering, digressive, and highly opinionated. I also failed to anticipate the extent to which I would have to re-read my chosen books in order to write the posts. As a result, my April was completely taken over, and involved many, many long nights. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun. And most of all, the Challenge got me writing regularly again, which was my main goal this year.

Here is a hyperlinked list of this month’s entries. Below it I will list the fellow-bloggers whom I followed regularly during the month and who followed me in return, sending me encouraging comments and sharing their own reading experiences.

Blogging from A to Z in 2025: My Theme and Your Suggestions

A is for Alice (and Other Ambiguous Adventures)
B is for Black Beauty
Clear Light of Day
David Copperfield
Emma and Efuru
The Family from One End Street
Gora and The Grapes of Wrath
Houses: Howards End and A House for Mr. Biswas
Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve
July’s People
Klara and the Sun
The Little Grey Men, Lucky Jim, Life After Life
The Mahabharata (and everything else)
No-No Boy
The Overstory
Perelandra, Poetic Justice, Praisesong for the Widow
The Quiet American
The Railway Children
The Summer Book and Shikasta
Tintin in Tibet
The Upanishads
Vanity Fair and The Vegetarian
Wise Children
Xala
Yuganta
Zeitoun

The participating blogs I followed the most regularly throughout the month were The Curry Apple Orchard, Finding Eliza, Tao Talk, A Year with Trees, The Multicolored Diary
, Madly-in-Verse, How Would You Know, A Kings, galeriaredelius, Panorama of the Mountains, and Temenos of the Blessing Light. Their themes were, respectively, an Australian’s year in England in the Swinging Sixties; special dates in the family tree; an A to Z of garden plants; an Abecedarium of Indian trees; women’s epics; a deep dive into Indian textiles (particularly in sarees); an idiosyncratic (and inspired) autobiography; hilarious personal stories; songs featuring precious metals; an alphabet of short films; and meditations on rare and wonderful words. Each one of them was underpinned by encyclopedic knowledge on the subject, and lured the reader down a magical rabbit hole, from which this reader extracted herself with difficulty, only because the next post was waiting to be written. To my fellow Challenge bloggers: I so appreciated the generosity and regularity of your comments, and apologize for the many posts of yours that I missed. I hope to return to them over the next few months.

I identified the most with Linda’s posts in The Curry Apple Orchard, because I was in London during the same period as her fictionalized “Will”, and recognized with delight the places, music, fashions, politics, and general zeitgeist. My most delightful new discovery was Fatima’s A Year With Trees, since her loving and detailed descriptions of Indian trees, along with childhood memories evoked by them, resonate deeply with mine and also because her tastes in reading overlapped so much with my own. I also very much enjoyed my regular back-and-forths with Lisa of Tao Talk, and am delighted that she shared a post of mine on her blog.

In addition to the participating bloggers, I received a number of other very welcome comments from friends, some who are bloggers and others who subscribe to my blog by email or read it on Facebook. The bloggers were Yamini MacLean of Doses of Wild Yam, Anne Katzeff of ASK Design Blog, and Josie Holford of Rattlebag and Rhubarb. Thank you! Yamini, I think you commented on every single one of my posts! I look forward to returning to read and comment on yours now that this time-consuming Challenge is over. The other friends who commented were Anna, Barbara, Cynthia, Gail, Hayat, Kim, Maureen, Michael, Norah, Parmita, Pennie, Piya, Sartaz, Shailja, Shoba, and Thakshala. Thank you kindly, kindred spirits all!

The intrepid A-to-Z Challenge organizers, half of whom somehow found the time to visit and comment on my blog over the course of the month, asked us about our favorite comments over the course of the month. One or two of my favorites were too personal to post, but here are just three of the many I loved:

From Shailja, on David Copperfield:
An abridged version of David Copperfield was my Standard Seven set book. Your post awakens so many memories! Including a playground dotted with 12 year olds impersonating Uriah Heep.

From Michael, who inspired me to finish reading and write on The Overstory:
Came across this book when looking for a new book on my WP Book site (prior to cancelling my subscription – Brologarchy) that was recommending Richard Power’s latest Playground. When I was looking on Alibris to purchase it, I saw the Overstory title and purchased it instead. Reading it straight through was definitely advantageous. The weaving of the story of the eight characters was only more or less successful. The Root, Trunk, Crown, Seed was less clear. Maybe someone else can enlighten on this aspect. Despite all this the writing was compelling, often taking me back to my own tree/forest experiences (sights, sounds, smells and textures underfoot).

From Fatima on The Railway Children: 

I read this book a couple of years ago and really loved it. As an adult, I could understand how difficult life grown ups can have and how they hide it from young ones. And also appreciate the innocence of children and childhood in general, how even after vaguely understanding difficult times in parents life, how resilient children are and how amazing their coping mechanisms are. I hope I made sense about what I said… It’s a similar kind of book to The Secret Garden or A Little Princess, meant for kids but equally good read for adults. Thanks for sharing about this book.

What did I learn this month? With encouragement from Kristin of Finding Eliza, I learned how to use the block system on WordPress. I also learned that despite (or perhaps because of) having retired, it seems to be taking me longer to write these posts, and that I tend to go down too many internet rabbit holes in the process.

Thank you to the organizers of the A-to-Z Challenge! I hope to join again in 2026 for a tenth year—if I can come up with a way to write shorter, pithier posts, the discipline to write them in advance, and the patience to hold them until next April.

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Blogging from A to Z in 2025: My Theme and Your Suggestions

In Notes on March 19, 2025 at 2:31 pm

Dear Readers, after a period of indecision, it is decided: Tell Me Another will participate in this April’s Blogging from A to Z Challenge and the theme will be Books.

There are a lot of books in the world, you may rightly declare. What kinds of books do I have in mind? On what basis will I choose them? Once chosen, how and what do I propose to write about them? Good questions. Let’s hope that my responses will provide answers to me as well as to you.

To start with I have made a list of books I like whose titles begin with each letter of the alphabet (see below). Some letters have only one or two titles under them, others six or seven. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I will choose just one book for each letter. You’ll see, too, that in several cases there are two or three works by the same author. I’ll probably focus on one and just mention the other(s) in passing.

A quick scan of the list reveals that most but not all of them are fiction and only a handful are non-fiction. Most, but not all, of the works of fiction are novels. Two or three works fall into a category all their own. 

Of my preliminary list, most were written for adults, but there are a good number of children’s books as well, ones that I loved in my own childhood. Most were written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but there are several nineteenth-century works and a couple of much older outliers. Most were written in English, but a few of them were originally written in other languages—Bengali, French, Korean, Marathi, Swedish, Latin, Sanskrit.

What were my the principles of selection? Only that I had read and liked the books. Well, to be honest, there was one exception, a book I only chose because its title started with a difficult letter. However, in that case I did know and like its author, and promise to have read it by the time I get to the letter X.

Now to the hardest question: how do I propose to write these posts? What kind of animal will they be? I haven’t decided. I do know that they will not fit the book review genre in any traditional sense. They won’t be plot summaries, either. They will have nothing to offer students looking for last-minute material for a book report. They won’t be consistent in length, or style, or form. However, I do hope that they will be fun to read.

Will my posts be the unashamed ravings of a fan who has shut down all her critical faculties? Possibly, in one or two cases. They will be personal, idiosyncratic, digressive, and—new for me—as short as I can make them. This last will be the hardest to achieve, so please cut me some slack. I typically have to write for a while in order to discover what it is that I want to say.

So here’s my preliminary list. Please write to me with the titles you would like me to discuss, especially for those letters which have a number of titles under them.

A
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), by Lewis Carroll
Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane (1961)
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson (1956)
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (2000)

B
Baluta by Daya Pawar (1978, tr. 2015)
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (2008)
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

C
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham (1938)
Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai (1980)
Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease (1940)

D
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

E
Efuru by Flora Nwapa (1966)
Emma by Jane Austen (1815)
Every Room in the House Burnin’ by Andrea Levy (1995)

F
The Family from One End Street, by Eve Garnett (1937)
Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai (1977)
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (1902)
Friday’s Tunnel by John Verney (1959)

G
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore (1910)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

H
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (2017)
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (2020)
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (1961)
Howards End by E. M. Forster (1910)

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh (2004)

I
I Have Become the Tide by Githa Hariharan (2019)
Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa (2024)

J
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (1981)

K
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

L
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013)
The Little Grey Men by BB (1942)
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)

M

The Mahabharata, traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa (3rd C BCE to 3rd C CE)
Mara and Dann by Doris Lessing (1999)
The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing (1974)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi (1985)

N
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya (1954)
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948)
No-No Boy by John Okada (1957)

O
Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981)

The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018)

P
The Painter of Signs by R. K. Narayan (1976)
Perelandra by C.S. Lewis (1943)
Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross (1970)
Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (1983)

Q
The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)

R
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta by Doris Lessing (1979)
Regeneration by Pat Barker (1991)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad (2022)
Roots and Shadows by Shashi Deshpande (1983)

S
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1989)
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (1017)
Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004)
Small Remedies by Shashi Deshpande (2000)
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (1987)
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)

T
Tintin in Tibet by Hergé (1960)
Transmission by Atima Srivastava (1992)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

U
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)

The Upanishads, by many different writers (800-200 BCE)
Utopia by Thomas More (1516)

V
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2007)
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1969)

W
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee (1980)
Wise Children by Angela Carter (1991)

X
Xala by Ousmane Sembène (1975)

Y
Yuganta by Irawati Karve (1967)

Z
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (2009)


Reflections on the 2024 A-to-Z Challenge: The World is Always With Us

In blogs and blogging, Inter/Transnational, Notes, writing on May 4, 2024 at 3:02 am

In April 2024 I participated for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this time was the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

Well, I got through it, but by the skin of my teeth. As usual, I hadn’t written my posts in advance, so it was a daily scramble, and although each one simmered in my head all day I never seemed to really get down to writing until late at night when there were no other distractions. One would think that now that I have retired it would be easy to keep up, but it seems I was more efficient when working, even in the cruellest month of the Spring semester. Meanwhile, some of my fellow-bloggers had written all their entries in advance and set them to auto-post through the month. Respect!

My theme—The World is Always With Us—is not inherently a heavy one, but what with the weight of all the weapons and wars, I felt burdened by it at times, though I did try to introduce variety over the month, with posts on music, books, food, languages, and occasional flashes of levity (not to mention potholes). Sometimes I felt that my teacherly self was looking for an outlet in retirement, making me lecture my readers rather than simply telling an engaging story (as my blog’s title, Tell Me Another, proposes to do).

First I’ll list the month’s entries with hyperlinks to the posts, and then list and comment briefly on the blogs I visited the most, and the bloggers who visited mine.

The World is Always With Us
A is for Apple
Books: A World Within
A Cosmopolitan Perspective
D is for Diaspora

E is for Empathy
F is for Food
Global Literacy
Human Rights
Invasive? It Depends
J is for Jingoism
K is for Kinship
Languages
Music
Nationalisms
Opium wars, then and now
P is for Potholes
Queequeg
R is for Reading
S is for Spices
T is for Time Zones
Universities
V is for Visibility
W is for Weapons
X is for X Factor
Y is for Yiddish
Zaporizhzhia and Za’atar

I decided at the start to visit and comment on the posts of the bloggers who visited and commented on mine, and by and large that’s what I did, although there was a little time to surf the list on Sundays and read a few more. Half of them were new to me this year, and the other half I follow whenever they participate in the Challenge. Together, they ran the gamut of subject matter, genre, and voice. Thanks to:

Alice in Bloggingland
The Curry Apple Orchard
The English Explorer
Finding Eliza
How Would You Know
Lynnelives
Milepebbles

The Multicolored Diary
Nikki’s Confetti Life
The Witchy Storyteller

I was inspired and humbled by your energy, creativity, and generosity.

A number of personal friends and blogger-friends who weren’t participating in the A-to-Z Challenge also visited, Liked, commented, and shared: Anna, Barbara, Carolyn, Cynthia L, Cynthia H, Hayat, Margaret, Norah, Quirky Chris, Sartaz, Shailja (who shared and highlighted a quote every day), Sharon, and Shoba. Dear Sartaz and Andrew went several steps further, proofreading and pointing out language that needed attention. Love and heartfelt thanks to you all!

Finally, thank you to the organizers of the annual April Blogging from A to Z Challenge for this labor of love. It is so much fun, and always energizes me, despite the inevitable (for me, at least) burning of the midnight oil.

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A Decade with the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge

In Notes on March 29, 2024 at 2:09 pm

Even as I have sworn not to keep saying Yes to new projects, I’ve gone ahead and committed myself—yet again—to writing 26 blog posts in the month of April, one for each letter of the alphabet. I haven’t yet decided on my topic for each post, let alone writing any of them.

 What have I gotten myself into?

If I managed to do it while I was teaching full-time, it ought to be a piece of cake now that I’ve retired, right? But somehow that’s cold comfort. No, my theme for the month is not clichés; as my last post announced, it’s the omnipresence, the inescapability of the world.

For today, though, I will stave off my anxiety over this looming theme with a backward glance at the A-to-Z blogging challenges I’ve participated in over the past ten years. I missed three, in the Aprils following my parents’ deaths and my last semester of teaching before retirement. I started a challenge in the second spring of the pandemic, but online teaching didn’t permit me to get beyond the letter “F” (Fin).

Here, then, are links to seven “Reflection” posts between 2013 to 2023,  listing the posts for the year’s April challenge, with hyperlinks to each of them.

2013: Blogging from A to Z (no theme)
2014: Traveling Light
2015: A Printer’s Alphabet
2016: Bringing Me Joy
2019: Migrants, Refugees, and Exiles
2020: 50 Years in the United States
2023: My India Trip

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A to Z Challenge 2023: Reflections and Links

In blogs and blogging, Notes, reflections, writing on May 3, 2023 at 6:18 pm

I decided to participate in this year’s April A to Z Blogging Challenge at the eleventh hour, just after having returned from a two-month trip to India. I hadn’t had time to process the experience myself, let alone to come up with 26 public-facing posts. Almost as soon as I had started I wished I hadn’t, but then again, I didn’t want to drop out partway through. Now it’s done, and I’m relieved. The pieces may not have been as thoughtful or well-written as I might have liked, but they’re out there, and together they make up My India Trip: An A to Z Journey.

First I’ll list all the month’s posts, with clickable hyperlinks. Then, for my fellow participants in the April A to Z Challenge, I’ll say a little about how the month went for me and my interactions with the other blogs and bloggers.

My India Trip: An A to Z Journey

526. A is for Atya, Address, Ashes

527. B is for Books

528. C is for Clothing

529. D is for Drumsticks

530. (No) Elephants Crossing

531. F is for Fruit (local and in season)

532. G is for Goa

533. H is for Holi

534. I is for Indian English

535. J is for Jewelry

536. K is for the Konkan

537. L is for Lucknow

538. Mum Meets Her In-laws

539. N is for Namkeen

540. O is for Old Age

541. Pronunciation: Indian English

542. Q is for Questions

543. R is for Redevelopment

544. S is for SPARROW

545. T is for Trees

546. U is for Urdu

547. V is for Vertical Garden

548. W is for Waqt

549. X is for Xacuti

550. Y is for Yoga (Reflections)

551. Z is for Zameen

There were new blogs that I discovered just this year, some of which I followed fairly regularly and others which I only discovered late and want to return to or catch up with. It’s always fun to reconnect with fellow-bloggers from previous challenges, and this time was no exception. Some of them have become regular “blogpals” and we follow each other during the year as well.

There were the bloggers and non-blogging friends who weren’t participating in the Challenge but who read and commented on my A to Z posts nonetheless. And finally there were the friends and family members who responded to my A-to-Z posts on Facebook or via email.

New-found blogs: How Would You Know, Life with Mia, Women’s Legacy Project, A Multitude of Musings, To My Recollection, Stacey Explores, Healers Write, Writers Heal, and The Twenty and Something—which I think was my favorite new blog this year.
Reconnections and year-round blogpals: The Curry Apple Orchard, The Multicolored Diary, Madly-in-Verse, Sharon Cathcart, Finding Eliza

Blogpals not participating in the Challenge: Calmgrove, Doses of Wild YAM, Rattlebag and Rhubarb.
Friends and family who commented on Facebook or via email: Abhay, Adrienne, Andy, Anna, Barbara, Carolyn, Cynthia, Erica, Jude, Madhavi, Margaret, Nalini, Norah, Pallavi, Peta, Pinakin, Sabine, Sarah, Sartaz, Shruti, Smita, Sue, Shoba, and Urmi. And Andrew, who did all the proofreading for me.

With regard to how the Challenge went and how it might improve next year: I appreciated the visit from Challenge founder Arlee Bird (Tossing it Out) when I was about a third of the way through and was starting to flag. I needed the positive reinforcement and it was a shot in the arm (inadvertent use of vaccine idiom!) that came just at the right time. I didn’t find it easy to look up the themes of my fellow-Challenge participants, but just found myself responding to people who posted a comment on my blog, and when I had a few free moments, going down the Master List and randomly clicking on blogs that had interesting names.

How I might improve next year would be to write at least some of my posts in advance and learn how to schedule them. Then I might have more time left over to comment on other blogs after scrambling to post my own. As it was, I was perennially a day or two behind. Thank goodness for the catch-up day on Sunday—except for the last Sunday of the month, when I suddenly remembered that April hath only 30 days, and had to write my last two posts in quick succession.

                                             Thank you all!

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My India Trip: An A-Z journey

In Aging, blogs and blogging, Books, Childhood, culture, Family, Food, Immigration, India, Notes, people, places, reading, reflections, storytelling, Words & phrases on April 1, 2023 at 11:02 pm

I’ve just returned from a two-month trip to India, where my father was from and where I grew up. I hadn’t been back for nearly nine years, and for my husband it had been fully 30 years—an entire generation! I haven’t had time to reflect on all the experiences, sights, conversations of the past 60 days, but have decided to participate in the annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge and post something about the trip every day this month—an observation, fragments of a conversation, a story recounted to me by my aunt, reflections on language, books, food, people and places.
Please join me!

I first participated in the A to Z Challenge ten years ago, but have missed a few years in-between. Here are links to all my previous April A-Z challenge posts:
2013: Blogging from A to Z (no theme)
2014: Traveling Light
2015: A Printer’s Alphabet
2016: Bringing me Joy
2020: Fifty Years in the United States https://josna.wordpress.com/…/on-the-2020-a-to-z…/
2021: Anachronidioms (abandoned partway through)

 

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Twelve Years!

In Notes on February 28, 2022 at 2:42 am

WordPress has just sent me a notice congratulating me on the 12th anniversary of Tell Me Another. Twelve years!  In that time I’ve found myself telling more than 500 stories here. Decided to share two from each year below, plus one for good measure—and good luck. Thank you for your indulgence.

The Horn Player in the Cupboard
1974: Living in London with old high-school friends

My Grandmother
Mum’s memories, 1930s-1950

Sucking Lemons and Quoting Shaw
My parents in 1930s England, 1930s/1940s India

Trouble
Empty-nesters

Victory V’s
In my youth the slogan for the Victory V lozenge was, “It’s got a kick like a mule!” One look at the ingredients shows why.

No, It’s Not Political Incorrectness
Calling a spade a spade

Oh, to be in England
Decolonizing “Home”

It’s Only Temporary
At least, one thinks so, until

Krishna’s Butterball
Grant me a little nostalgia

Whetstone Press
1980s and 1990s: Our job printing business

Time’s Wingèd Chariot
Time, again

Real Country
Music to my ears

It Wants To Be Found
Guns

Colo(u)rs
Dad loved them

 E is for Emigrant, Expatriate, and Exile
Self-explanatory

Householder
Remembering that noble stage in life

The Sitting Tenant
A pandemic companion

Notting Hill Bedsitter, 1950s
A storied place

Britishisms
They date me

Farewell, Old House!
On the eve of the closing

 

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Fin

In Notes on April 11, 2021 at 11:14 am

I’m throwing in the towel, folks: no more anachronidioms. F is for Finished; or as my father used to say, “bas enough ho gaya!” Sorry for bailing out on you, fellow-bloggers. April is the cruellest month for academics and this one is shaping up to be a doozy. I’ve enjoyed the five entries I’ve written and, as usual, the exchanges with participants old and new, but have already fallen several entries behind and can’t see my way clear to catching up. Furthermore, at my age, burning the midnight oil too often is not advisable, and it’s starting to take its toll. So I’m drawing a line under this year’s Blogging from A to Z Challenge, with thanks to the tireless organizers.

All the best to everyone participating in the Challenge. As time permits, I will continue to visit the bloggers I’ve been following so far, including The Curry Apple Orchard, Time and Tide, Teerthadanam, Doses of Wild Yam, galeriaredelius, The Multicolored Diary, Panorama of the Mountains, and How Would You Know.

Just as a teaser, here are the topics I’d more-or-less projected for the rest of the month: Food and Drink, Greek (to me), Hierarchies, Indian English, Jargon, Kindling (and other fossil fuels), Love, My Generation, Numbers, Onomatopoeia, Peace, Quarantine, Reading, Shakespeare, Travel, Undercover, Violence, Work, Xerxes (and other kings), Yore (days of), and Zoos.

Signing off, but not altogether signing out.

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Anachronidioms

In Notes on March 8, 2021 at 11:33 am

We all speak—and think—in anachronisms, our language having arisen from a landscape that may have since changed out of all recognition. The idioms, sayings, proverbs, figures of speech we use are picked up from what we hear and later read as we are growing up. We pick them up from our families, friends, teachers, communities, and workplaces—from conversations, songs, and books—and they shape the way we see the world around us. Many of our sayings hark back to an era before we were born, others to our childhood or to the decade in which we came of age.

The landscape that shapes our daily speech is frequently multilingual as well. So many of the sayings that English speakers use every day have seeped into it from other languages, giving us glimpses of our collective as well as our family histories. Do we adopt new language as we grow older or do we cling to the language of a bygone age? Does that make us anachronisms or living treasures? I for one enjoy rolling words and phrases around on my tongue, using expressions that are becoming archaic. Why? For this year’s A to Z Blogging Challenge, starting on the first of April, I’ll reflect on these questions with a different saying or category of sayings every day. I’ve coined a word for them: anachronidioms.

I’m looking forward to reconnecting with old blogging friends and meeting new ones. This is the seventh year I’ve participated in the A to Z Challenge, the sixth year with a theme. Below are the links to my themes and post from all the previous years.

2013: Blogging from A to Z
2014: Traveling Light
2015: A Printer’s Alphabet
2016: Bringing Me Joy
2019: Migrants, Refugees, and Exiles
2020: Fifty Years in the United States

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

 

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