Gramarye

Gramarye is intended as a place to collect thoughts about culture, theory, education, and sundry other topics. For years I’ve kept a livejournal, but LJ’s essentially closed-off nature can be somewhat confining, and I just recently acquired a textdrive account, opening up new possibilities—like using wordpress for my blogging needs.

The name is taken from the Kipling quote that opens TH White’s Once and Future King,

She is not any common Earth
Water or Wood or Air
But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye
Where you and I will fare

Of course, “gramarye” in this case, as you may well know, just means “magic,” but it means magic by way of meaning grammar—i.e., from back in a time where learning was so scarce that a basic knowledge of Latin grammar was considered sufficient to work great wonders. Despite the fact that grammar (in either my native English or my three-year Sanskrit) has never, ever been my strong point, I like the idea of the connection between language and power, especially a transgressive, transformative, and ultimately imaginary power like magic. (Obviously I’m engaging in the Etymological Fallacy here; so sue me.) And obviously it helps that I first encountered “gramarye” in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, which were one of the major formative texts of my youth—probably the first books I ever read that really made a mark on me.

I believe it’s pronounced “grammar-ee”, but in my head it’s always been “grammar-ai”, thanks to the final -ye.

Me

For more information about me, see the Unlikely Glossary Project page on me.

If you feel a burning need to know even more, you can see quite a bit about where my head’s at from my 43things account or my bloglines feeds or clip blog

I also used to be a very devoted editor at Wikipedia, especially on the Buddhism pages, but I’ve been neglecting it for months, because of other demands on my time. Hopefully I’ll be able to change this at some point in the future.

If you feel a need to contact me for any reason (well, any legal, moral reason that won’t scare me), feel free to email me. Funny spam is also welcome; unfunny spam is, of course, discouraged.

If you’re into FOAF (and, really, who isn’t?), I have a wildly un-kempt FOAF file here which you can view through the lovely FOAF Explorer if you aren’t feeling so machine-like.

UGP

The Unlikely Glossary Project is my semi-personal wiki, the idea of which is to serve as a sort of user’s guide to the (often inexplicable) things I say. So if you find yourself wondering what the hell I mean by TWDCR, for example, the UGP is a good place to check.