My housemate Lily barges into my bedroom--and more follow. Housemates and friends troop in, jabbering, till my bedroom's so noisy and full I can't breathe. Lily describes a group of Americans with the peculiar word 'Mareotic'. I say "that makes no sense" and she crows in triumph--"I know a word you don't! It means the Left Coast, duuude!"

Irritating (adj.): a smug old lady yelling duuude.

Wrong, too. I do know that word. It's very specific. Mareotic means "Alexandrian"--more exactly, the south side of that Egyptian port. I say "In the Norton Anthology of Poetry they footnote that word in Yeats's last poem, and explain that 'by the Mareotic Lake' means the shores of the Mediterranean. Wrong! Lake Maryut, as it's pronounced today, is still there; Alexandria lies between it and the sea.

"Yeats meant that the scholars in the Alexandrian Library knew we reincarnate, that both Christians and materialists were wrong. Call him wrong, call him stupid, but that's what he said. The Norton editors were just too lazy to open an atlas and look up Mareotic with spelling variations. It didn't mean the whole Mediterranean world then, and it doesn't mean the West Coast now!"

Fussy, I know, but I AM fussy about words--I'm a writer. Can't be clear if readers blur words' meanings. And I don't trust anointed experts. Self-anointed or Oxbridge. Anyone can be lazy or bluff... or just plain lie.

Lily looks recalcitrant. I add "I have three dictionaries. Let's see what THEY say." The other invaders in my bedroom get in my way, but I push through them to the books... though I know NONE are likely to list 'Mareotic'; too obscure.

Still, I notice Lily's reluctant. Ha! They may not vindicate me, but she KNOWS they won't support her. She just guessed. And guessed wrong.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Mareotic:
  1. Mare + Erotic? Before bed I saw Tina Fey's show "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt". Kimmy's patronizing exercise-class guru plays with her hair, says "I love ponytails. Make me think of... ponies!" And then calls his groupies "My little ponies." I cringed, since I really AM a furry--I like the series My Little Pony as much as Unbreakable and I do find its pegasi and unicorns cuter than most humans. Furries are as sexually hardwired as you monospecists are--straight, gay, whatever. So I resent the show making this jerk a furry just to flag that he's a jerk.
  2. Moronic + Idiotic? Yep, that fits even better...
• Yeats: I've been reading Philip Pullman's essays. He finds Blake's mythology solid & consistent (though Pullman admits he's never fully grasped it), but he finds Yeats's ideas superstitious hokum... Really? Any reader who's done serious dreamwork can tell that Yeats, while fringy, derived his beliefs from first-hand experience AND esoteric research. True, Yeats, like Blake, EXPLAINS his system poorly... but Yeats did his homework. Pullman, I'm not so sure.
• Fake scholarship in the Norton Anthology: real! Their "Mareotic = Mediterranean" sounded fishy, so I checked an atlas and promptly found the real lake. Yeats had made a concise and precise assertion (that Alexandrian scholars preserved old Egyptian esoteric knowledge) that the Norton "scholars" misread through sheer laziness, then misled their readers. Proving Yeats's very point that SOME ancients knew things moderns are too lazy to look up. And unread sources might as well have burned in that Alexandrian fire.
• So why did Lily say "Mareotic" means "Left Coast"? Well, that IS where most Americans live who believe in reincarnation. And it's rich in dreamworkers too--the HQ of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. So it does apply. Sort of. Metaphorically. But that ain't what it means! Stickler till I die.
• ACTION: Check your facts; don't take the word of experts. Self-anointed or not. People--even those with degrees--are lazy.

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