juvenescence noun, [ mass noun ] formal: the state or period of being young. figurative : in the juvenescence of the year. adjective. ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Latin juvenescent- ‘reaching the age of youth’, from the verb juvenescere, from juvenis ‘young’.

Not to be confused with senescence :

senescence noun [ mass noun ] Biology: the condition or process of deterioration with age. • loss of a cell's power of division and growth. DERIVATIVES senescent, adjective. NOT YET!!

My idea (hope) is that I will renew myself with each blog as I stumble and stagger and trip and totter my way through life - what's left of it.

Years ago I wrote a book for the United Church of Canada. I've probabiy mentoned it before so I won't go into it now. Briefly, it was a collection of interviews with "ordinary" (no such thing as ordinary) people across Canada, two in each province, catching them on their life's journey. The oldest subject I talked to was a retired 93-year-old minister in a retirement home, a delightful, cheerful - but not pie-in-the-sky cheerful - who was studying Hebrew for the first time in his life. He reported this to me with pride, pointing out that it was yet another proof of an after life.

"Why would i be learning Hebrew at my age if it were not for the FACT that I will have use of this knowledge in another/the next life?"

And so I keep writing blogs, being renewed in knowledge and faith of some sort that It/someething will go on.

And on and on and on.

Anon.

I would much rather that I be about Idiom, but then I'd have to pull out a bunch of books and run by favourite examples. That's the hardest part of learning a foreign language - not the irregular verbs, but the idioms. The majority of them do not translate well, that is, the meanings of the words are too practical and do not translate to the meaning of the idiom = the sum total of the separate parts.

When I get involved in an explanation like this, I arm reminded of a lesson for writers. I think this is apocryphal but it's fun. I never saw it on any course but I did hear of one result of the question: "Without using your hands, describe an accordion." My counter question would be "Without using your hands, explain how to fold a fitted sheet." The result, perhaps a myth, is that one wannabe writer got so good at descriptions of this nature that he ended up writing instructions on packages.. Ah, the romance of merchandise!

We've used up our spare parts in the service of effective description.