Wouldn’t you know? —Shakespeare had something to say about immigrants. This is from the TLS, a clipping that I’ve saved for some time (since October, 2018). The reviewer, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, quotes the bard as an introduction to three books he is reviewing about refugees and migrants. He says that the only surviving example of William Shakespeare’s handwriting is supposed to be in a co-authored manuscript of a play, The Book of Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare’s hand-written contribution is a speech by More as deputy sheriff addressing a mob rioting against immigrants. He asks them to think what they would feel like if they were in the shoes of the “strangers” exiled from home:

What country by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province,Spain or Portugal,

Anywhere that adheres to England,

Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’d

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That breaking out in hideous violence

Would not afford you abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, not that that the elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But charter’d unto them? What would you think

To be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ case

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

You would be amazed at how much I’ve done—just no blog. Anon

Later, much later, but I have a little energy left before I sleep. Backlog of words:

baldachin (also baldaquin), noun, a ceremonial canopy of stone, metal, or fabric over an altar, throne, or doorway. ORIGIN late 16th cent. (denoting a rich brocade of silk and gold thread): from Italian baldacchino, from Baldacco ‘Baghdad’, place of origin of the brocade.

phoneme noun, Phonetics: any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat. DERIVATIVES phonemic adjective, phonemics plural noun, ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French phonème, from Greek phōnēma ‘sound, speech’, from phōnein ‘speak’.

morpheme noun, Linguistics: a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided (e.g. in, come, -ing, forming incoming). DERIVATIVES morphemic adjective, morphemically adverb, ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French morphème, from Greek morphē ‘form’, on the pattern of French phonème ‘phoneme’.

pelmet noun, a narrow border of cloth or wood, fitted across the top of a door or window to conceal the curtain fittings. • Brit. informal a very short skirt. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: probably an alteration of French palmette, literally ‘small palm’ (see palmette) .

sarky adjective (sarkier, sarkiest) Brit. informal, sarcastic. DERIVATIVES sarkily adverb, sarkiness noun ORIGIN early 20th cent.: abbreviation. Try it?

aporia noun, an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory. the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars. • [ mass noun ] Rhetoric the expression of doubt. DERIVATIVES aporetic adjective ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek, from aporos ‘impassable’, from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage’.

entheogen noun, a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes. DERIVATIVES entheogenic adjective ORIGIN 1970s: from Greek, literally ‘becoming divine within’; coined by an informal committee studying the inebriants of shamans.

pleonasm noun [ mass noun ] the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning (e.g. see with one's eyes), either as a fault of style or for emphasis. DERIVATIVES pleonastic adjective, pleonastically adverb ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek pleonasmos, from pleonazein ‘be superfluous’.

conflate verb [ with obj. ] combine (two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc.) into one: the urban crisis conflates a number of different economic, political, and social issues. DERIVATIVES conflation noun ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense ‘fuse or melt down metal’): from Latin conflat- ‘kindled, fused’, from the verb conflare, from con- ‘together’ + flare ‘to blow’.

Now I am tired. That’s enough.