All Definitions, All The Time

I think the OED is a stand in for my grandparents. It's old, it reclines on the internet, occupying a strange place amidst bookmarks. I find myself puzzled by the context of the word? I go to Grandma OED and am satisfied. There's a role reversal though. I am the senile one, going back and back again for the definitions of ontology, epistemology, qua, leitmotiv and other multisyllabic monsters.

qua (adv) "In the capacity of; as being."

leitmotiv (n) "In the musical drama of Wagner and his imitators, a theme associated throughout the work with a particular person, situation, or sentiment."

I've started on Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a complex allegory about India during the struggle for independence. The first 50 pages remind me very much of Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude because of the crawl back into genealogy. We're talking why grandpa married grandma and then slogging through why mom married dad and what was up with auntie 1 and auntie 2. But Rushdie pulls it off with literary pizzazz. I think he's a forerunner of Joss Whedon because he coins Rushdie-isms (tacking on ism to any tense and making it a noun, just like Buffy turns adjectives into nouns). Here's a review of the production Columbia Univ. put on with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

One of many favorite Spike moments: