"'What should I call you, please?' Meg asked.
"'Well, now. First, try not to say any words for just a moment. Think
within your own mind. Think of all the things you call people, different
kinds of people.'
"While Meg thought, the beast murmured to her gently. 'No, mother
is a special, a one-name; and a father you have here. Not just friend, nor
teacher, nor brother, nor sister. What is acquaintance? What a funny,
hard word. Aunt. Maybe. Yes, perhaps that will do. And you think such odd
words about me. Thing, and monster! Monster, what a horrid
sort of word. I really do not think I am a monster. Beast. That will
do. Aunt Beast.'
"'Aunt Beast,' Meg murmured sleepily, and laughed.
"Have I said something funny?' Aunt Beast asked in surprise. 'Isn't
Aunt Beast all right?'
"'Aunt Beast is lovely,' Meg said. 'Please sing to me, Aunt Beast.'"
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (New York: Farrar, Strauss,
Giroux, 1962), p. 167
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When I began to keep a journal, when I was 15, I soon decided that continually referring to people by their first names would get confusing, so I began to use people's three initials. (This is why people without middle names annoy me and I often wind up assigning them a nickname, if only in my head.) This custom of abbreviations has spread to anything I can reasonably (or unreasonably) shorten.
OMFB is (obviously) not another TLA (three-letter
abbreviation), but it occurs frequently in my journal. It refers to both
A Clockwork Orange and Calvin and Hobbes, and literary allusions
don't get much better than that. The Calvin and Hobbes takes a detour through
CLH. Somehow I told her or she
found out that I keep all my letters, and before I had brought myself to
transcribing personal letters into my computer I would at least photocopy
them, or the ones I liked best, and add them to my paper journal. My beloved
sister found this riotous as well as vain. She later sent me a Calvin and
Hobbes strip where Calvin tells Hobbes he is going to keep copies of all
of his letters because one day they will be a useful resource for his many
biographers. Hobbes picks up a letter to a chewing gum company, which begins,
"Dear Booger-brain." (I had thought of the letters for my biographers
long before that strip, and in my memory I have never used that salutation
even for CLH.) Thus OMFB means either Alex's prefatory vocative, "O
My Friends and Brothers" or my own pretension, "O My Future Biographers."
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"....They arrived at an inconvenient time
I was hiding in a room in my mind
They made me look at myself
I saw it well, I'd shut the people out of my life
So now I take the opportunities
Wonderful teachers ready to teach me
I must work on my mind
For now I realize that every one of us
Has a heaven inside
....
Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot
Them heavy people help me
...
They open doorways that I thought were shut for good
They read me Gurdjieff and Jesu
They build up my body
Break me emotionally, it's nearly killing me
But what a lovely feeling
I love the whirling of the Dervishes
I love the beauty of rare innocence
You don't need no crystal ball
Don't fall for a magic wand
We humans got it all, we perform the miracles...."
Kate Bush, The Kick Inside: "Them Heavy People" (EMI 1978)
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