This week: Update on last week - I’m alive! And, I have a new favorite word - limn. It’s a verb, it means “to illuminate.” Let’s talk about it.
Limning the Week
Confession time: I haven’t watched Stranger Things1. Apparently, this most recent season prominently features a decades old Kate Bush song. I know this because it’s all anyone seems to be talking about2. And here’s where things get fun for me because, while I don’t know Stranger Things, I’ve been listening to Kate Bush records for, uhm, decades. Imagine my delight then, when journalist and pop critic Chris Molanphy pops up on two different podcasts3 to give context to this recent rediscovery of “Running Up That Hill.” So far, so good.
But, the thing is…Kate Bush is a hard artist to describe4. Take, for example, her breakout song,“Wuthering Heights.” It’s a beautiful, ethereal, and deeply weird song for a pop hit. Molanphy himself says it best in this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest:
Wuthering Heights, for starters, is a song about the Bronte novel where she’s kind of limning the plot of the book and imagining herself as a character, in effect, in the Bronte novel.
Right? But let’s shift gears now, because, as much as I love geeking out on pop culture numerology, Molanphy used a word I didn’t know: limn. And this is a good word. Like, how did I not know this word? I want to use this word all the time. Let’s talk about it:
1: to draw or paint on a surface
2: to outline in clear sharp detail
3: describe
So, obviously, it’s in this third sense that Molanphy uses the word. And that seems perfectly apropos. But let’s see if we can’t find some nuance anyway.
early 15c., "to illuminate" (manuscripts), altered from Middle English luminen, "to illuminate manuscripts" (late 14c.), from Old French luminer "light up, illuminate," from Latin luminare
Need a few more examples of it used in a sentence? Me, too. But, a quick search of the COCA5 immediately shows us a problem in getting example sentences: limn is not a very common word. Of the 96 results returned, well over half use Limn as a proper noun for either a person or as the name of a location. But, of the remaining choices, several interesting uses of limn, ones that can begin to lead us towards some nuance, appear.
(Quick note here: I had originally actually quoted the sentences I found in the COCA, however, I was unable to actually get to the sources of most of the quotations, for various reasons, and that didn’t feel great. And, since this is a pop-etymology blog rather than a research paper, I decided that the better part of valor would be to sum up my findings in a way I would never allow any of my students to do.)
As is so common with numbered definitions, the apparent rank of a given usage and its actual usage do not seem to have a whole lot in common. Which is to say that the third usage given by Merriam-Webster, describe, is by far the most common usage shown in the COCA.
What’s more, the nuance, for me, as a reader, comes from less a position of illumination and more one of bridging a gap between disparate realms of knowledge or passion. At least 4 examples (out of twelve that I read) reference borders or boundaries, the gaps between which must be limned. What’s really interesting is that all four of these examples come from 2017 or later.
Earlier examples make far more use of limn as a fancy synonym for describe, making no interesting correlation between the thing being limned and either illumination or borders, with the notable exception of two examples, both of which use limn to suggest that there is a nothingness that needs to be explained before something more interesting can be created.
So, there you have it. Use limn to illuminate a gap or to describe a nothingness between two realms of somethingness. Use it to tell your housepainter where you want them to work. Use it to befuddle your friends and neighbors. Or, maybe, just use it to break someone out of the Upside Down?
Update:
As you can see by this letter, I am alive and kicking (and screaming). I am recovering daily and feel just mostly dead instead of completely dead. But I sincerely wish to thank everyone who sent comments and well wishes as they made me feel quite a bit better and I appreciate them all so much.
I may have a bit more to say about all of it later on, but for now, I’m just happy to be able to be back at the keyboard, bantering on about words and 80s synth pop. Which brings me to…
91 Days:
This is my new project, available at 91days.substack.com. There are lots of details in the form of an FAQ on the about page. Feel free to sign up or ignore at your pleasure, I appreciate your support either way.
Down the Rabbit Hole:
As I write this, Glastonbury 2022 has just finished up with a blistering set from Kendrick Lamar. The Beeb has been kind enough to put several HD videos up featuring everyone from Olivia Rodrigo to Jack White to Paul McCartney to the aforementioned Kendrick. Here are just a couple that I’ve been listening to while putting together this week’s letter:
Wet Leg - Chaise Lounge - I didn’t really like the song the first 5, 000 times YouTube tried to shove it down my throat, but it’s grown on me and this is a great version.
IDLES - Crawl - One of, if not the single best punk outfit in Britain today, IDLES kills it every time they step on stage and this is no exception. Fast and loud warning.
The Jesus and Mary Chain (feat. Phoebe Bridgers) - Just Like Honey - Look, if you didn’t slow dance to this song at the end of a seventh grade dance with that first special someone then you don’t know what love is and I can’t help you.
Olivia Rodrigo (feat. Lily Allen) - Fuck You - Pass this on to every pre-teen girl you know. Make sure they have their voice.
Pet Shop Boys - It’s a Sin - Come for It’s a Sin, stay for Suburbia, relive the best of the 80s through the only lens that matters: crass commercial excess.
From the Archives:
Just about a year ago, we were talking about fiction and how even at it’s best, it’s just someone lying to us: Learned Volume 4, Issue 14: Fictional Lies. Go read about it!
I know, I know, it’s just that there are only so many hours in the day.
There are, of course, many more serious topics to be discussed in the world at the moment, but, frankly, I’m not yet ready or able to discuss most of them without it devolving into inchoate rage.
By the Way, the two podcasts in question were Molanphy’s own Hit Parade, A Deal with the TV God Edition and the Slate Culture Gabfest, Running Up That Flaming Hill Edition. For what it’s worth, Hit Parade is an excellent, deep, and deeply nerdy look at music history as told through the charts. It is one of my immediate listens every time it pops up in my feed.
As Molanphy points out in the Slate Culture Gabfest show, Kate Bush was fairly unknown in the States during the early 80s. But I had Mtv and loved Peter Gabriel. I mean, I was a kid and the videos for Sledgehammer and Big Time were the coolest things on the channel. Gabriel and Bush performed a very simple, very moving song called “Don’t Give Up” that captured my attention just as deeply as Gabriel’s weirder videos.
Corpus of Contemporary American English, available at English-corpora.org.
Reminds me of how mercilessly people once made fun of NYT's Michiko Kakutani for overusing "limn" in her reviews. There was a hilarious article, can't seem to find it now...