Bocage

I had a wonderful word in mind for my June 6 post: bocage. This year we marked the 70th anniversary of D-Day on that day, when the Allied armies mounted the greatest invasion in our history to take back the European continent from the Nazis.

According to the Wikipedia entry, bocage is a Norman French and English word typically meaning fields broken up by woodland thickets, which act as both windbreak and boundary. In American English, the word bocage came to mean hedgerow. The soldiers who stormed the beaches and pushed into Normandy encountered heavy resistance both from the enemy and from the very dense bocage.

The day I started working on this post was Hallowe'en, a good day to post about words like Samhain, hallow, or soul cake.

But I could not make myself write about a word or phrase with a Hallowe'en theme. If this is what you are looking for, please let me refer you to the Writer's Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, where you will find an appropriate Hallowe'en entry, as well as other interesting notes about the date, October 31.

I do not know if Garrison Keillor is a dreamer or not, although I imagine that as a writer he must have some characteristics of the dreamer. But the man also has a staff to help write seasonally appropriate entries, even out of season. (Note to self: what would it take for me to do this? More than I have, or not?)

Of course, having a staff also makes the possibility for mistakes even greater. In the Hallowe'en post, he (or, as I imagine, one of his staff) says, "Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, which forgave the punishment for sins." In fact, the indulgence--that is, the payment you had to make for forgiveness--is the punishment, and, in return for the payment, you got forgiveness. So this should read: ". . . selling indulgences, by which you could have your sins forgiven."