LIBRARY
Wild Word Friday!
You don’t get much wilder than a LIBRARY.
What?
Really, you don’t. You can pull a book from a LIBRARY shelf and become Frankenstein or Hannibal the Cannibal or Alexander the Great. You can be a pioneer child in the big woods of Wisconsin or find a hidden treasure large enough to make you into the Count of Monte Cristo.
In Middle English, the word for LIBRARY was librarie, and we first find that word in Boethius by Chaucer. The Middle English librarie came from the French librairie. The root is Latin from the word liber, which means book but originally referred to tree bark.
Today some scholars ridicule the idea (held by ancient Romans and Greeks) that writing was originally made on tree bark, but anyone who studies Amerindian cultures knows that the first peoples of the Americas produced pictures and picture-type ideograms by biting or scratching their designs into the peeled inner bark of trees.
So there you have it. From bark to book to LIBRARY. And that’s pretty wild, too.
Do you remember your first visit to a LIBRARY? How old were you?
Blessings!
Sue
Information in this post gleaned from The Chronology of Words and Phrases by Linda and Roger Flavell. Photo from Wikipedia.
Some of my very best memories are times when my mom read to my brother and me, Laura. (We had only 2 kids in the family then. Mom and Dad started a 2nd family when I was 12 and my brother was 10. Now we number 5 in all!)
When I was in grade three we were allowed to borrow books from the school library. I always chose Nancy Drew. My mum would read to my brother and I. Growing up in a rural community we had no library, and so being bused to a larger community school had some great advantages.
We did have a bookmobile come through once a month, and it still makes its rounds today.