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Today some scholars ridicule the idea (held by ancient Romans and Greeks) that writing was originally made on tree bark, but anyone who studies Amerindian cultures knows that the first peoples of the Americas produced pictures and picture-type ideograms by biting or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.