About three years ago during the first incarnation of AWAD we had this discussion self-same, remember?
Oh well, fogetfullness is oft times a blessing because now you old folks get to hear my story again...
Twenty years ago I had a drinking buddy named Richard Morgan, He was affable, intellegent, tender-hearted, and Manic Depressive by clinical certfication. One night as we sat drinking whiskey in a car in the woods he had an attack and described it thusly..."All of sudden everything appears strange and foreign without a single reference point to facilitate comprehension. It is like being dead - no! - it is worse than being dead - every atom of your being yearns for a void.
I really shouldn't be taking my medication and drinking this whiskey, my psychiatrist said that combining the two would make me more psychotic."
"Damn Richard, that's terrible" I said, "Can't those incompetent quacks do something other than keep you doped up and sober?"
"No." He said. "They know almost nothing about the disorder but like good shamans they have given the condition a name.
They call it
deja va the direct opposite of
deja ju."
Two years later Richard died. He was hospitalised for a minor heart attack and simply lost his will to live. He was thirty-five.
Some twenty years later the jolly folks of Awad were batting about words and began a discussion (
deja vu all over again
) about the apporiate word for the opposite of
deja vu. So I told them the Richard Morgan story (
deja vu all over again
) and told them (You all) that the correct term was
deje va. Oh no! said the not-so-merry band of word pundits, the term has no such inverse meaning when retranslated from the French.
They were right. I looked it up. But damnit Richard had said it and I had heard it so the rest of the world can go to hell.
Then three years later (
deje vu all over again
) when
tsuwm posted the below above...
jarmis vu Fr. never seen. ...I was vindicated. Although I know that you are never so wrong than when you are dead sure you are right - this time I was dead sure I was right and I was. You see Richard had not
va-ed the
vu. Richard had
jarmis-ed when in my drunken state I thought he had
deje-ed and I had later disremembered it.
And I'll tell you one thing - it feels good to be proven right.
