If we’re going to blame anyone, let’s blame Susan Cooper. If Ms. Cooper hadn’t settled behind a typewriter to punch out all the letters and punctuation and blank spaces (the very most important bits; if you don’t have blank spaces, you just have letters bumping into each other with an alphabetical cacophony of “Sorry!” and “Why, excuse me!” and “Hey now, watch it! Can’t you see I’m pregnant?”—The B s get away with that last one all of the time. All. Of. The. Time.) of The Dark is Rising , no one would have
I finished the series and wound up entranced by this mythical realm of far-away Wales. (The Welsh might be surprised to discover their country is mythical, but the Welsh need to slow their Celtic roll and just go with it.) So, when my Freshman Spanish teacher (I was a Freshman; she was a Spanish teacher) volunteered her plans to head to the U.K. over the holidays, I asked her for a Welsh-English dictionary. (Pre-web, guys. Sourcing stuff was harder then. Like, you know, so much more difficult.) Surprisingly
Despite all my best intentions over the decades, I still can’t speak Welsh. But I can pay Google Translate exactly nothing to convert gab for me, so my go-to language when I want fun and fanciful is Cymric . Except. Except this one time, this one most important time, it failed me. When the InstaPrincess was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, I sought my usual linguistic refuge to write about it, and instead of curious vocables such as hyfrydwch or tywysoges or Damn poeth, fy ngwraig yn boeth! my search