I’m taking the day off.
Last night at 2 am, I sent the manuscript off to my wonderful beta readers and for the first time in a couple of months, I’m not trying to figure out how to keep Polly out of trouble.
That’s not actually true. Book 16 already presents challenges for the poor girl, but that’s neither here nor there today.
So … here I go. Did you ever wonder where the idiom ‘neither here nor there’ comes from? Apparently I did today.
It’s from a sermon by John Calvin on Deuteronomy in the year 1583. Well, it’s from Golding’s translation of that sermon.
“True it is that our so doing is neither here nor there (as they say) in respect of God.”
Did you notice the words in parentheses? As they say? It seems like that phrase had been around for a while. So … now you know.
Speaking of parenthesis. Did you ever wonder where those come from? Well, a parenthesis is actually the phrase that is inserted into a passage. It comes from the Greek word parénthesis, which comes from words that mean “alongside of” and “to place” So … to place alongside of.
The parenthesis is usually marked off by brackets, dashes or commas. It doesn’t need to be enclosed by the curved brackets which are actually called parentheses (plural). As time has progressed, these punctuation marks have become the only common use for the term. We no longer use the word for those inserted phrases.
And now you know.
NOW I’m going to take a day off.
