On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Lusercop wrote:
> OOI, I thought this was "sigil", is it not? if not, what's the etymology of
> ``sidgel'' ?
During a three month trek across the desert I encountered a wizened old
man who managed to survive by way of consuming the life giving juices of
the meager plant life that scrounged a living in the barren environment.
He was an interesting salt, his most distinctive feature being that he was
covered toe to head with archaic looking symbols, which I took to have
some deep cultural significance to him. During one of our many late night
discussions (for it was easier to converse during the bitterly cold nights
than during the blinding sun of the day) he attempted to convince me with
a complex argument involving hand puppets and bits of twine that the
correct name for these symbols should be spelt "sidgel". Obviously, being
the foolhardy youth I was in those days, I declared that I was having
nothing to do with his preposterous argument, and I was adamant that it was
indeed spelt "sigil" as my old home economics teacher had taught me during
my childhood.
The morning after the fateful conversation I awoke to find myself alone,
with my strange travelling companion no where to be found. My first
thought was that he had abandoned me after the heated discussion of the
night before. As I was to later discover, nothing was further from the
truth. Three long hours and five longer days hence I managed to drag my
sack of skin and bones to the nearest form of civilisation, a outlying
branch of the stain-a-way dry cleaning franchise. It was they who first
informed me of the chilling legend of the desert walker, a tattooed man
who had used to walk the deserts over two hundred years ago.
I felt myself honoured to have trekked the wasteland with the wayward spirit
of those long since departed. To this day I honour the memory of the
nameless old man by using his preferred spelling wherever I can.
That or I just couldn't be bothered to look up the correct spelling.
Mark.
--
#!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
print q{Mark Fowler, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://twoshortplanks.com/};
