April 9, 2005

Listlessness

Stuart is justifiably often irritated by my obsessive list-making, and so I retired my book of lists this past weekend so we could spend time relaxedly. It was not an unenjoyable experiment, but yet I felt somewhat at a loss. Listless, you might even say. Do you feel listless when you are listless? I’d never thought about it before. We looked it up in the dictionary, and found that that meaning” lacking energy or disinclined to exert effort” comes from root “liste” meaning “to desire” in Middle English. However “list” as in “a series of things in an order” comes from the French “liste” which presumably means something different. It is sad that I do not have lingual authority for my neuroses.