Drivel

Isn't funny when a word you thought meant something, really means something else?

Take Drivel for instance, various dictionaries define it as either drooling or worthless talk. Now the talking part I knew, but drooling? Nope, didn't know that one.

The point of all this is that I like drivel, as in the talking definition, not the drooling one. You know, that worthless (supposedly) rambling that really tells you the interesting parts of a persons life? The gossip, the funny stories, the babble that shows the real them, not the serious part that they try to present, or the goofiness that they try to hide behind.

Its in the nonesense of life, that sense is made, where priorities are really shown and inner character shines forth.

All of this is brought to you by my addiction to Cadbury's Crunchie candy bars. I was going to write about how I just love these things and hunt for them every week at the grocery store. I think its mainly because the wrapper is in 5 languages, if it was an American candy bar, I probably wouldn't eat it... but I have a weird addiction to expensive European candy bars, when I thought "That's Drivel! Who would want to know about that?".

I love drivel! I love the inane details, the nonsense! Give me a funny book over a serious one any day, or better yet, a research book with lots of drivel in it. Like The Beggar and the Professor, but I'll write a review on that book next, its got loads of drivel, but good juicy stuff.

Book Review: The Beggar and the Professor

The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

I have a love/hate relationship with this book. On the one hand, it has lots of great details in it like when Felix (the son) travels with his father to visit the old family farm in the Alps to show the relatives just how good they've made it. On the last leg of the journey, he wears a red silk doublet, red pantaloons and a fuzzy velvet hat. He also gets heatstroke because he's hiking up a mountain in summer in red silk!

Or the stories about the students in Thomas's school, or the baker who died in a fire because he was too fat to escape out his house windows... Or that there was a fashion for yellow dresses in Basel brought from Strausburg by a particular person. Or details about the practical jokes they used to play on each other. Or the business and legal aspects, or training in being a doctor, childhood, etc.

It just has lots of great stuff, rich detail and soap opera-y true life stories to keep you entertained for a while. It shows what life was really like in Switzerland and other parts of Europe in the early to mid 16th century, for both rich and poor. Thomas the father started out as a goat herd, traveled around Europe for ten years trying to learn to read and he ended up a professor and a printer (along with several other careers along the way)

On the other hand, the author drives me crazy with his sideline editorializing and his failure to just quote the raw material straight up. He paraphrases most everything and the scholar in me wants the straight text.

Bottom line: Buy it. Its cheap, entertaining and has lots of real life details that will help you flesh out your persona whether male or female.