I listen to a lot of radio, working around the farm, driving from one beeyard to another.  Occasionally I hear something that makes me sit up and pay attention.  The other day it was an interview with a Brit who’s written a just in time book about Phil Spector.  It was his verbal facility that caught my attention, describing the Tiny Terror’s “dark, orchidean mystery” and using one of my favorite words, ‘elegiac’.

Perhaps for Americans of my generation Phil Spector and his manias are a given, certainly LA seems full of people weirder than him and one would have to be older or a conventional beans on toast Brit that writes for the Torygraph to find him dark and orchidean but still its good word play.  Then there’s elegiac.  He pronounced it eel-ee-gee-ack, accent on the second syllable and, I kid you not, I reeled.  It is a word that one rarely hears spoken out loud but I say it now and again and I would say ell uh jai ic.  The dictionary confirms that both pronunciations are used.  It also says that its meaning is mostly about poetic meter going back to classical Greek.  The meaning that I think of, ‘like an elegy’ is last of the possibilities.  No more than a fancy way of making nostalgia more elegant, singing the praises of days gone by.  I wish I could remember what aspect of the Phil Spector story warranted the word.  The sense of beautiful things gone past, of lost sunsets, simpler times lit in soft focus gold with a soundtrack by Vaughn Williams, I just don’t see Phil in any part of that and I’m not going to give up the word.  So there.