Monday, June 16, 2008
Staying at Home
Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, Newsletter 590 (June 7, 2008), on the neologism staycation:
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Ken Thomson heard this word on TV in San Francisco and thought it had a nice ring to it. It's a stay-at-home vacation. It seems to have first appeared in 2005 but has become significantly more visible in the past three months because of financial concerns as the economy weakens and the price of fuel keeps going up. Other reasons were given in an article in the Washington Times on 23 March: "Increasing concerns over the environment as well as the desire for more family time add to the staycation's popularity."Stanley Crawford, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1992), pp. 192-193 (from a chapter titled Staying at Home):
But staying at home is the most ecological thing to do. There is no other way to grow your garden, tend your animals, your orchard, your streams and rivers, ponds and lakes, fences and roads, to study the accretions of time. This is of course mainly what most of humankind has done for most of history. The numbers are rapidly coming in to say that running around, driving and flying, on the scale now considered socially acceptable and even fashionable, is something the planet cannot much longer support.Sophocles, fragment 934 = Aeschylus, fragment 317 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):
Staying home is hauling water and chopping wood, mending your fences, hoeing your row, planting your tree, digging out your ditches, raising your children, milking your goats. For those who stay at home, there is no figure of speech here: these are lists of the real chores by which the notion of home, both of house and of landscape, is made and defined.
The man who is truly fortunate should stay at home.Related posts:
οἴκοι μένειν δεῖ τὸν καλῶς εὐδαίμονα.
