Douglas Clark wrote:
>Just to say that I was talking to my cousin in Lanark (not far from
>Grieve's Biggar) this morning and she had never heard of the word,
>although it sounded familiar. I think it is a case for the dictionaries.
--Or, alternatively, consulting one's anthological elders (so
nutty that it might just work!).
See Edward Lucie-Smith's glosses to everything in "In the Fall"
from "gean" to "spargosis," including "sny." While all the other
terms are glossed denotatively, Lucie-Smith makes a guess at "sny,"
but it's an educated one and seems more plausible (to me) than that
the term is meant "to be opaque to the reader":
"_phyllotaxis_: the arrangement or order of leaves upon an axis
or stem. _sny_: a shipbuilding term for the 'run' of the hull of
a ship. Here presumably used by extension, to mean 'the tendency
of the natural order'" (_British Poetry Since 1945_, p. 43).
Lucie-Smith can't help with "scriota," though, as he didn't
include that poem in his anthology.
Candice
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