Monday, January 10, 2005

Unorgastic experiences

Whilst looking for Germaine Greer quotes, I came across the following:

"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting."
(Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, 1989)

Fine words, although it's hardly surprising that a famous academic should have such respect for libraries. What caught my eye was the word 'unorgastic'. The OED has orgastic down as "Of, pertaining to, or charaterized by orgasm" so I suppose she was spot on in describing libraries as the opposite. My interest in the word had been aroused though, so I did a search to see who else had used it. As far as I can tell, 'unoragstic' has not appeared in any of the publications on Lexis Nexis (apart from a couple of reviews of Greer's book) and Google only throws up rather a lot people repeating the quote. Can't wait to see how she describes the Big Brother house.